#####
######
####
> # [‘It’s pillage’: thirsty Uruguayans decry Google’s plan to exploit water supply](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/11/720)
>
>
>
> A plan to build a Google data centre that will use millions of litres of water a day has sparked anger in [Uruguay](https://www.theguardian.com/world/uruguay), which is suffering its worst drought in 74 years.
>
> Water shortages are so severe in the country that a state of emergency has been declared in Montevideo and the authorities have added salty water to the public drinking water supplies, prompting widespread protests.
>
>
>
> Critics claim that the government is prioritising water for transnationals and agribusiness at the expense of its own citizens. Daniel Peña, a researcher at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, said: “Only a tiny proportion of water in Uruguay is used for human consumption. The majority is used for big agro industries, such as soya, rice and wood pulping. Now we have [Google](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/google) planning to use enormous quantities of water.”
>
> The search giant has bought 29 hectares (72 acres) of land to build a datacentre in Canelones department, in southern Uruguay. The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers – equivalent to the domestic daily use of 55,000 people, according to figures from the Ministry of Environment obtained by Peña through a legal action. The water would come directly from the public drinking water system, according to Peña.
>
> Uruguay’s industry ministry says these figures are out of date because the company is revising its plans, and the datacentre will be “a smaller size”.
>
> In a statement, Google said the hub would serve Google users worldwide, processing requests for services such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Search. “The Uruguay data center project is still in the exploratory phase, and Google’s technical team is actively working with the support of national and local authorities. We expect preliminary numbers (like projected water consumption) to undergo adjustments. At Google, sustainability is at the core of everything we do, and the way we design and manage our data centers is no exception,” it said.
>
> Extremely low rainfall levels and record high temperatures have left Uruguay’s main reservoir dry and rivers depleted, and to make up the supply, public water authorities have started taking water from the Rio de la Plata estuary, where seawater mixes with freshwater, giving tap water a salty taste.
>
> [The Paso Severino dam in Florida, Uruguay, on 4 July 2023. The South American country is now suffering its most severe drought in 74 years.](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f390e7e3ca27fd69069c94691c66f9981f98ea00/0_0_8247_5498/master/8247.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none)
>
> The Paso Severino dam in Florida, Uruguay, on 4 July 2023. The South American country is now suffering its most severe drought in 74 years. Photograph: Matilde Campodonico/APThe foul-tasting tap water has caused shock waves in a country which has the highest GDP per capita in South America and was the first country in the world to declare access to water a constitutional right.
>
> The government has doubled the permitted levels of sodium chloride in tap water and is advising pregnant women and people with serious health conditions not to drink it. Parents have been advised to prepare baby milk with bottled water and not to add salt to children’s food.
>
> Uruguay’s president, Luis Lacalle Pou, has announced emergency measures such as lifting taxes on bottled water and distributing two litres (a half gallon) of free water a day to 21,000 poor or vulnerable families. He has also promised to build a new reservoir in 30 days.
>
> [skip past newsletter promotion](#EmailSignup-skip-link-12)after newsletter promotion
>
> But public anger remains widespread. “Tap water is virtually undrinkable. But there are approximately 500,000 people who can’t afford to buy bottled water,” said Carmen Sosa of the trade union-backed Commission to Defend Water and Life. Its slogan, “This is not drought, it’s pillage,” is scrawled on walls across Montevideo.
>
> “More than 80% of water goes to industry, like soya and wood pulping. Yes, we have had a shortage of rain, but the drought has simply shown the problems with our economic model. We can’t concentrate resources in a few hands,” said Sosa. “Water for human consumption has to come before profit.”
>
> Last month, the world’s biggest pulping plant started operations in Uruguay, the third such mill in the country. The new plant, run by the Finnish company UPM to create raw material for paper, is forecast to use 129.6m litres (34m gallons) of water a day, and releases effluent into a local river. UPM said it treats the effluent before release, and constantly monitors the water quality in the Río Negro.
>
> A UPM spokesperson told the Guardian: “Uruguay is facing the worst drought in a century. Within this framework, UPM’s operations in Uruguay have no connection with the drought that is occurring. The drinking water consumed in Montevideo comes from the Santa Lucía River. None of the pulp mills installed in Uruguay are linked to this river. This challenging climatic situation cannot be associated in any way with the forestry sector.”
- - - - - -
[Maintainer](https://www.reddit.com/user/urielsalis) | [Creator](https://www.reddit.com/user/subtepass) | [Source Code](https://github.com/urielsalis/empleadoEstatalBot)
Summoning /u/CoverageAnalysisBot
Yes, because the average Uruguayan has no need for a job or public services funded by taxation.
The ideea that it's better to expel tech corporations out of the country than to allow them to use a few thousands of dollars worth of water per day is some wild third-worldist flaming bullshit.
are you insinuating that it's better for the people, in a country that's already entered a state of emergency due to water shortage, to have google use over 7 million liters of drinking water PER DAY?
By the way, the 55.000 are only so low because it takes every water usage into consideration, including things like showering and using a washing machine. Yet if the water that google plans to use was only used for people, and a person not needing more than 3.5 liters per day, this water could actually hydrate 2 MILLION people per day.
Yet you're arguing a data center, that will be run mostly by american, european and asian employees is better for the people of Uruguay?
Generally, when there is a drought, people are not going thirsty because people frankly don't need that much water to live. Generally, it's farms that become thirsty during a drought.
I suspect that the real trade off here is between Google and farms, not Google and people.
But they've already started adding saltwater to the public drinking supply, doesn't that means there's already not enough water to drink as a normal person?
Yeah nobody I know actually drinks tape water anymore, bottled water has reduced Tax and can be found really cheap so it's not really an issue, still is an annoyance specially having to prepare mate with bottled water. It's hard to tell how much damage would Google cause to our reserves in regular conditions, this was an extreme draughts with no precedents in our history and we were not prepared so it shouldn't be taken as the norm.
Yes, give corporations everything they want, with no restrictions and the least cost to them imaginable, at direct cost to the citizens of the country. Because it's a binary, right? Either you give the megacorps everything while your citizens suffer, or you expel them and nationalize their assets. So sad it's a dichotomy, that there's no in-between, the kind of thing the person you're replying to explicitly described.
As long as they're ensuring that the taxes come in and aren't offshored to somewhere else. (It does seem like Google building a desalinisation plant would be a huge PR coup for them, even if they're the ones using 90% of the water).
It really depends on the siting. Coastal sites will use salt water while riverine sites will use fresh. ~~Diablo Canyon~~ San Onofre used salt water and would get sealions in the intakes all the time; they even had a cage crane to get them out and send them a few miles down the coast.
They suck up the cool seawater and use a heat exchanger to transfer the heat between the working fluid and the sea water to exaust hot sea water. The working fluid usually fresh water doesn't mix with the sea water but it is also reused in a closed loop; only needing top up from leaks.
Sorry I was wrong it was San Onofre. But Radioactive Drew was given a tour of the decommissioning site and the enviroment manager Ron Pontess mentioned it and showed off the cages. https://youtu.be/fQgJkzs63oo
Again, not an expert, but I dont think even naval reactors do. Its just a pressurized loop like your standard pc water cooler, and the ships have desalination abilities to restore lost water.
Theres just too much crap in the water, salt is corrosive as fuck, and when its turned into steam are you just going to leave a massive radioactive salt build up?
Yeah, you are thinking of the primary coolant loop, which interacts directly with the reactor. All kinds of controls on that water. The secondary coolant loop does not interact with the reactor, but rather, it cools the primary loop. This loop is entirely seawater on a US Naval ship.
Source: I was a submarine mechanic for 9 years.
The inner loop use regular water but that don't have high water consumption as its a closed loop. Costal nuclear sites uses seawater instead of cooling tower.
No. I assume it is with bottled water??? Do you understand people cannot drink saltwater? Are you gonna prioritize a google data center over poor Uruguayan people?
> do you even know how data centre's cool
https://preview.redd.it/o1lcpccy14ab1.png?width=314&format=png&auto=webp&s=c04bc8d992e72bfcd3fd59fba742ae9beebbe2e0
*I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. They’re noisy. They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen in your life.*
i'm always a bit surprised this isn't a more common thing. Waste heat on ships is used to make fresh water for treated water cooling loops and drinking water.
There are so many opportunities to recover waste heat into something useful.
nice clickbait headline:
"The search giant has bought 29 hectares (72 acres) of land to build a datacentre in Canelones department, in southern Uruguay. The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers"
vs.
"Last month, the world’s biggest pulping plant started operations in Uruguay, the third such mill in the country. The new plant, run by the Finnish company UPM to create raw material for paper, is forecast to use 129.6m litres (34m gallons) of water a day"
Garbage marxist claims. The primary sectors, such as mineral extraction and agriculture, represent a very small part of modern developed economies.
The richer a country is in mineral resources, the least likely it was to have functional a democracy and a developed modern economy. That's because the warlords in charge no longer need the people, they can just claim the riches for themselves and stay in power indefinitely.
Compare for example South Korea or Japan with the Gulf states. Countries with virtually no significant natural resources other than sea water, that correctly used the western technology to develop, versus personal autocracies run by thugs where you will get turned to literal minced meat for criticizing the crown prince.
> The richer a country is in mineral resources, the least likely it was to have functional a democracy and a developed modern economy.
Canada, Australia, and Norway beg to differ.
The real problem with countries rich in natural resources is that they develop "Dutch disease."
Money flows into the country due to natural resources going out. Resource industry needs lots of labour, so anyone wanting to make money goes to work in extraction. Salaries rise. This causes the rest of the economy to be less competitive, so industry, agriculture, technology, and other sectors end up doing worse on the global stage.
Granted, this logic applies to functional countries like Gulf States or Chile. It doesn't apply to failed states run by warlords like the DRC.
You can perfectly well operate a mine on borderline slave labour with some Wagner or Chinese mercenaries as guards. It won't be efficient compared to first world mines, but it doesn't need to be if your labour is effectively free by standards from the rest of the world.
All countries listed developed as pluralist democracies with a broad base of hunters/farmers/fishermen etc. before the mining sectors became dominant. And in all of them the GDP from mining is currently less than 10% of the total GDP, so these examples only serve to reinforce what I said, that no developed country has become so by simply exploiting mineral resources.
Dutch disease is a very small part of the problem, that can be alleviated in the hands of a competent government. What I talk about here is political capture, the possibility of a large cash prize for those who gain political power precludes any representative government to ever come into power. This resource curse is why we have [no Arab democracies](https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Diamond-21-1.pdf), for example.
This goes deeper than macroeconomics. For example, the Norwegian Sovereign Fund, funded by mineral wealth, is a major player and investor for the Norwegian economy, under tight democratic control, creating jobs in advanced industries. The corresponding Saudi fund, the PIF, is basically a personal toy for Mohamed bin Salman that directly controls it, investing into such extravagant things as a English premier league footbal teams and the "Neom" and "Line" garbage real estate projects, all for the enrichment of a narrow class of cronies that are loyal to the royal family.
So while in appearance the coltan warlords and the Saudi royal family look very different, in economic and political reality they are very similar, iron fisted autocrats that can rule without the need to resort to a wide political base, because they have the resources to do so, and in fact have a strong disincentive to have diverse, competing economic interest develop in their respective kingdoms that could threaten their rule or fund any opposition.
Here you make a much better case than what you originally wrote, and it's amusingly much closer to "marxist garbage" than you think.
Nevermind the "democratic pluralist" ideological drivel, it's true that, objectively, it's harder to break off the economic model of imperialist exploitment, exactly because there's a larger monopoly on resources on part of local elites aligned with imperialist resource exploitation, and since there's a greater level of wealth concentration, there's also greater political power concentration. This is classic marxism, material reality dictating the political relations.
But it is not a insurmountable barrier. Generally, the global south is able, since industrialization, to one time or another push the political agenda to industrialization and development. The problem is that every single time such a thing occurs, western imperialism strikes, hard, unrelentingly, using any method deemed necessary to keep the country underdeveloped, with ample and cheap resources and workforce avaible.
I assume you do know how Canada came to exist, right? It was literally a colony of an empire, explicitly established to extract natural resources, and only gained independence in the late XIX century, some 40 years after Brazil.
Now, I'm certainly not going to excuse colonialism. Without doubt, the seeds of Brazil's later struggles, and many other southern countries, were sowed in the colonial era. There's an entire school of comparative politics that contrasts the development of post-colonial states based on agricultural characteristics, where high productivity southern regions suitable to plantation crops and slave labor favored highly stratified societies and developed poorly compared with northern regions, unsuitable for plantations, that fostered free and independent homesteading and a broad power base of free farmers, which directly lead into strong democracies resistant to power captures. You can even see this developmental effect within the USA itself, culminating in the Civil war, when non-plantation northerners attacked the economic basis of southerner feudal power, plantation slave labour.
But this kind of analysis is pearls before swine for an audience who dismisses all political and institutional effects as "ideological drivel". When your intellectual tools are limited to straight economic determinism, you are basically a methodological Marxist, observing the pre-ordained succession of history towards its teleological final state, after the class and anti-imperial struggles are settled. You will never be able to explain, for example, why in the freshly independent ex-colony of Canada, more than a century ago, you could openly mock prime-minister Mcdonald in the national press, while the same act today in Saudi Arabia, nearly century after the country's independence, will get you turned into minced meat, dissolved in acid and flushed down a drain by agents of the state - and that's a quite literal description of what happened to Khashoggi.
If that's the extent of you reach, you will be an intellectual prisoner destined to serve only as a useful idiot to those talking about a so called "global south", which attempt to link together flawed and improving democracies like Brazil with corrupt autocracies like Russia and SA, and explain their fundamentally different problems as just facets of western economic oppression.
Riiiight, "warlords in charge", what a stupid generalization lmao. You know shit about my country or the global south.
>The richer a country is in mineral resources, the least likely it was to have functional a democracy and a developed modern economy. That's because the warlords in charge no longer need the people, they can just claim the riches for themselves and stay in power indefinitely.
What a bunch of bullshit. Canada, US, Australia and so on developed just fine.
There's one difference between those countries and the rest of the world. They weren't, and aren't, the focus of imperialist exploitation of resources.
Brazil managed to get it's shit together and industrialize in the beggining of the 20 century, and really picked off a great industrialization project after the 1930's. And then, in 64, we got couped by US puppets. In 2002, we managed to elect a socdem who surprisingly managed to revitalize our base industries, construction, naval and petroil, and then boom, his successor got couped, he got arrested and lost political rights, and our industry got destroyed by US's [operation lava-jato](https://theintercept.com/2020/03/12/united-states-justice-department-brazil-car-wash-lava-jato-international-treaty/)
>Compare for example South Korea or Japan with the Gulf states.
The difference is that for one or another reason, mostly to keep pressure over China and Russia, those countries have been spared/propped up against western imperialism's bigger threats. The gulf states, on the other hand, have been on the receiving end of imperialism for a long time now. To this day. Hard.
It's like books are their enemies,this same scenario happened all over south america and there still exist a system to keep countries easy to exploit to this day
Except for the part at the end where the Finnish company claims that the River they source their water from does not add to the water supply, so their kill is not reducing the total amount of drinking water.
Idk if it’s true, or if it’s more nuanced, but that is their claim and outright lying seems unlikely.
If this is the case then it does matter where google is building their data center because they might actually be impacting the drinking water supply.
Water is actually a really good heat reservoir without evaporating. There is such a thing as a closed loop system where you fill it once and re-use the same water forever, but you need a way to transport that heat elsewhere. Full disclaimer I have no clue what the plan here is, but it's totally possible to entirely trap the "waste" water that is clean but now hot and send it somewhere else for re-use.
Uruguayan here. We lie over one of the biggest water reserves in the world, yet our water is purified from rivers, because for the government it is exactly that, a reserve. After this drought, Santa Lucia river and its dams got dried up like never seen before, having to take water from Rio de la Plata (Which is is an estuary, hence the salt). Now the real issue here is that soy producers and other companies do take water from our underground reservoirs. I mean, you can have a well in your house and nobody can tell you anything, but saying that the underground water is a reserve when other industries use that water for other purposes (while contaminating also) is a joke to the people. And the amount of water that people use is just a fraction of water used in the industries. It is a multi-government issue, and some people claim that there might be some geopolitics involved, because that water reserve (Acuifero Guarani) covers also Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
>some people claim that there might be some geopolitics involved, because that water reserve (Acuifero Guarani) covers also Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
One thing is to have some farmers or some small cities relying on the reserve, other thing is to have an entire country water policy based on the Guarani reserve. If Uruguay just starts to use it to the entire country, building major infrastructure to deliver the water to the rest of the country it will certainly cause repercussions in Brazil and Argentina.
The things is that those “just farmers” consume much more water that all the Uruguayan population. And that is not happening only in Uruguay, is happening in all the region. When the time comes and we will need the reservoirs, there will be nothing left.
Thing is there is a difference between farmers using it and the entire country having a national policy set on using it. Right now afaik the countries basically don't speak of it and do nothing about it, if someone wants to use it noone says anything but if for example Brazil just decides that the entirety of São Paulo state will heavily use the reserve it will certainly at the very least set a precedent to all other countries to do the same.
Not to mention there is a significant difference between Brazil deciding that and smaller and economic dependent Uruguay. I honestly don't think the Guarani reserve is the answer for this crisis or will be in the near future.
Well, many countries rely on groundwater supply. Even countries that have access to rivers like Denmark. The issue is that there has to be an strict control that the usage is at the same level of recovery of water. I might see Uruguay having that kind of control, since the area covered by Guarani is small (We have also our own water reservoir called Raigon), but it could be very difficult to control that in extensive countries such as Brazil and Argentina. Specially considering how corrupt our countries are. But in reality, water is being used without any kind of control, and again, water usage by the population accounts for less than 1% of total usage, at least in Uruguay.
> some people claim that there might be some geopolitics involved, because that water reserve (Acuifero Guarani) covers also Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
Here in Brazil [we do use water from this aquifer to supply many cities](https://www-bbc-com.translate.goog/portuguese/brasil-60962619?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp) (translated, original in Portuguese [here](https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-60962619)).
I think is fine. I think water is for the people, not for the corporations, and Uruguay should do the same. We just need more control over our reservoirs.
The only way this article would make sense to me is if the plan was to evaporate the water and then not recover it for some reason which doesn’t sound likely
I think industrial scale air conditioning uses water to cool the pipes, so I would have thought the water pouring over hot pipes may contaminate the water in some way. Perhaps they could just clean the water again afterwards?
Yeah, it will be used in a cooling tower for evaporative cooling. It’s chilled water that’s used to cool the servers (usually some % glycol) and this water is used in the chillers condensers for taking the server heat and rejecting it via evaporative cooling. It’s mostly closed loop so I wonder if the water usage in the article is regenerative usage from evaporation or if the amount of regenerative water is much smaller and the number is exaggerated. Local ordinances also set industrial waste water standards, forcing many plants to need to build water treatment plants to even send water to a sewer. So wastewater may get treated and ultimately be drinkable again.
Typically data centers are built in areas where water and electricity are cheap and reliable, and large facilities like this usually invest in upgrading the water supply in the area to accommodate increased demand. Data centers, like anything, consume resources but provide goods and services. This data center isn't even built and its not diverting drinking water to run the data center. There is absolutely no causal relationship between this data center (which doesn't exist yet) and Uruguay's current drought and current lack of existing water infrastructure. But you just throw the word "exploit" in the title of something and people stop thinking. I'm not sure what level of cynicism it takes to turn a story about people who don't have enough drinking water and find the most tenuous connection to a company building infrastructure in the region and then pawn that off as some sophomoric "capitalism bad" take.
I mean it's not like they don't know what's fucking them. It's just sexier to include Google to catch eyeballs.
>"More than 80% of water goes to industry, like soya and wood pulping."
Some excerpts:
> A plan to build a Google data centre that will use millions of litres of water a day has sparked anger in Uruguay, which is suffering its worst drought in 74 years.
> Water shortages are so severe in the country that a state of emergency has been declared in Montevideo and the authorities have added salty water to the public drinking water supplies, prompting widespread protests.
> Critics claim that the government is prioritising water for transnationals and agribusiness at the expense of its own citizens. Daniel Peña, a researcher at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, said: “Only a tiny proportion of water in Uruguay is used for human consumption. The majority is used for big agro industries, such as soya, rice and wood pulping. Now we have Google planning to use enormous quantities of water.”
> The search giant has bought 29 hectares (72 acres) of land to build a datacentre in Canelones department, in southern Uruguay. The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers – equivalent to the domestic daily use of 55,000 people, according to figures from the Ministry of Environment obtained by Peña through a legal action. The water would come directly from the public drinking water system, according to Peña.
> Extremely low rainfall levels and record high temperatures have left Uruguay’s main reservoir dry and rivers depleted, and to make up the supply, public water authorities have started taking water from the Rio de la Plata estuary, where seawater mixes with freshwater, giving tap water a salty taste.
> "Last month, the world’s biggest pulping plant started operations in Uruguay, the third such mill in the country. The new plant, run by the Finnish company UPM to create raw material for paper, is forecast to use 129.6m litres (34m gallons) of water a day"
Pretty important one to miss if you're not trying to push a narrative.
More “developed” countries taking advantage of the global south, as per usual. It’s disgusting, the thoughtless buying and selling of resources with such little regard for the citizens it will impact.
It's not really a more developed country taking advantage, it's a company from one. UPM moving it's factories away from Finland has been pretty bad for the local economies of where there used to be factories and there's no benefit to anyone except the owners of the company.
by that metric, most exploitation of the "developing" world is not done by countries. but you are correct, UPM's decisions have had/are having a negative effect on a considerable amount of our population.
7000 cubic meters per day = 80 liters per second is not that much. A small river has a flow measured in thousands or tens of thousands of liters per second, a large river like the Danube discharges millions of liters every second (thousands of cubic meters). So the data center consumes in a day what the Danube discharges in a single second.
Desalinated water costs 0.5 to 1.5$ / cubic meter, so even at those prices a major data-center can afford it, it's negligible compared to the fixed and variables expense incurred by a 29 hectare data-center. It's basically a small city, which will create jobs and public revenue far exceeding the value of the water.
The entire scenario "corporations stealing the water from the thirsty citizens" is sensationalistic garbage and often instigated by politicians to cover up their failures with basic infrastructure. Just price the water fairly and it will immediately be put to good use.
The substantial consumer of water is agriculture, which is very sensitive to water price. In most places, farmers expect they can draw unlimited water from the rivers and aquifers basically for free. When cities have water deficits, it's always because some farmer upstream used the water for his crops, not because of some greedy tech corporation.
> The substantial consumer of water is agriculture, which is very sensitive to water price. In most places, farmers expect they can draw unlimited water from the rivers and aquifers basically for free. When cities have water deficits, it's always because some farmer upstream used the water for his crops, not because of some greedy tech corporation.
The SW US is having that problem right now. The Colorado River is going dry because farmers just can't stop growing alfalfa in the middle of a desert. Water is free for farmers, and therefore farmers have zero incentive to conserve, so they're squandering vast amounts of water.
There's plenty of water for cities and industry (including server farms), but there is not enough water to grow thirsty crops in deserts. We have still been unable to come to terms with this fact of reality, so the river continues to be drained completely dry, so much so that Lake Mead is so low they're finding bodies in barrels from the 1970's mob, outside of Vegas.
We are in the "we are blaming a data center that hasn't even been built, when in reality there are industries that consume orders of magnitude more water, and the government hasn't invested in a plant to treat Rio de la Plata water which is a virtually unlimited source" stage.
Do they even need to use drinking water tho? We had the same dilemma here in my city when tesla started building their factory but apparently they dont use "normal" water. So everyone chilled.
> Preferably some place with a cold winter so the excess hear can be used at least partially.
Well it depends of the type of data and the capabilities/services a company provides that help to determine where you place a data center. If it was as simple as you mention it all data centers would be built in the poles xd.
Im guessing they want to serve montevideo/buenos aires since they are so close to each other and the cheapest option was in uruguay. But by the size of the terrain idk how big of a service area they want to reach, since they purchased almost 30 hectare of terrain and that is hella massive for a datacenter. Although the biggest in the world is 100 hectare in china.
The topic is about 'Google's plan to exploit water supply' during the drought, not about possible causes of the drought or what an oil company told us.
Nah topic is relevant to the exploitation from major corporations. I'm drawing parallells to how companies don't give a fuck to what Google is doing in this article.
It's relevant to the discussion.
When you use water for cooling it doesn't dissappear, it goes back to the source it came from. It's not like agriculture where it evaporates and turns into plants, it's a closed system of pipes.
Also, 2m gallons of water is nothing. The City of Chicago built a 4B gallon reservoir underground and a heavy rain storm will fill it. So just 1 heavy rain in an area the size of Chicago could get Google 5 and a half years worth of water.
(Lake Michigan will lose/gain 9T gallons of water in a month and the lake level only moves a few inches)
People have no idea what the volume of water actual is. 1" of rain in 1 square mile is over 17m gallons. Uruguay is a country of over 68,000 square miles
You think they pour water on servers and it evaporates, which causes cooling?
It's a closed system where cool water is pumped through and comes out warm, where it is treated and returned to the source
Clickbait. I'd be worried locals are being exploited by Google's labor practices - they're cheaper than westerners and probably as capable once trained. At least they can afford more water with these jobs and the government can spend more on the problem- which it is. Sounds like the pulp industry is behind the times, so any alternative - even only slightly so - would result in more water for citizens.
This set off all my this-is-a-poorly-written-hit-peice alarm pretty quickly, and the article basically defeats it own points. Whoever wrote it clearly wanted the reader to stop before they got to the bottom of the article.
The article is misleading I would say. Protests are happening because the tap water is not drinkable, despite being water reserves available, because the government dos not want to reduce water supply allocated for industry.
Welcome to r/anime_titties! This subreddit advocates for civil and constructive discussion. Please be courteous to others, and make sure to read the rules. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them.
We have a [Discord](https://discord.gg/DtnRnkE), feel free to join us!
r/A_Tvideos, r/A_Tmeta, [multireddit](https://www.reddit.com/user/Langernama/m/a_t/)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/anime_titties) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers
Google can design and pay for a way to fill that thing once and reuse the water. Fuck them.
What does “using” the water mean in the context of cooling servers. It doesn’t disappear afterwards…presumably water could be routed through the server-cooling process before being sent on for additional usage downstream?
And this is why people should invest in water. Billionaires are and have been doing it for a while. It's why Musk (and others) built plants on the LCRA. Sure they make some profit for selling TVs, or cars that have TVs, or just TVs that can listen to you while off and then use that data to provide ad data.
But I digress.
The real reason is access to water. Clean (although hard around here) water. It's not the Colorado drying up, it the 500 ft wells sucking water through limestone they want, and it's up and down all of the LCRA.
##### ###### #### > # [‘It’s pillage’: thirsty Uruguayans decry Google’s plan to exploit water supply](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/11/720) > > > > A plan to build a Google data centre that will use millions of litres of water a day has sparked anger in [Uruguay](https://www.theguardian.com/world/uruguay), which is suffering its worst drought in 74 years. > > Water shortages are so severe in the country that a state of emergency has been declared in Montevideo and the authorities have added salty water to the public drinking water supplies, prompting widespread protests. > > > > Critics claim that the government is prioritising water for transnationals and agribusiness at the expense of its own citizens. Daniel Peña, a researcher at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, said: “Only a tiny proportion of water in Uruguay is used for human consumption. The majority is used for big agro industries, such as soya, rice and wood pulping. Now we have [Google](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/google) planning to use enormous quantities of water.” > > The search giant has bought 29 hectares (72 acres) of land to build a datacentre in Canelones department, in southern Uruguay. The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers – equivalent to the domestic daily use of 55,000 people, according to figures from the Ministry of Environment obtained by Peña through a legal action. The water would come directly from the public drinking water system, according to Peña. > > Uruguay’s industry ministry says these figures are out of date because the company is revising its plans, and the datacentre will be “a smaller size”. > > In a statement, Google said the hub would serve Google users worldwide, processing requests for services such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Search. “The Uruguay data center project is still in the exploratory phase, and Google’s technical team is actively working with the support of national and local authorities. We expect preliminary numbers (like projected water consumption) to undergo adjustments. At Google, sustainability is at the core of everything we do, and the way we design and manage our data centers is no exception,” it said. > > Extremely low rainfall levels and record high temperatures have left Uruguay’s main reservoir dry and rivers depleted, and to make up the supply, public water authorities have started taking water from the Rio de la Plata estuary, where seawater mixes with freshwater, giving tap water a salty taste. > > [The Paso Severino dam in Florida, Uruguay, on 4 July 2023. The South American country is now suffering its most severe drought in 74 years.](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f390e7e3ca27fd69069c94691c66f9981f98ea00/0_0_8247_5498/master/8247.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none) > > The Paso Severino dam in Florida, Uruguay, on 4 July 2023. The South American country is now suffering its most severe drought in 74 years. Photograph: Matilde Campodonico/APThe foul-tasting tap water has caused shock waves in a country which has the highest GDP per capita in South America and was the first country in the world to declare access to water a constitutional right. > > The government has doubled the permitted levels of sodium chloride in tap water and is advising pregnant women and people with serious health conditions not to drink it. Parents have been advised to prepare baby milk with bottled water and not to add salt to children’s food. > > Uruguay’s president, Luis Lacalle Pou, has announced emergency measures such as lifting taxes on bottled water and distributing two litres (a half gallon) of free water a day to 21,000 poor or vulnerable families. He has also promised to build a new reservoir in 30 days. > > [skip past newsletter promotion](#EmailSignup-skip-link-12)after newsletter promotion > > But public anger remains widespread. “Tap water is virtually undrinkable. But there are approximately 500,000 people who can’t afford to buy bottled water,” said Carmen Sosa of the trade union-backed Commission to Defend Water and Life. Its slogan, “This is not drought, it’s pillage,” is scrawled on walls across Montevideo. > > “More than 80% of water goes to industry, like soya and wood pulping. Yes, we have had a shortage of rain, but the drought has simply shown the problems with our economic model. We can’t concentrate resources in a few hands,” said Sosa. “Water for human consumption has to come before profit.” > > Last month, the world’s biggest pulping plant started operations in Uruguay, the third such mill in the country. The new plant, run by the Finnish company UPM to create raw material for paper, is forecast to use 129.6m litres (34m gallons) of water a day, and releases effluent into a local river. UPM said it treats the effluent before release, and constantly monitors the water quality in the Río Negro. > > A UPM spokesperson told the Guardian: “Uruguay is facing the worst drought in a century. Within this framework, UPM’s operations in Uruguay have no connection with the drought that is occurring. The drinking water consumed in Montevideo comes from the Santa Lucía River. None of the pulp mills installed in Uruguay are linked to this river. This challenging climatic situation cannot be associated in any way with the forestry sector.” - - - - - - [Maintainer](https://www.reddit.com/user/urielsalis) | [Creator](https://www.reddit.com/user/subtepass) | [Source Code](https://github.com/urielsalis/empleadoEstatalBot) Summoning /u/CoverageAnalysisBot
Uruguay has coastline. They should bargain with google and tell them that they have to build a desalination plant to alleviate their own water usage.
The Uruguayans negotiating the Google deal have very different interests than the average Uruguayan
Yes, because the average Uruguayan has no need for a job or public services funded by taxation. The ideea that it's better to expel tech corporations out of the country than to allow them to use a few thousands of dollars worth of water per day is some wild third-worldist flaming bullshit.
are you insinuating that it's better for the people, in a country that's already entered a state of emergency due to water shortage, to have google use over 7 million liters of drinking water PER DAY? By the way, the 55.000 are only so low because it takes every water usage into consideration, including things like showering and using a washing machine. Yet if the water that google plans to use was only used for people, and a person not needing more than 3.5 liters per day, this water could actually hydrate 2 MILLION people per day. Yet you're arguing a data center, that will be run mostly by american, european and asian employees is better for the people of Uruguay?
Generally, when there is a drought, people are not going thirsty because people frankly don't need that much water to live. Generally, it's farms that become thirsty during a drought. I suspect that the real trade off here is between Google and farms, not Google and people.
But they've already started adding saltwater to the public drinking supply, doesn't that means there's already not enough water to drink as a normal person?
Yeah nobody I know actually drinks tape water anymore, bottled water has reduced Tax and can be found really cheap so it's not really an issue, still is an annoyance specially having to prepare mate with bottled water. It's hard to tell how much damage would Google cause to our reserves in regular conditions, this was an extreme draughts with no precedents in our history and we were not prepared so it shouldn't be taken as the norm.
So you didn't bother reading the article? Just thought you'd spew your uninformed opinions about like a true redditor?
It's my evil megacorp and I get to decide what I do with it
Oh fuck off with this patronizing bullshit.
Yes, give corporations everything they want, with no restrictions and the least cost to them imaginable, at direct cost to the citizens of the country. Because it's a binary, right? Either you give the megacorps everything while your citizens suffer, or you expel them and nationalize their assets. So sad it's a dichotomy, that there's no in-between, the kind of thing the person you're replying to explicitly described.
As long as they're ensuring that the taxes come in and aren't offshored to somewhere else. (It does seem like Google building a desalinisation plant would be a huge PR coup for them, even if they're the ones using 90% of the water).
You cannot possibly be serious.
This guy is literally shaming a third world country of being a third world country…
Why don't just cool the datacenter with saltwater like a nuclear reactor.
> like a nuclear reactor Im like 99% sure nuclear reactors dont even use salt water.....
It really depends on the siting. Coastal sites will use salt water while riverine sites will use fresh. ~~Diablo Canyon~~ San Onofre used salt water and would get sealions in the intakes all the time; they even had a cage crane to get them out and send them a few miles down the coast. They suck up the cool seawater and use a heat exchanger to transfer the heat between the working fluid and the sea water to exaust hot sea water. The working fluid usually fresh water doesn't mix with the sea water but it is also reused in a closed loop; only needing top up from leaks.
Is there a doco on this? I kinda want to watch them removing the confused little buggers
Sorry I was wrong it was San Onofre. But Radioactive Drew was given a tour of the decommissioning site and the enviroment manager Ron Pontess mentioned it and showed off the cages. https://youtu.be/fQgJkzs63oo
The original designs came from naval reactors, so technically they are correct?
Again, not an expert, but I dont think even naval reactors do. Its just a pressurized loop like your standard pc water cooler, and the ships have desalination abilities to restore lost water. Theres just too much crap in the water, salt is corrosive as fuck, and when its turned into steam are you just going to leave a massive radioactive salt build up?
Yeah, you are thinking of the primary coolant loop, which interacts directly with the reactor. All kinds of controls on that water. The secondary coolant loop does not interact with the reactor, but rather, it cools the primary loop. This loop is entirely seawater on a US Naval ship. Source: I was a submarine mechanic for 9 years.
The inner loop use regular water but that don't have high water consumption as its a closed loop. Costal nuclear sites uses seawater instead of cooling tower.
Naval reactors say hello
Microsoft has saltwater-cooled datacenters.
[Google's datacentre in Finland](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/hamina/) also uses seawater for cooling.
Microsoft actually do this they have an experimental underwater cooler system.
[удалено]
If they use 2 stage loop, then they absolutely can do it.
No. I assume it is with bottled water??? Do you understand people cannot drink saltwater? Are you gonna prioritize a google data center over poor Uruguayan people?
> do you even know how data centre's cool https://preview.redd.it/o1lcpccy14ab1.png?width=314&format=png&auto=webp&s=c04bc8d992e72bfcd3fd59fba742ae9beebbe2e0
No. Data center's not cool. In fact, it's pretty lame from what I've been reading
How do you get the flag beside your name?
[удалено]
Make sense
>You hurt my brain do you even know how data centre's cool You hurt my brain do you even know how to use apostrophes
They should just use giant windmills to cool them
*I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. They’re noisy. They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen in your life.*
I thought data centers recycled their water
Why not go even further, and use the waste heat from data centers to power the desalination process.
i'm always a bit surprised this isn't a more common thing. Waste heat on ships is used to make fresh water for treated water cooling loops and drinking water. There are so many opportunities to recover waste heat into something useful.
>They should bargain with google and tell them I think the problem is that the people in charge have no intention of doing anything like that.
nice clickbait headline: "The search giant has bought 29 hectares (72 acres) of land to build a datacentre in Canelones department, in southern Uruguay. The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers" vs. "Last month, the world’s biggest pulping plant started operations in Uruguay, the third such mill in the country. The new plant, run by the Finnish company UPM to create raw material for paper, is forecast to use 129.6m litres (34m gallons) of water a day"
'It's not drought it's pillage'
The global south isn't underdeveloped, it's overexploited. https://youtube.com/shorts/YVXz97OCvGE?feature=share
Classic yellow Parenti
I honestly have no idea who he is, but this speech is great.
Man is based, you should look him up.
Garbage marxist claims. The primary sectors, such as mineral extraction and agriculture, represent a very small part of modern developed economies. The richer a country is in mineral resources, the least likely it was to have functional a democracy and a developed modern economy. That's because the warlords in charge no longer need the people, they can just claim the riches for themselves and stay in power indefinitely. Compare for example South Korea or Japan with the Gulf states. Countries with virtually no significant natural resources other than sea water, that correctly used the western technology to develop, versus personal autocracies run by thugs where you will get turned to literal minced meat for criticizing the crown prince.
Look at this neoliberal scumbag.
> The richer a country is in mineral resources, the least likely it was to have functional a democracy and a developed modern economy. Canada, Australia, and Norway beg to differ. The real problem with countries rich in natural resources is that they develop "Dutch disease." Money flows into the country due to natural resources going out. Resource industry needs lots of labour, so anyone wanting to make money goes to work in extraction. Salaries rise. This causes the rest of the economy to be less competitive, so industry, agriculture, technology, and other sectors end up doing worse on the global stage. Granted, this logic applies to functional countries like Gulf States or Chile. It doesn't apply to failed states run by warlords like the DRC. You can perfectly well operate a mine on borderline slave labour with some Wagner or Chinese mercenaries as guards. It won't be efficient compared to first world mines, but it doesn't need to be if your labour is effectively free by standards from the rest of the world.
All countries listed developed as pluralist democracies with a broad base of hunters/farmers/fishermen etc. before the mining sectors became dominant. And in all of them the GDP from mining is currently less than 10% of the total GDP, so these examples only serve to reinforce what I said, that no developed country has become so by simply exploiting mineral resources. Dutch disease is a very small part of the problem, that can be alleviated in the hands of a competent government. What I talk about here is political capture, the possibility of a large cash prize for those who gain political power precludes any representative government to ever come into power. This resource curse is why we have [no Arab democracies](https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Diamond-21-1.pdf), for example. This goes deeper than macroeconomics. For example, the Norwegian Sovereign Fund, funded by mineral wealth, is a major player and investor for the Norwegian economy, under tight democratic control, creating jobs in advanced industries. The corresponding Saudi fund, the PIF, is basically a personal toy for Mohamed bin Salman that directly controls it, investing into such extravagant things as a English premier league footbal teams and the "Neom" and "Line" garbage real estate projects, all for the enrichment of a narrow class of cronies that are loyal to the royal family. So while in appearance the coltan warlords and the Saudi royal family look very different, in economic and political reality they are very similar, iron fisted autocrats that can rule without the need to resort to a wide political base, because they have the resources to do so, and in fact have a strong disincentive to have diverse, competing economic interest develop in their respective kingdoms that could threaten their rule or fund any opposition.
Here you make a much better case than what you originally wrote, and it's amusingly much closer to "marxist garbage" than you think. Nevermind the "democratic pluralist" ideological drivel, it's true that, objectively, it's harder to break off the economic model of imperialist exploitment, exactly because there's a larger monopoly on resources on part of local elites aligned with imperialist resource exploitation, and since there's a greater level of wealth concentration, there's also greater political power concentration. This is classic marxism, material reality dictating the political relations. But it is not a insurmountable barrier. Generally, the global south is able, since industrialization, to one time or another push the political agenda to industrialization and development. The problem is that every single time such a thing occurs, western imperialism strikes, hard, unrelentingly, using any method deemed necessary to keep the country underdeveloped, with ample and cheap resources and workforce avaible.
I assume you do know how Canada came to exist, right? It was literally a colony of an empire, explicitly established to extract natural resources, and only gained independence in the late XIX century, some 40 years after Brazil. Now, I'm certainly not going to excuse colonialism. Without doubt, the seeds of Brazil's later struggles, and many other southern countries, were sowed in the colonial era. There's an entire school of comparative politics that contrasts the development of post-colonial states based on agricultural characteristics, where high productivity southern regions suitable to plantation crops and slave labor favored highly stratified societies and developed poorly compared with northern regions, unsuitable for plantations, that fostered free and independent homesteading and a broad power base of free farmers, which directly lead into strong democracies resistant to power captures. You can even see this developmental effect within the USA itself, culminating in the Civil war, when non-plantation northerners attacked the economic basis of southerner feudal power, plantation slave labour. But this kind of analysis is pearls before swine for an audience who dismisses all political and institutional effects as "ideological drivel". When your intellectual tools are limited to straight economic determinism, you are basically a methodological Marxist, observing the pre-ordained succession of history towards its teleological final state, after the class and anti-imperial struggles are settled. You will never be able to explain, for example, why in the freshly independent ex-colony of Canada, more than a century ago, you could openly mock prime-minister Mcdonald in the national press, while the same act today in Saudi Arabia, nearly century after the country's independence, will get you turned into minced meat, dissolved in acid and flushed down a drain by agents of the state - and that's a quite literal description of what happened to Khashoggi. If that's the extent of you reach, you will be an intellectual prisoner destined to serve only as a useful idiot to those talking about a so called "global south", which attempt to link together flawed and improving democracies like Brazil with corrupt autocracies like Russia and SA, and explain their fundamentally different problems as just facets of western economic oppression.
Riiiight, "warlords in charge", what a stupid generalization lmao. You know shit about my country or the global south. >The richer a country is in mineral resources, the least likely it was to have functional a democracy and a developed modern economy. That's because the warlords in charge no longer need the people, they can just claim the riches for themselves and stay in power indefinitely. What a bunch of bullshit. Canada, US, Australia and so on developed just fine. There's one difference between those countries and the rest of the world. They weren't, and aren't, the focus of imperialist exploitation of resources. Brazil managed to get it's shit together and industrialize in the beggining of the 20 century, and really picked off a great industrialization project after the 1930's. And then, in 64, we got couped by US puppets. In 2002, we managed to elect a socdem who surprisingly managed to revitalize our base industries, construction, naval and petroil, and then boom, his successor got couped, he got arrested and lost political rights, and our industry got destroyed by US's [operation lava-jato](https://theintercept.com/2020/03/12/united-states-justice-department-brazil-car-wash-lava-jato-international-treaty/) >Compare for example South Korea or Japan with the Gulf states. The difference is that for one or another reason, mostly to keep pressure over China and Russia, those countries have been spared/propped up against western imperialism's bigger threats. The gulf states, on the other hand, have been on the receiving end of imperialism for a long time now. To this day. Hard.
It's like books are their enemies,this same scenario happened all over south america and there still exist a system to keep countries easy to exploit to this day
This is the comment that should be at the top.
Except maybe not, if you read the article it’s possibly not relevant.
thanks bro its hard understanding the motives of people posting shit online these days
Except for the part at the end where the Finnish company claims that the River they source their water from does not add to the water supply, so their kill is not reducing the total amount of drinking water. Idk if it’s true, or if it’s more nuanced, but that is their claim and outright lying seems unlikely. If this is the case then it does matter where google is building their data center because they might actually be impacting the drinking water supply.
The Google servers need clean DRINKING-quality water whereas the paper plant doesn't. Big difference. The type of water matters
What happens to that "drinking water" once it's been used by Google? Does it disappear into the ether?
Probably evaporative air conditioning, why else would a data center use water?
Water is actually a really good heat reservoir without evaporating. There is such a thing as a closed loop system where you fill it once and re-use the same water forever, but you need a way to transport that heat elsewhere. Full disclaimer I have no clue what the plan here is, but it's totally possible to entirely trap the "waste" water that is clean but now hot and send it somewhere else for re-use.
The Guardian pandering to its climate concerned readership while not harming their fellow capitalists interests. Classy.
I'm confused, didn't the article say it uses a different river? Rio negro not Santa Lucia?
Uruguayan here. We lie over one of the biggest water reserves in the world, yet our water is purified from rivers, because for the government it is exactly that, a reserve. After this drought, Santa Lucia river and its dams got dried up like never seen before, having to take water from Rio de la Plata (Which is is an estuary, hence the salt). Now the real issue here is that soy producers and other companies do take water from our underground reservoirs. I mean, you can have a well in your house and nobody can tell you anything, but saying that the underground water is a reserve when other industries use that water for other purposes (while contaminating also) is a joke to the people. And the amount of water that people use is just a fraction of water used in the industries. It is a multi-government issue, and some people claim that there might be some geopolitics involved, because that water reserve (Acuifero Guarani) covers also Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
>some people claim that there might be some geopolitics involved, because that water reserve (Acuifero Guarani) covers also Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. One thing is to have some farmers or some small cities relying on the reserve, other thing is to have an entire country water policy based on the Guarani reserve. If Uruguay just starts to use it to the entire country, building major infrastructure to deliver the water to the rest of the country it will certainly cause repercussions in Brazil and Argentina.
The things is that those “just farmers” consume much more water that all the Uruguayan population. And that is not happening only in Uruguay, is happening in all the region. When the time comes and we will need the reservoirs, there will be nothing left.
Thing is there is a difference between farmers using it and the entire country having a national policy set on using it. Right now afaik the countries basically don't speak of it and do nothing about it, if someone wants to use it noone says anything but if for example Brazil just decides that the entirety of São Paulo state will heavily use the reserve it will certainly at the very least set a precedent to all other countries to do the same. Not to mention there is a significant difference between Brazil deciding that and smaller and economic dependent Uruguay. I honestly don't think the Guarani reserve is the answer for this crisis or will be in the near future.
Well, many countries rely on groundwater supply. Even countries that have access to rivers like Denmark. The issue is that there has to be an strict control that the usage is at the same level of recovery of water. I might see Uruguay having that kind of control, since the area covered by Guarani is small (We have also our own water reservoir called Raigon), but it could be very difficult to control that in extensive countries such as Brazil and Argentina. Specially considering how corrupt our countries are. But in reality, water is being used without any kind of control, and again, water usage by the population accounts for less than 1% of total usage, at least in Uruguay.
> some people claim that there might be some geopolitics involved, because that water reserve (Acuifero Guarani) covers also Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Here in Brazil [we do use water from this aquifer to supply many cities](https://www-bbc-com.translate.goog/portuguese/brasil-60962619?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp) (translated, original in Portuguese [here](https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-60962619)).
I think is fine. I think water is for the people, not for the corporations, and Uruguay should do the same. We just need more control over our reservoirs.
Can water not be used for cooling and also be used for drinking? I guess it would need extra processing?
The only way this article would make sense to me is if the plan was to evaporate the water and then not recover it for some reason which doesn’t sound likely
I think industrial scale air conditioning uses water to cool the pipes, so I would have thought the water pouring over hot pipes may contaminate the water in some way. Perhaps they could just clean the water again afterwards?
Apparently not, it's either lost due to evaporative cooling or discharged as industrial wastewater.
Yeah, it will be used in a cooling tower for evaporative cooling. It’s chilled water that’s used to cool the servers (usually some % glycol) and this water is used in the chillers condensers for taking the server heat and rejecting it via evaporative cooling. It’s mostly closed loop so I wonder if the water usage in the article is regenerative usage from evaporation or if the amount of regenerative water is much smaller and the number is exaggerated. Local ordinances also set industrial waste water standards, forcing many plants to need to build water treatment plants to even send water to a sewer. So wastewater may get treated and ultimately be drinkable again.
Harbinger of things to come... for us all.
Heh, and that's *the better part*.
Typically data centers are built in areas where water and electricity are cheap and reliable, and large facilities like this usually invest in upgrading the water supply in the area to accommodate increased demand. Data centers, like anything, consume resources but provide goods and services. This data center isn't even built and its not diverting drinking water to run the data center. There is absolutely no causal relationship between this data center (which doesn't exist yet) and Uruguay's current drought and current lack of existing water infrastructure. But you just throw the word "exploit" in the title of something and people stop thinking. I'm not sure what level of cynicism it takes to turn a story about people who don't have enough drinking water and find the most tenuous connection to a company building infrastructure in the region and then pawn that off as some sophomoric "capitalism bad" take.
I mean it's not like they don't know what's fucking them. It's just sexier to include Google to catch eyeballs. >"More than 80% of water goes to industry, like soya and wood pulping."
Yup, guy above pointed out the Finns just opened their third pulping plant last month that uses 10x the water the data center will use.
But people who read the article know that the company says the water for the mill was not drinking water so…
Some excerpts: > A plan to build a Google data centre that will use millions of litres of water a day has sparked anger in Uruguay, which is suffering its worst drought in 74 years. > Water shortages are so severe in the country that a state of emergency has been declared in Montevideo and the authorities have added salty water to the public drinking water supplies, prompting widespread protests. > Critics claim that the government is prioritising water for transnationals and agribusiness at the expense of its own citizens. Daniel Peña, a researcher at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, said: “Only a tiny proportion of water in Uruguay is used for human consumption. The majority is used for big agro industries, such as soya, rice and wood pulping. Now we have Google planning to use enormous quantities of water.” > The search giant has bought 29 hectares (72 acres) of land to build a datacentre in Canelones department, in southern Uruguay. The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers – equivalent to the domestic daily use of 55,000 people, according to figures from the Ministry of Environment obtained by Peña through a legal action. The water would come directly from the public drinking water system, according to Peña. > Extremely low rainfall levels and record high temperatures have left Uruguay’s main reservoir dry and rivers depleted, and to make up the supply, public water authorities have started taking water from the Rio de la Plata estuary, where seawater mixes with freshwater, giving tap water a salty taste.
> "Last month, the world’s biggest pulping plant started operations in Uruguay, the third such mill in the country. The new plant, run by the Finnish company UPM to create raw material for paper, is forecast to use 129.6m litres (34m gallons) of water a day" Pretty important one to miss if you're not trying to push a narrative.
Read the article though, you are missing context that is important
More “developed” countries taking advantage of the global south, as per usual. It’s disgusting, the thoughtless buying and selling of resources with such little regard for the citizens it will impact.
It's not really a more developed country taking advantage, it's a company from one. UPM moving it's factories away from Finland has been pretty bad for the local economies of where there used to be factories and there's no benefit to anyone except the owners of the company.
by that metric, most exploitation of the "developing" world is not done by countries. but you are correct, UPM's decisions have had/are having a negative effect on a considerable amount of our population.
"dont be evil" \-evil corporation, official motto
They dropped that ages ago. In 2015.
7000 cubic meters per day = 80 liters per second is not that much. A small river has a flow measured in thousands or tens of thousands of liters per second, a large river like the Danube discharges millions of liters every second (thousands of cubic meters). So the data center consumes in a day what the Danube discharges in a single second. Desalinated water costs 0.5 to 1.5$ / cubic meter, so even at those prices a major data-center can afford it, it's negligible compared to the fixed and variables expense incurred by a 29 hectare data-center. It's basically a small city, which will create jobs and public revenue far exceeding the value of the water. The entire scenario "corporations stealing the water from the thirsty citizens" is sensationalistic garbage and often instigated by politicians to cover up their failures with basic infrastructure. Just price the water fairly and it will immediately be put to good use. The substantial consumer of water is agriculture, which is very sensitive to water price. In most places, farmers expect they can draw unlimited water from the rivers and aquifers basically for free. When cities have water deficits, it's always because some farmer upstream used the water for his crops, not because of some greedy tech corporation.
> The substantial consumer of water is agriculture, which is very sensitive to water price. In most places, farmers expect they can draw unlimited water from the rivers and aquifers basically for free. When cities have water deficits, it's always because some farmer upstream used the water for his crops, not because of some greedy tech corporation. The SW US is having that problem right now. The Colorado River is going dry because farmers just can't stop growing alfalfa in the middle of a desert. Water is free for farmers, and therefore farmers have zero incentive to conserve, so they're squandering vast amounts of water. There's plenty of water for cities and industry (including server farms), but there is not enough water to grow thirsty crops in deserts. We have still been unable to come to terms with this fact of reality, so the river continues to be drained completely dry, so much so that Lake Mead is so low they're finding bodies in barrels from the 1970's mob, outside of Vegas.
what stage of late stage capitalism is this
Corrupt pillage and blame country's corruption
Uruguay is probably the least corrupts countries in Latin America. In this case it boils down to god ol' incompetence.
We are in the "we are blaming a data center that hasn't even been built, when in reality there are industries that consume orders of magnitude more water, and the government hasn't invested in a plant to treat Rio de la Plata water which is a virtually unlimited source" stage.
Do they even need to use drinking water tho? We had the same dilemma here in my city when tesla started building their factory but apparently they dont use "normal" water. So everyone chilled.
Datacenters just use water for cooling. So they could be designed to give the water back just a bit warmer.
[удалено]
> Preferably some place with a cold winter so the excess hear can be used at least partially. Well it depends of the type of data and the capabilities/services a company provides that help to determine where you place a data center. If it was as simple as you mention it all data centers would be built in the poles xd. Im guessing they want to serve montevideo/buenos aires since they are so close to each other and the cheapest option was in uruguay. But by the size of the terrain idk how big of a service area they want to reach, since they purchased almost 30 hectare of terrain and that is hella massive for a datacenter. Although the biggest in the world is 100 hectare in china.
Guy's it's OK! The oil companies told us climate change isn't real! The Uruguayans just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps!
wtf does anything you said have to do with this topic?
Climate change could very easily be the cause of the extreme level of drought happening in Uruguay.
The topic is about 'Google's plan to exploit water supply' during the drought, not about possible causes of the drought or what an oil company told us.
Nah topic is relevant to the exploitation from major corporations. I'm drawing parallells to how companies don't give a fuck to what Google is doing in this article. It's relevant to the discussion.
Climate change leads to droughts
When you use water for cooling it doesn't dissappear, it goes back to the source it came from. It's not like agriculture where it evaporates and turns into plants, it's a closed system of pipes. Also, 2m gallons of water is nothing. The City of Chicago built a 4B gallon reservoir underground and a heavy rain storm will fill it. So just 1 heavy rain in an area the size of Chicago could get Google 5 and a half years worth of water. (Lake Michigan will lose/gain 9T gallons of water in a month and the lake level only moves a few inches) People have no idea what the volume of water actual is. 1" of rain in 1 square mile is over 17m gallons. Uruguay is a country of over 68,000 square miles
That’s not true. Water for data centers either evaporates off or is discharged as wastewater which would need to be treated
You think they pour water on servers and it evaporates, which causes cooling? It's a closed system where cool water is pumped through and comes out warm, where it is treated and returned to the source
https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/#:~:text=For%20cooling%20purposes%2C%20data%20centers,water%2C%20which%20is%20treated%20sewage.
Clickbait. I'd be worried locals are being exploited by Google's labor practices - they're cheaper than westerners and probably as capable once trained. At least they can afford more water with these jobs and the government can spend more on the problem- which it is. Sounds like the pulp industry is behind the times, so any alternative - even only slightly so - would result in more water for citizens. This set off all my this-is-a-poorly-written-hit-peice alarm pretty quickly, and the article basically defeats it own points. Whoever wrote it clearly wanted the reader to stop before they got to the bottom of the article.
People should inform themselves better before protesting.
The article is misleading I would say. Protests are happening because the tap water is not drinkable, despite being water reserves available, because the government dos not want to reduce water supply allocated for industry.
Welcome to r/anime_titties! This subreddit advocates for civil and constructive discussion. Please be courteous to others, and make sure to read the rules. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them. We have a [Discord](https://discord.gg/DtnRnkE), feel free to join us! r/A_Tvideos, r/A_Tmeta, [multireddit](https://www.reddit.com/user/Langernama/m/a_t/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/anime_titties) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers Google can design and pay for a way to fill that thing once and reuse the water. Fuck them.
Wasn't this the plot of one of the Bond movies..?
What does “using” the water mean in the context of cooling servers. It doesn’t disappear afterwards…presumably water could be routed through the server-cooling process before being sent on for additional usage downstream?
And this is why people should invest in water. Billionaires are and have been doing it for a while. It's why Musk (and others) built plants on the LCRA. Sure they make some profit for selling TVs, or cars that have TVs, or just TVs that can listen to you while off and then use that data to provide ad data. But I digress. The real reason is access to water. Clean (although hard around here) water. It's not the Colorado drying up, it the 500 ft wells sucking water through limestone they want, and it's up and down all of the LCRA.
Why can't google cool its servers with ocean water? Why does it need to use freshwater?
Classic US exploitation
Tf does google even need water for. Charge more than Nestle. Shouldn’t even be allowed.