Unotherday

Beyond wet and dry

Bruce Li in Hackernoon: AI’s Water Problem Is Smaller Than You Think Pull-quote:

The data centers rising out of the desert didn't create the water crisis. They did something arguably more useful: they made it legible. A 200-megawatt facility asking a small county for eight million gallons on a summer afternoon is a question the 20th-century water grid cannot answer without revealing exactly how thin its margins already were — margins eroded by a century of pumping from ever-more-distant rivers, using each drop precisely once, and calling the result waste.
What's replacing it is a shift in scale of attention. We are moving out of an era of bulk extraction and into one of molecular management.