@evanspw @decryption As Peter said, gigawatt datacenters don't actually exist.
But even if they did, the calculation is flawed because they don't actually need to use any water at all.
They need to reject the heat created by the equipment in the datacenter: Almost all of the electricity fed into a computer is radiated as waste heat, only a small fraction of it is consumed as useful work.
The cooling systems in the datacenter collect the heat, typically by running exhaust air through heat exchangers which transfer it into a fluid. Pumping the fluid elsewhere carries the heat with it, so thats how it gets out of the datacenter's technical floor area.
The fluid will end up in a plant room, where it'll need to be cooled before it returns to the technical floor area for another go (it's a closed loop)
You cool it by extracting the heat it's carrying into another fluid - say, refrigerant gas. So now you have cold working fluid and hot gas.
Finally, you need to cool the gas, because it's another closed loop and it needs to do another lap to repeat the cycle.
The highest-density way of cooling the gas is to pump it through tubes immersed in water, which heats up and evaporates into the air. That's where basically 100% water consumption comes from.
But you can also air-cool the gas, which needs no water at all.
It really depends on the design of the facility, something completely lost on the kermit-arms panic people.
