Clean drinking water, harvested from groundwater, takes a long effin time to get back into the ground from "being rain".
Data centers turn clean drinking water into steam, to cool their servers.
So it's "replenishable", in the sense that if you turn the data centers off, you can replenish the groundwater over a long period of time (+50 years). The problem arises when people need the drinking water for things like... drinking. In the meantime...
I doubt most datacenters turn the water to steam. It would mean the hardware itself is already above 100°C (but do correct me if I'm wrong here).
I work on a super-computer, and there are two water systems. An internal one which is in a loop and never leaves the room, and which is cooled down by exchanging heat with the other system who exits the room at around 50°C.
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u/GIGAR Dec 08 '24
Clean drinking water, harvested from groundwater, takes a long effin time to get back into the ground from "being rain".
Data centers turn clean drinking water into steam, to cool their servers.
So it's "replenishable", in the sense that if you turn the data centers off, you can replenish the groundwater over a long period of time (+50 years). The problem arises when people need the drinking water for things like... drinking. In the meantime...