From Tokens to Burgers: A Water Footprint Face-Off

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.

What the Numbers Overlook

Datacenter water usage is under increasing scrutiny, with projects even paused or canceled. See recent discussions in Arizona. We think the debate is overstated, as the numbers are often misleading and key variables are frequently ignored. By this we mean the cooling architecture (one of the main drivers of water usage), power source, location and local water scarcity or water source, among others. In addition, datacenter water consumption is often taken at face value and rarely put in perspective versus other everyday industries.

Besides, there’s no standard for water accounting, which makes comparisons messy. Do you include training runs and embedded supply-chain water, or only onsite evaporation and consumption? A lot of nuances that makes the “datacenters are choking the world” headline hard to assess.

To contribute a different angle to the debate, we decided to put face to face one of the world’s biggest datacenters (want to know which place? Watch our latest Youtube video!) and one of the most loved elements in humanity, burgers. More specifically, we’ll calculate and compare the overall water footprint of Elon Musk’s Colossus 2 Memphis datacenter, the Macrohard one, and an average In-N-Out store. Does Macrohard’s beat an In-N-Out store? Let the duel begin.

Round 1: Colossus 2

Let’s start with Colossus 2, xAI’s datacenter that will power future generations of Grok. As we covered in our report on Colossus 2 and recent media posts, based on our satellite footage and the cooling equipment in the facility, the datacenter is in near term progress to get to a Critical IT Capacity of 400MW. Although it is expected to expand to more than 1GW, for now we’ll calculate the water footprint in its current state.

What can we expect initially? A quick search gives the first hints: “Colossus 2 could consume as much as 1 million gallons of water ...