A Boring Dystopia

Land of the fee and the home of the slave.

It's worse, Americans choose over and over again to suffer, as long as other people suffer too.

It’s not vandalism, it’s direct action. Or sabotage, if you consider this to be a time of war (which it undoubtedly is — a class war). Don’t use the enemy’s language against ourselves.

The majority of energy consumed is for training the AI models, not providing output from those models.

This means the resource consumption is not tied to usage and prompts. Also it means resource consumption to train models is temporary, relative to the model.

Evaporative cooling.

They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you're cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I've seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.

Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.

For cooling many (most?) data centers use evaporative cooling. That evaporated water could be captured again with a heat pump (reducing the wasted water + recuperating heat for other uses), but it's Texas, so it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the data centers have no intensive to be less wasteful. So the evaporated water gets released into the atmosphere and it's gone.

Edit: about your question where the water is coming from: there is no simple answer, it's coming from many sources and it's being used for many things. But irregardless of the source, there's only so much available and using more than is available is not possible. When the math is done, it turns out that Texas is running out of water. At that point choices have to be made, and apparently Texas is chosing to increase/maintain the supply to data centers and to reduce the supply to people.

I wish... We get over a thousand new residents a day. It's awful.

Cooling. Even closed loops evaporate a lot.

Apparently closed loop systems are not good enough for these kinds of applications, and often instead use evaporative. Which kind of logical, since they're not running a single factory overclocked GPU with a top of the line desktop CPU, but a cluster of factory overclocked GPUs with a server CPU.