Per what?
This looks to be the total number of each category. If so, it’s a useless graph. How many L/day are used per single unit. Maybe per farm/datacenter.
Edit.
I did the math
3,562 Cattle farms
21,617,069 L/day/ranch
5,400 data centers
416,667 L/day/data center
45 AI data centers
600,000 L/day/AI data center
This does not take into consideration the heat produced nor fossil fuels consumed by each.
If water is your only metric, cattle ranches are worse. But this isn’t a good metric for many reasons, since livestock, being food, is a commodity, while data centers are not.
Let’s normalize to technology, ans ignore beef for a moment.
AI data centers consume about 33% more water than non-AI centers.
There is not a situation where this is fine.
The other part I don’t see talked about is that evaporative cooling produces water vapour, and water vapour increases greenhouse effects. Normally we don’t worry about water vapour emissions because it tends to fall out as rain or snow a couple of weeks later, but this is continuous usage. Continuous plumes of 600 tonnes of water vapour per AI data centre per day.
Per what?
This looks to be the total number of each category. If so, it’s a useless graph. How many L/day are used per single unit. Maybe per farm/datacenter.
Edit.
I did the math
3,562 Cattle farms
21,617,069 L/day/ranch
5,400 data centers
416,667 L/day/data center
45 AI data centers
600,000 L/day/AI data center
This does not take into consideration the heat produced nor fossil fuels consumed by each.
If water is your only metric, cattle ranches are worse. But this isn’t a good metric for many reasons, since livestock, being food, is a commodity, while data centers are not.
Let’s normalize to technology, ans ignore beef for a moment.
AI data centers consume about 33% more water than non-AI centers.
There is not a situation where this is fine.
The other part I don’t see talked about is that evaporative cooling produces water vapour, and water vapour increases greenhouse effects. Normally we don’t worry about water vapour emissions because it tends to fall out as rain or snow a couple of weeks later, but this is continuous usage. Continuous plumes of 600 tonnes of water vapour per AI data centre per day.