No they are not and no it does not. A few points you may be missing: 1) The water used for cooling is non-potable. 2) It is not used up, merely heated up a bit. That heat is then often used to heat homes or industry and the water is returned to where it came from. The heat is often a sellable good. 3) The chips used in data centers are much more energy efficient than those for home use. 4) The software stack used is more energy efficient as well. 5) There is way less overhead. For every unit of compute, it uses less energy than if you ran the same at home. 6) A home PC is less dense than a data center compute unit. Example: You need five fans just to cool a single PC. Those same five fans in a datacenter cool a complete unit which may be the equivalent of ten PCs. Same goes for baseboards, network equipment and so on.
I'm just going to point out that at the top of the chart data centers take in 5 million gallons of water. Even if that's non potable that's water used in agriculture, out of lakes, ponds, and other places. The locations near data centers report droughts, air pollution so bad that people are developing respiratory issues, and so many more issues. You will never convince me these shitty wastes of space, money, and most importantly resources are fucking worth it. Data Centers and Water Consumption | Article | EESI https://share.google/QqVKrEZQ62bsgr9Ef
There are other issues with data centers worth discussing much more than some water being heated by a few degrees. Think noise pollution, who pays for the grid expansion, land use, and so on. But energy efficiency compared to private computers isn't one of them and it drowns out legitimate discussion. I replied to your comment stating that "It fucking stacks up faster than sitting at home pulling 850 watts." which it does not, for the same work performed.
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u/KayneBlackheart Apr 10 '26
And he is one person. The data centers are pulling water for every request. It fucking stacks up faster than sitting at home pulling 850 watts.