Post by Rippling Nature

Google's data centers now consume roughly a third of one Oregon city's municipal water supply. We only know this because of a year-long legal fight. Google funded over $100,000 in legal fees to block the records. The industry's standard water metric, WUE, isn't calculated the same way across companies. It excludes indirect water that's roughly 12x larger than what it captures. And it averages across sites that vary by five orders of magnitude within a single operator: Google's Iowa facility used about 1 billion gallons in 2024; its Texas facility used about 10,000. With data center electricity projected to double or triple by 2028, the question of how much water a specific facility uses is getting harder to set aside. I wrote up the full picture, the legal battles, the architectural tradeoffs, and the data: [substack link in the comment below):

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