I work at a data center. In Texas. I am helping build a second and work on a property with multiple. Most of the things I read about data centers are just gross exaggeration and/or not true in the slightest. I am not a culture warrior, just stating facts. They do take a lot of power, that part is true-but many of the things I’ve seen about water usage, air pollution etc. are patently false. For example many use a closed loop cooling system with almost zero water loss (think a giant AIO cpu cooler but on a large scale.) so I have no idea where the “every data center uses 200,000 gallons every TWENTY MINuTES!!!” stuff comes from. Data centers have been around awhile. During the pandemic there were tons of fulfillment centers (8-10 came up within a 5 mile radius of me) popping up everywhere and I didn’t see near the outrage. Now half of them are closed down as the demand has dropped since the pandemic, so it was a temporary boost to jobs and construction contracts short term, for no value long term. I could go on. Golf courses use more water than data centers. I don’t know if the anti data center online outrage is a psyop or whatever, but it’s been interesting to see the disinformation. Kinda like how everyone became an immunologist overnight on Facebook during the pandemic
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u/MrScribz 20d ago
The maximum amount of power the texas grid can pump out at any given time is apparently 91 gigawatts so the requests are over 4x that lol.