This water usage argument against data centers is so specious I almost think it's spread as a deliberate talking point by DC proponents.
Power consumption and effect on electricity infrastructure is so, so, so much more consequential and dangerous. It alone is way more than enough on which to base a very solid anti-DC campaign. The water argument weakens the whole anti-DC position by being so refutable.
EDIT: with probable exceptions in specific local instances where water supply is already very constrained, like Utah.
Nah, it's just that most people function based on intuitive, rather than precise, models of how the world works. They have trouble telling millions of gallons apart from billions of gallons. But they were taught through childhood not to leave the water running while brushing their teeth. So the concept of data centers wasting water is intuitively persuasive to them.
I actually have a great deal of respect for the average person. Most of the time, the intuitive model of the world is very good at getting workable answers. But it completely falls apart when something is outside the universe of what people deal with on a day-to-day basis. Try asking the people in your family what the profit margin of a grocery store is. People might go to grocery stores all the time and know exactly how to comparison shop to optimize their spend. But most actually have no idea about the numbers involved at each step of the supply chain. Trying to explain inflation to people over the last few years has been literal hell, because virtually nobody understands the differences between price levels and the first and second derivatives thereof.
We should never assume any aquifer can be used up lightly, whether Utah or in a rainforest. Droughts are going to become more common, and not only does a lower water table impact other human activities, but also plants that have deep roots and anything relying on natural springs that might dry up faster if we're wasting a bunch on evaporative cooling.
Demanding closed loop cooling is just as important as demanding self built renewable power for new data centers.
Didn't OpenAI say they thought it was foreign interference?
Personally, I find it ironic to see people going on and on about data centers on platforms like Threads, Reddit, and X. It's like, do you know where your data is going when you press that button?
doesn't mean we won't run out of drinking water in our lifetime
> 2.5 billion gallons of water worldwide last year, or about 5% of the amount metro Seattle consumes annually
That doesn't seem like that much, really. The Seattle metro area isn't huge; that consumption is only 0.7% of New York's, and Amazon runs the largest network of data centers in the world.
Another data point.
California pistachios consume about 500–600 billion gallons of water per year.
Because of this I always fix a piercing gaze on any pistachio that crosses my path
I've always found this a weird comparison. There is no more important use of water than providing food. I love tech and earn my living from it, but the importance of food cannot be overstated.
Hyperbolic people help me ignore their fake concerns.
I think the criticism here is that they're pumping that water in from the Colorado river based on a pricing schema that makes it artificially cheap t grow water intensive crops in a very arid region. If the pricing were modernized and rationalized those pistachios would be grown somewhere that has more rain fall. Moreover a lot of that water is transported with the pistachios out of the watershed so it creates 2nd order problems.
You could also argue that Amazon data centers are crucial commercial infrastructure that used for a lot of logistics necessary to move food around.
There are a whole lot of foods that are incredibly wasteful if you truly care about water consumption.
Saying "if it's edible then it doesn't matter how much water it uses, it's justified" isn't a good position to take.
Its not a bad comparison because pistachios are a cash crop, not a staple crop. That is to say, pistachios aren't grown to keep people fed, they are grown for economic profit
Almonds use more water for the same calories of nutrition compared to a grain, somewhere from 4-8x more depending on the source.
Plus California was/is in a drought for years, that's why people bring up the almonds example.
pistachios is not the same thing as "food" it is just a small percentage of it. "Food" is important, pistachios not so much.
You find growing an incredibly water heavy crop in a place that doesn’t have the water supply to do so a weird comparison? And it’s not even a food that’s needed, so you can’t stand on that either.
And some foods are a lot more water efficient than others to produce.
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You don't need pistachios. General compute is a few orders of magnitude more important to humanity's livelihood than pistachios.
With any water use, I'd say it's important to examine how the water gets back into the system. Does it return to the same source or end up elsewhere? Does it return clean, treated, or polluted? If it evaporates, where is that vapor most likely to end up?
A lot of ways people use water can actually end up back in the source area after treatment. That should be considered differently than water evaporated in a desert that rarely receives rains.
It's not in the title, but this is 2.5 billion gallons per year.
For context, the city of London uses about 2.6 billion liters, or about 680 million gallons, per day.
So that's about four days of London water usage per year, give or take -- or just over 1% of London's water usage.
I spoke to someone who owns data centers recently. He said that in hot climates, they run closed-loop to preserve water, so the actual water use is virtually nothing. In Chicago (where we have no water shortage), they consume water—but it just evaporates and re-enters the water cycle.
Yep, that's how they do it in here Vegas. Datacenter water use isn't the problem, the state law mandating 15% of electricity must be bought from the privately owned state utility monopoly is.
Agreed; power is an entirely different (and less rosy) discussion
2.5 billion gallons per year.
The US uses about 2 billion gallons of water per day on golf courses.
A lot of the golf courses around here use reclaimed water (treated effluent). Hopefully data centers aren't using potable water.
They hook into industrial water supplies (usually not potable, unless the utility has no other option)
I would say that is the exception rather than the rule (potable is normal).
The more important question in both cases is where the water comes from.
And how it affects the local area.
An industry report from 2012 puts water use for US golf courses at around 2B gallons of water/day [0].
It's possible they've gotten more efficient in the past 14 years, but it's also possible there are more golf courses today. I haven't looked into it.
[0]: https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf
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What is it for data centers to use water, precisely? To take cool water in and run it through pipes to produce warm water, then send it to rivers?
According to this study[1] "With good water quality, roughly 80% of water withdrawal is evaporated and considered “consumption"" with the rest being discharged to wastewater facilities.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
Couldn't they reuse the water - after it cooled down.
Apparently in a closed loop cooling system they do, but in areas where water just runs off the mountains they use evaporation and it reenters the water cycle.
I had to say I was wondering why basic non polluting water use would need special attention like this. Apparently it’s a PR meme to divert attention from real problems.
evaporative cooling, which saves on energy costs
Roughly 736* of US households assuming it's 2.5B per year, 100 gal per person. I can't read the article because I got what it feels like 17 popups that nearly gave me epilepsy.
edit: corrected to 736, its per year.
I was wondering "use" means here, as-in.. does it not recirculate? And apparently the answer seems to be: it's circulated/vaporized into the air. It may fall down as rain somewhere else, not necessarily in the local area where the water was withdrawn from, effectively draining the water from the local area at least.
Also, I was wondering, what does 2.5B gallons of water equate to? Here's the answer for curious minds:
> Using EPA’s cited 82 gallons per person per day figure, 2.5B gallons/year equals the annual household water use of about 83,500 people.
I did some further math... If 1bn users world wide leverage AWS services in their daily routine (netflix, whatever, ...), the formula becomes this one:
2.5B gallons/year ÷ 1B users = 2.5 gallons/user/year
> Compared with the EPA-style U.S. household benchmark we used earlier of about 82 gallons/person/day, that would be:
>
> 0.00685 ÷ 82 ≈ 0.0084%
So the AWS data centers make up roughly an additional 0.01% of daily water usage. Why is this worth a bloomberg article?
> So the AWS data centers make up roughly an additional 0.01% of daily water usage. Why is this worth a bloomberg article?
I live somewhere that's had a lot of interest from companies wanting to put up new data centers (northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota – open farmland basically). The water usage thing is easily the top concern that people cite in their arguments against data centers.
(Just a side note on how things are going here: three surrounding counties have already implemented a 5-year moratorium on any new data centers and solar power plants because people see them as inextricably linked here.)
I am curious about the energy/expense of getting water that has been "consumed" by data centers ready for other use (e.g. drinking water), versus the energy/expense of getting water that has been "consumed" by residential users ready for the same use.
To my understanding, the only thing that changes when water is used for data centers is its temperature.
That's a lot different than residential use, where it's used in toilets and needs to undergo significant wastewater treatment to be cleaned enough to be re-used.
So how do we compare apples to oranges for these very different use cases?
Update: It appears my assumption about the only thing changing in the data center case is temperature. For much of that water, a phase change occurs (evaporative cooling), so it is no longer accessible to be recycled.
Yeah the main problem is just that the cheapest/easiest way of getting rid of heat is evaporation*. Once it's evaporated it's obviously not economic to try and get it back at that point. You could have a closed loop system sinking heat into a lake or the sea, even better it could go into a heat network heating peoples homes. All those things are just more 'hard' than ordering a cooling tower.
*
In air-cooled datacentres an approach is "direct evaporative cooling". They might take 30°C outside air and spray a fine mist into it, cooling it to perhaps 25°C before it enters the servers. After passing through the servers the air might leave at around 38°C. The water is now dispersed as humidity in a large volume of exhaust air. Recovering that water would require condensing it back out of the air, which means removing huge amounts of latent heat, it would be cheaper to just use 'traditional' compressor based cooling in the first place.
Cooling towers (which are used in many 'ai' facilities) have essentially the same problem. Servers reject heat into a water loop, and the cooling tower then cools that water by evaporating a portion of it into the atmosphere. The water that leaves as vapour is the "consumed" portion. While some liquid water remains in the system and a small amount is discharged as concentrated blowdown that can be treated and reused relatively easily, the majority of the consumed water has been converted into atmospheric moisture as above.
The whole use of the word “use” throws me off. It’s not like the water just disappears. It’s still very much there, just… well, yep, what exactly? Dirtier? Evaporated? Warmer? We’re drinking water every day from the tap that has previously been “used” as fish pee, nuclear plant cooling water and sawmill fuel. I’m not too dead yet and I think it would be great to get a more scientific discussion from public media.
IF a DC does evaporative cooling, which is said to be the cheaper option, I wonder by what percentage compared to close loop cooling.
Defensive HN replies about "AI" water use seem more incriminating than the title or even the contents of this article
There is nothing to indicate 2.5B is too much, too little or just right
But HN replies are extraordinarily reactionary and defensive when there is any discussion of "AI" water use
The replies are reminiscent of those in threads under submissions reporting facts about "crypto" not too long ago, before SBF went to prison and the crypto hype subsided
i find the climate/environment concern around AI so clearly performative and poorly calibrated that it actively angers me. moral panics are weird
I don’t think it’s performative. That seems really uncharitable. Seems like most “performative“ accusations are.
I think a ton of people were REALLY misinformed about how much water AI data centers use. I know I was at one point.
Now there may be people pushing that narrative still on purpose because it clearly works. But I don’t think the average person who uses that talking point is doing anything other than expressing a concern based on the (terrible) information they got somewhere.
I stand by it. If you only care about the climate for things that are socially rewarded (being anti-AI is, telling your friends to about the impact of eating beef or taking flights or other day to day activities is boooo you're being a buzzkill), you are being performative.
There are a reason certain types of misinformation become popular and others fizzle. The environmental concerns around AI are starting from the goal 'disliking AI' and going in search of a reason for many people. The environment is a convenient reason because it links to an existing left-wing cause & doesn't require conceding the frame of AI rapidly becoming extremely capable (scary! don't like to think about that!) so it's all comfort and outrage without stakes.
What angers me on the other hand is calling something "performative" while completely ignoring the facts. Have you checked the projected impact of new data centers on CO2 emmissions?
Yes, I'm extremely climate conscious and change my behavior around many things that I think have particularly high climate externalities. But ultimately, most of the people I know who are really concerned about this engage in extremely high externality behavior (flights, beef eating, etc.) regularly without even thinking about it. AI doesn't even come close and beyond that potentially enables a lot of solutions.
If measured the same way the sun uses about as much water as 60,000,000 large data centers.
I'd like to see that compared to Total us water consumption for animal agriculture.
the water cycle exists. unless data centers are being built in deserts or run off fossil aquifers the or other water constrained circumstance the waste is supurious. As other commenters have said closed loop cooling exists. Billions of motor vehicles run on water based cooling and consume virtually nothing once filled.
> unless data centers are being built in deserts or run off fossil aquifers the or other water constrained circumstance the waste is supurious.
In some cases, they are.
The Colorado River basin waters seven states and is in extreme drought. There are proposed data centers in the area that would require water from the Colorado or from already distressed aquifers.
Part of it is they are being built in places that have water issues already or ones in the middle to long term future. Central to west Texas is a good example of these.
They are being built with evaporative cooling which is not closed loop.
With that said, the vast majority of the yelling about water issues is overblown, power issues are far more likely to be a problem.
The entire environmental argument against data centers is largely bullshit.
Sure, they shouldn’t be powered by gas or coal. And the local effects are significant.
But the macro environmental effects are minor and the local effects can be resolved with the most trivial regulations.
Let's see the recent Guardian article:
The UK government vastly underestimated the climate impact of artificial intelligence, it has emerged, after officials raised their estimate of carbon emissions from AI by a factor of more than 100.
According to new data quietly published this week, energy use by AI datacentres in the UK could cause the emission of up to 123m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) – about as much as generated by 2.7 million people – over the next 10 years.
That latest figure replaces a previous estimate – since deleted – that claimed emissions would reach a maximum of 0.142m tonnes of CO₂ in a single year.
> they shouldn’t be powered by gas or coal.
But they mostly are....