Ann Vaughan

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778 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Ann Vaughan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The MeatEater Podcast · Ep. 902: The Pros, Cons, and Complications of Data Centers · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

So the much bigger offenders in the water for the digital economy are electric power plants and actually chip foundries are extremely water intensive and they use ultra pure water and it takes, you know, a large, you know,

kind of extra amount of water to get it fully pure and to do that.

And some of it is consumptive.

And so there are some water treatment and, you know, technology companies that have done some really interesting studies.

You know, Xylem's done one that I wrote about in my last column, just showing if you can visualize, like, these two

layers of giant mountains of water use and, and they, they are semiconductor plants and power plants.

And then there's kind of a, a ribbon on the top, which is data centers.

Yeah.

Crops, single crops, big, big crops in the U S might be 3 trillion gallons a year of water.

Direct water use of data centers has been estimated at roughly 18 billion gallons.

So remember, a billion is a thousand less, order of magnitude of thousand less than a trillion.

So three trillion for a single crop, U.S.

data center use, 18 billion.

We're talking way, way smaller.

like a quarter of a percent.

What?

And so it's just important to kind of keep some of that in perspective because even the data center footprint of onsite plus the amount consumed in the electric sector, you take how much power they're using, you have to haircut it because not all power is thermal power.

And you also have to haircut it because it's not, just as we said, all consumed.

And it's still, like, we're talking 1% of fresh water, even maybe by 2030, that data centers might be using in a more consumptive fashion.

We've become numb to it.

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