You have these huge data centres "using" all this clean water, that most likely is little different to how it went in, but it's still classed as waste water.

Either that or kill all the sandal wearing almond "milk" drinking hipsters.

How about banning the consumption of water for cooling, at least by datacenters instead? Surely they can cool the datacenters without consuming so much water. (Using as a heat transfer fluid is fine, but none to drain and little evaporation.)

Years ago I took a tour of a wastewater treatment facility. Had a nice drink from the water fountain at the end, which was fed by the plant output. It was purer than tap water - no chlorine or other disinfectants in the final product.

Years ago I took a tour of a wastewater treatment facility. Had a nice drink from the water fountain at the end, which was fed by the plant output. It was purer than tap water - no chlorine or other disinfectants in the final product.

Here in the UK our current regulations prevent such clean water being introduced to the water supply directly. Instead it has to be put into the nearest river, which is contaminated with all sorts of crap (literally), and then the river water is cleaned up at great expense to be pumped into out houses. Horrible inefficiency and a waste of money, all because some people are squeamish.

When I first started working with injection moulding (late 80's), the plant I worked at had unmetered water. We ran water through cooling channels on all the machines, right into the drain. It was bad... to the point that the town through they had a serious water leak. They traced it to us lol

A couple of years later, water meters got put in. T'was then that we ordered a huge plastic vat, soldered up some copper piping with elbows and shit to make a square shaped "cooling coil", bought a big old chiller second hand and ran anitfreeze through the copper coil we made. A pump to circulate the water and flow control knobs with a float to gauge flow at each machine to vary cooling appropriately (some molds you want to run a bit hot). All of it recirculated back into the vat. I also made some hanging holders for "bromine" pucks so the water didn't get slimy (algae, bacteria etc.)

Point being, it should be prohibitively expensive to waste water like that. If you're paying 3'ish bucks per cubic meter (like a household would), you won't be running it into the drain 24/7 x 365 :-)

A lot of wastewater is pumped up hills to keep lakes and streams going. As the article says, the ground is used for filtration and the water comes back out from wells. This doesn't filter out salts. The dirt doesn't necessarily taste good either. What comes out in San Jose is salty and loaded with minerals better suited to a bath than drinking.

The sewer-to-sink path uses reverse osmosis or other demineralization. That should cut the salts, sulphur, and whatever it is that oozes out at nearby Alum Rock Park, from the drinking water.

As a licensed Civil Engineer in California who deals with this type of stuff, yes, they do eliminate all the salts you're complaining about through reverse osmosis treatment and microfiltration. In fact, they need to add some level of calcium and other minerals back to the water to give it some taste because of how pure it actually is.

Minerals which then have to be RO filtered right back out at point of use because they make tap water taste like dirt.

Larger irrigation projects use reclaimed water. The irrigation piping is purple in color rather than white to signal that its non-potable. Its actually not much different from raw lake or river water, the stuff that's in our reservoirs, so just as you wouldn't drink straight out of an aqueduct you wouldn't drink that water. Once treated its just like any other water.

Water is a recycled resource -- we should have been taught about the water cycle in elementary or middle school. Growing up in London I was told that my tapwater had gone through eight sets of kidneys before reaching my tap. It was still potable (give or take a lead supply pipe or two). I'd expect our local water to have the same provenance, give or take. As it is the stuff starts life as snow on the Northern Sierras, flows down rivers to the top of the Bay Area, is collected by an aqueduct and taken down the San Joaquin Valley and over the mountains, stopping off at a reservoir or two, before arriving treated at my tap. Its had plenty of opportunity to be contaminated en route but water treatment is designed to fix that for us.

The purple pipe water is a bit salty and it kills some plants, especially [1]some decorative redwood trees . Evaporative coolers, pee, soaps, detergents, and processing all add salts.

[1] https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/files/assets/public/v/1/public-works/water-quality-control-plant/recycled-water/2021/3.-redwood-tree-monitoring-study-factsheet.pdf

I wonder if it’s possible to recycle data center water?

I’d rather drink Xeon water than toilet water, I guess.

You might have a new bottled water product there:

Spring water filtered through our 100% Xeon datacentre…

"Azure Springs" - my branding consultancy invoice is on its way

Blockchain processed Power Water!

Now with 33% more AI!

.... use consistent units for the volumes of water involved. The switch from litres to cubic meters to gallons and back to cubic meters makes it difficult to relate the numbers.

And why were they not converted to Reg standard Olympic sized swimming pools for us regular Regitards?!?

--------> The real volume of liquid we're interested in!

Came here to say the same: ounces, cubic metres, gallons, litres and Denmarks. What a mess.

I too, saw the reference to Denmarks, and the reference to half-UK's, and was mentally trying to convert into something more meaningful such as Wales, or centi-Wales. I can imagine a Wales being roughly the same order of magnitude as a half-uk (maybe closer to third-uk), but have no idea how that translates in a Denmark........

If there is one mermaid in a Denmark, does that means there is about 0.8 Mermaids in a Wales?

Acre feet is the standard unit of measure for bulk water (in reservoirs and rivers,) in the western U.S.. As you might guess, it's the amount of water needed to cover an acre to one, huh, foot.

One acre = 43,560 square feet or, for the rest of the world, 4046.86 square meters.

One acre foot = 325,851 U.S. liquid gallons or 1233.48 cubic meters.

Olympic swimming pools are 50 meters long, 25 meters wide, and 2 meters deep. In terms of volume, when full, these pools hold 2.5 million liters of water or about 660,000 gallons. (from the interweb). Just shy of 2 acre feet.

I've tasted California water. I thought it already was reclaimed waste water!!

Oh, and I love the FUD about data centers "consuming" water. Like water is a limited supply of fossil fuels or something like that. The water either exits the data center and returns to the eco system as waste water, or it evaporates and comes back as rain elsewhere. It doesn't go in to the data center, never to return.

While that's true, the real problem with dumping purified water after it's been through a data center is that it takes a lot of energy to filter it.

Wasting water isn't really about the water. It's about the energy.

> “Like water is a limited supply of fossil fuels or something like that”

Fresh water is in short supply, particularly in California. Even the UK, which has significantly more rain than California, has a fresh water supply problem…

>"Fresh water is in short supply, particularly in California."

So is the issue a supply of fresh water? Or is the issue the location of the data center? Seems to me in our current 'cloudy' world that there is no major requirement for the data center to be in a place of limited water supply.

The worst tasting and hardest (most loaded with minerals) water is pumped from wells. In many places a water softener is required to keep from ruining the pipes.

Some places that 'consume' water are dumping it more or less into the ocean. Once data center water is mixed in with bog water and industrial waste the cost to clean it goes up dramatically. The water should be reclaimed at the data center before the cost to clean it skyrockets.

We already recycle water to a degree; this new legislation is saying they don't need to clean the water as much before handing it back to people to drink. It seems to me that if the data centers are so thirsty they should be using the waste water rather than putting it into our taps.

Aren't the data centers near rivers or the sea.. that way they could pump water though chillers to transfer the heat to the sea water and then dump that.