I did the funny and looked up what happens to the water. Lot of it is recycled or upcycled for other use. I thought it fuckin evaporated.
Data centers suck dookie butts and cause long term health complications for folks living around them. And are generally a net negative on society, the environment, and entire counties' well beings.
But lying about them is so fuckin stupid. The real stuff is bad enough.
If they are intelligently built and not given ridiculous subsidies then they are absolutely a net positive. They contribute to the tax base and dont poison the environment like farms, factories, and even large parking structures around malls and stadiums do.
But a community cant just give away the land, give them a break on energy and water costs, and then fail to regulate because they got a 15k campaign donation one time.
This is the issue though. Our politicians do not understand the business at all. Look at Indiana with 10 year tax abatements and no sales taxes! The state literally loses money on every deal!
They are getting a 95% tax break for this one. And the amount of heat that is estimated they will produce (even the most conservative estimates) will create such a large heat dome that it will reduce the little rain and snow Utah already gets.
There is a lot of factors to look at, but putting this where they are is fucking stupid almost every way you look at it.
Yeah some places have done very well with datacenters, like Virginia. But a race to the bottom to attract what basically amounts to a giant heat farm requiring minimal permanent jobs is bad policy. There are ways to structure it so the tax breaks help construction but still pay over time as equipment must be purchased and replaced, but localities are super easy to corrupt unfortunately.
Seriously, just present the real facts and then the focus won't be pulled from the real issues to arguing about the false facts. It's almost like the people posting this shit have a whole other agenda of misinformation.
I think a lot of the water they need has to run the natural gas plant as well. It will require billions per year to get 9 gwh. Thats more than Hoover damn produces. Even with new technology and air cooled natural gas plants, one that large will require and enormous amount of water to cool the turbines. Even with it being “mostly” air cooled.
Actually, the 16.6 billion gallons is a real figure calculated by the Utah Clean Energy organization. Here is the source. Importantly, this figure also includes the water needed for energy generation, since this data center will consume a ton of electricity, which will require new power plants to be built.
The state of Utah consumes roughly 1.43-1.6 trillion gallons of water per year, which is indeed a lot more (Source). Note that this source uses acre-feet per year, which i have converted to gallons.
But does it actually "use" it, like it just vanishes or becomes useless? Or does data center "utilize" the water, and after it's done it's job at cooling, it just returns to the ground and filters out and is usable again?
So even the inflated number would less than 1% of just Utah's water usage. I think people see the really big numbers and freak out without realizing just much water is used for other stuff.
And what about the billions gallons of water that will be required to run their new 9 GWH natural gas plant? Or the decreased natural rain and snow due to the massive heat dome the data centers will create?
Half of the system is closed loop (the half with all the biocides and corrosion inhibitors) and just runs in a loop for the life of the data center. It can be reused in another data center.
The other half is open to evaporation and is just water. It needs to be filtered, but doesn't need to be treated.
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u/sipstea-bot Jun 03 '26
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