Perhaps data centers could fuck off to the hundreds of thousands of useless, uninhabited acres of America, generate their own power AND provide it free to us since we’re the ones funding them with OUR data. They could also collect, clean and recycle their own water if it’s less than a damned swimming pool. Otherwise, it’s a hard no for those of us with eyes, brains and touch with reality.
Jensen Huang, to CBS News:
"Water consumption, that's a myth now. These data centers use less water evaporative. They don't use evaporation anymore. It uses less water than a swimming pool evaporating all year long."
This is true for the newest chip generation specifically. Nvidia's Rubin architecture runs closed-loop liquid cooling, and Nvidia's own engineers say it cuts a facility's cooling water use from roughly 2.6 million gallons per megawatt annually down to near zero.
It's not true for the installed base. Most existing data centers still run open-loop evaporative cooling, and federal researchers estimated US data centers consumed 17 billion gallons directly in 2023, plus 211 billion gallons indirectly through the electricity they draw.
Huang is describing where the newest hardware is headed. He's not describing what's running today.