Water, Noise, Power: What Data Center Critics Get Wrong About Real Costs
bigdata · x · 2026-09-25
Ben Lorica dissects three recurring data-center concerns. US facilities used 66B liters of water directly in 2023 (<0.5% of Virginia's withdrawals), but impacts are hyper-local: among six Virginia utilities, data-center share ranged from negligible to 1/5, with one site consuming 243M gallons (36 large offices). Power generation for data centers added 800B liters of indirect water use — 12x direct use. He expects this to be a major 2028 primary issue and argues for site-specific tradeoffs over averages.
More from Infra
- Google's Project Suncatcher flies TPU prototype satellite on SpaceX Transporter-18 — Miles_Brundage · 2026-09-25
- YC-backed Isoquant launches GLM-5.3-Flash inference at $0.07/M with 452ms TTFT — ycombinator · 2026-09-25
- Nemotron 3 Speaker Diarization Ported to Apple Silicon via Core ML and MLX — ivan_digital · 2026-09-25
- Strangely, GPU matmuls run faster on 'predictable' data: Horace He explains — goyal__pramod · 2026-09-25
- PyTorch announces ExecuTorch Hackathon in San Francisco, Oct 17-18, with three device tracks — PyTorch · 2026-09-25
- Speculation: GPT-6 Luna/Sol efficiency lean hints at Cerebras 1000 tok/s inference economics — brandon_galang · 2026-09-25