Data Centre Bashing

Why is everyone just talking about water?

I just watched a very thorough investigative report on YouTube about the consumption of water by data centres. Link at the bottom — I encourage you to view it yourself.

It appeared to be very well researched, well reported.

Except it left me with questions, lots of questions.

For example: if water consumption is the issue, then why don’t they use an alternative method for cooling? After all liquid-cooled circuitry has been the holy grail of computing for a long time, and it’s very effective.

BTW, liquid cooled is not by water. It uses a special non-conductive dielectric liquid that absorbs the heat directly from the components and released in a closed-loop.

Another example: if power consumption is the issue, then why are these behemoths investing more in alternative power generation?

Better yet, why are they being build in Arizona, where it’s so hot, water is scarce, and the power grid is dicey?

The answer is simple: GREED.

These “issues” being reported about data centres are merely symptoms. They are symptoms of baked-in practices by these companies (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Meta, and others) to gleen as much profit from any operation as humanly (or otherwise) possible.

They use water for cooling, because it’s cheap, and they don’t care about water scarcity. Water is cheaper than power.

States like Arizona are subsidizing these companies and this greed by giving them huge incentives to build there; like tax-free building materials, free land, super low if any property taxes. A state like Arizona, is begging companies to build mega data centres there.

The report also complained about the amount of power these data centres consume. There was a claim that in 10 years it could represent 67% of the total consumption of electricity in America? That claim is NOT born out by my research. It’s wildly exaggerated.

But the fact that they are not using clean energy is a problem. Again GREED. States like Virginia and Pennsylvania are not closing their coal plants, or worse adding more, to cope with the consumption by these data centres.

What about “carbon-neutral” you ask? Ha! They were never concerned about being carbon neutral. Never ever. They were going to rely on swapping their carbon credits to others to have them “save” on their behalf. Just like water credits. Same deal, make others save the water instead of them.

For companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, it has always been about cutting corners. The more they cut, the more the subsidies pay off.
Here are some points: (From ChatGPT)

• Public subsidies = private gain.
  These companies get tax abatements on land, property, sales taxes on construction materials, even free water and electricity hookups. In some cases, counties waive tens of millions in property taxes for decades.

• Capex minimization = faster ROI.
  Even if construction is subsidized, operational costs (like electricity) are ongoing and scale with usage. Evaporative cooling saves them millions annually in electricity, so they choose it even if it wastes local water.
  → This isn’t about survival, it’s about shaving costs to maximize returns to shareholders.

• Financial optics.
  Investors love low operational cost numbers. Choosing the absolute cheapest operational model — even if environmentally destructive — pleases shareholders and inflates stock value. Environmental costs are externalized onto the public.

• Short planning horizons.
  Companies often assume they won’t be the ones paying when aquifers run dry or power grids collapse — those will be “future problems” for governments, ratepayers, or future executives.

Why do the states give away so many subsidies? That’s a good one. It’s because they believe the myth of “jobs". The fact is, once the buildings are built, a hyperscale data centre is just a giant automated warehouse of servers.

• 30–50 full-time operations staff

• Sometimes up to 100 in very large sites

• Most are IT technicians, security guards, and maintenance crew

And I’ll bet the largest group are security and maintenance.

So the states give money away with the prayer of “creating jobs”, which happens during the construction of the property, but those jobs are temporary.

In Canada, construction people follow the work… I’m sure it’s the same in America.

There is one thing that really bugged me though. So much noise about electric vehicles is about “the amount of power they’ll consume” and the “grid can’t handle all those cars”. Yes, those complaints are coming from the OIL industry. After all, they continue to have a vested interest in making sure everyone still buys Ford 150s with 8 cylinder engines of power, whether you need a pickup truck or not.

Meanwhile, these same critics say nothing about data centres consuming massive amounts of electricity.

Do you want to drive an EV and still have reliable electricity for your devices?
Because at this rate, there’s going to be a fight for power between EVs and data centres.

And there doesn’t have to be.

We could stop burning fossil fuels.
We could build clean energy capacity.
We could prioritize people, not profit.

My Closing Thought

We don’t have an energy shortage.
We have a priority problem.

Do we want a livable planet, clean transport, and strong communities —
or just more billionaire-owned server farms?

That link I promised: