From Tokens to Burgers – A Water Footprint Face-Off
A different perspective on the datacenter water debate, forget tokens/watt or tokens/dollar, it's about tokens/burger, how many In-N-Outs is equivalent to the world's largest datacenter
Tokens and burgers are not two ideas you often see paired in the same title. If you’re wondering what they could possibly have in common, stick with us for this short piece, because today we’re putting them face to face in a duel over a hot topic - datacenter water usage. If you want a different perspective on what a datacenter actually consumes, plus a couple of new cool metrics to use in your Friday evenings (did you hear about tokens per burger?), stay tuned. This one’s a meaty post. Datacenter water usage is under increasing scrutiny, with projects even paused or canceled. See recent…
related reading
- Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how muchtheconversation.com
- The AI water issue is fake - Andy Masleyblog.andymasley.com
- How Much Water Do AI Data Centers Really Use?undark.org
- Intro : copy paste wastecopypaste.pratergalerie.de
- No Data Centers In My Backyard - by Jasmine Sunjasmi.news
- Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom - Lincoln Institute of Land Policylincolninst.edu
- The data center is a symbolsubstack.com
- The data center is a symboltransformernews.ai
- To Boldly Go: The Case for Space Datacentersnewsletter.semianalysis.com
- Power 2026 - Electricity Pricing in the Age of AIpower2026.ai
- No Data Centers In My Backyardsubstack.com
- No Data Centers In My Backyardjasmi.news