While it is not a true "externality", data center use of water is a strong community/regional cost that effectively removes 1 person/1 vote. Those with the financial resources to buy more water get the water, those without do not.
Perhaps you think that the distribution of financial resources reflects what is in society's best interests - that Meta, Google et al. have demonstrated their utility in ways that make them literally more important than people with insufficient wealth to outbid those companies for water.
I live in New Mexico. I do not consider Hacker News to be a VC forum. For what it's worth (which is very little), I was employee #2 at amzn if I need some sort of credentials to get you to respond constructively to my point rather than with some hand-wavey ad hominem.
By "worth" in this context, I mean "authority to speak in a context claimed to be limited to a certain kind of person" (a limitation I do not acknowledge exists on HN, or anywhere, really).
For the record, my net worth increased by about $1M before taxes based on the 1 year of options I got at amzn. But not relevant in this context.
Could you elaborate on this? Are you saying that datacenter water usage is not a significant community issue? Or that such community issues should be irrelevant to VC conversations?
I'm not following you. The concern isn't that they somehow destroy the water, it's the consumption of processed water that has a limited supply. Are you saying a gallon of data center water use has less impact on supply than other uses? Recaptured water from evaporative cooling needs to be reprocessed just like any other water source, right?
Lets put this in perspective. A continuous 1 gigawatt draw is enough energy to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour. Assuming a generous 350 liters per person per day that's the equivalent of 90k people.
If you don't actually boil it and instead return only lukewarm water you're looking at something like 15x more (I don't know the exact factor) due to how large the heat of vaporization is.
How exactly are they supposed to return (ballpark) 1 million people worth of water to the utility company? Let's again put this in perspective. The entire Seattle metropolitan area hosts ~4.1 million people. The entire state of Florida is only 23.5 million. This is an absurd amount of water we're taking about here.
What fictional universe do you live in where people are not getting water because they have been outbid by some data center? As for commercial use of water, we absolutely should do it that way instead of the archaic water rights system we have now.
It's not a fictional universe. It is precisely the waters rights system you've mentioned. Capital-rich entity buys water senior water rights, extracts water, others find their wells descending/drying.
This hasn't happened yet in New Mexico with a data center because these are new. But it has happened numerous times with other capital-rich entities that have bought water rights (sometimes, just cities buying rights from adjacent rural county land).
A small community near where I live no longer has functioning wells because new residential construction below them sucked the water out of the aquifer. They tried to drill deeper, without much success. County is now having to build a water line to the community.
Perhaps you think that the distribution of financial resources reflects what is in society's best interests - that Meta, Google et al. have demonstrated their utility in ways that make them literally more important than people with insufficient wealth to outbid those companies for water.
Many of us do not.