Yes: my understanding is that it’s rather common practice to at least make a best-effort estimation of all these secondary impacts.
It’s also absolutely true that “agricultural usage dominating data center usage” is a dirty little secret that a lot of people are very, very incentivized to keep secret. Amazon can’t outright say that, because uh whutabuht mah poor farmers.
This also tends to include the rainwater that falls on the ground to grow the grass that cattle eat that would fall on the grass anyway, or that the cow farts aren't really more greenhouse emissions than the grass rotting out over the summer anyway. It's distortive.
IMO, water is a renewable resource and what should count is the use of water in scarce environments from scarce sources directly in excess of what gets renewed. If you're right by the Mississippi river and often see flooding in your region, I don't think using the water for cooling a reactor (steam as the byproduct) is necessarily something that should be considered a negative... it'll come back down as rain somewhere.
I'm not sure why Amazon is "using" so much water, assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop... otherwise, if using evaporation for cooling, like a reactor, it depends on the location, source and usage. "it's complicated"
> assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop
My understanding is that the closed-loop systems are rather new; like, "we started using these things in 2024 literally because everyone's been moaning about our AI water usage" new. I'd assume that many new constructions are starting to leverage them, but its not 100%, and existing DCs would be slow to upgrade.
1. Farmers oftentimes make zero effort to reduce their water usage. There's water reduction strategies they could employ, if they cared, but instead the vast multi-farm conglomerates invest their efforts in securing below-market, oftentimes monopolistic, control over water rights in their area, so they can use use an excess amount. Meanwhile, data center operators are (rightly) expected to engineer extremely sophisticated multi-millions of dollar systems to reduce their usage by even single digit percentages; an amount that some farms might consume in just one day.
2. Not all crops are built the same. Some, we rightly question "why are we growing this". Almonds are the canonical example; they consume utterly insane amounts of water, and the end result is: Almonds. A non-critical food that sits in some back corner of your grocery store. But, farmers like them because they sell for magnitudes more per pound than the more staple crops; its niche produce like almonds that can be the difference between a farm being profitable and unprofitable each year.
3. Many regions in the US have a climate that is just close enough to being able to grow things, like Alfala and Rice, year-round, so long as you utterly drench them in artifically-sourced water during the dry season when we shouldn't otherwise be able to grow them. There's a massive difference in natural sustainability of the seasonal farms in, say, the American midwest, versus the year-round industrial mega-farms of California.
Having grown up around farms my whole life: More people need to realize that the aw shucks poor farmer routine is just a play these usually extremely wealthy people use to justify any greedy, shitty behavior they can. Monopoly on water rights? Oh, so you want to starve? Yeah that's what I thought, as they sip a $400 bottle of wine in Nappa. Farms are quite possibly the most subsidized industry in all of America; while near-universally all farmers will fight tooth and nail for the elimination of subsidies and handouts for everyone else, if you even insinuate you'll take away their handouts, its war and "you're all going to starve" because you "don't appreciate farmers". They complain about America outsourcing all of its labor to other countries, while farming itself has become one of the most automated, labor-eliminating industries in the country, massive mega-conglomerate farms are now ran by three people piloting remote tractors and drones from their barn.
It’s also absolutely true that “agricultural usage dominating data center usage” is a dirty little secret that a lot of people are very, very incentivized to keep secret. Amazon can’t outright say that, because uh whutabuht mah poor farmers.