So, for my part, I’m not so concerned about the water inputs that are consumed by datacenters. The most water efficient traditional power generation systems we have are combined cycle natural gas turbines, and they consume about 5-10x as much water to produce a megawatt of power than the data center would use to cool itself from using that megawatt of power, even if they used the worst “one and done” through cooling system.

Check the HARC report on this.

No, my major concern is about what happens to the waste? Does it just get dumped into the sewers? What else might that poison? Where do those sewers get their water treated, and where does that water go downstream? Because my “treated” water output back into the rivers and aquifers is your downstream water input for humans to drink, golf courses to water their grass, etc….

And what happens when there is a toxic spill? Does that go into creeks and rivers on the surface? Where do those creeks and rivers go? Where do they let out, in relation to the closest water intakes?

Does the toxic spill go into the karst geography below the land? Into the aquifers? What all is exactly down there, and how many decades or centuries might they be poisoned? I mean, you may be able to clean up a surface creek or river, but you can’t clean up the karst geography below the surface, or the aquifers.

You could easily poison an entire city with a single spill of toxic waste from a datacenter, and continue to poison that city for years and decades to come.