The "datacenter" in El Reno, OK is a somewhat fly-by-night operation (many such cases) and the narrative of datacenter water use is very misleading. E.g. They weren't even using water for their site. For context I'm a former Bitcoin miner in OK and on the board of the Oklahoma Bitcoin Association. The water leak came from a private water line leading to a fire hydrant that the operator built, likely as a safety measure. Unclear to me what kind of permitting you need to do that and whether they had permitting to do that. But the 9 shipping container boxes (with the mining machines inside) on the site don't appear to be using water for cooling. Those are Antbox N5 containers (~745kw each), a Chinese manufactured modular Bitcoin mining structure. They clearly have the water screens (the brown panels on the side) which are designed to flow water through to cool intake air to the box. However you need a dry cooler or some kind of radiator system on site to expell the heat. You can clearly see rhere is no such system on site, meaning that the site did not use water for cooling the datacenter. Source: I've set up deals for & walked multiple sites with these exact same boxes. (Opinion, they're kinda shitty boxes btw, go American made) Those water screens are certainly not connected to anything and are likely just kept attached because the boxes ship with them attached. Smaller miners often scramble to acquire equipment & site plan so you'll see a lot of suboptimal configurations like this. I bet you that the AthlonBTC website describing the containers as "hydro cooled" are a marketing term to make it seem far more professional to potential hosting clients. Again, many such cases. For a little extra color to Bitcoin mining site construction, you can see that in between each container there are what look like fence panels. Those are clearly set up to block hot air from flowing from container exhaust (hot) into another's intake. Just those panels alone plus the disconnected Antbox water screens tell you a lot about how this site came to be -- that it's a very DIY operation and not remotely in the same class of sophisticated site design as these Tier 3+ AI hyperscalers. So where does that leave us? The 3 million gallon water leak was from activities UNRELATED to datacenter operation and are actually more in the category of operator negligence. The news & media understandably cannot figure this out because it requires special industry knowledge and the operator of the site clearly is a prickly person who doesn't want this scrutiny. But this is NOT a datacenter story. This is a negligent business & fly-by-night operator story more analogous to a shady weed growing operation than it is to anything datacenter related.(cbspears ◉)