Its a fair question, California agriculture tends to use 11 trillion gallons (34e6 acre feet[1][2]) of water annually. (about 1,700 Googles worth). Generally from a market driven standpoint agricultural users are trying to get maximum $/acre out of their land. I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming. Presuming batteries were included in that allowance, 350,000 acres of California farmland as solar farms (panels + batteries for 24/7 power) would power the entire state 24/7 with no need for coal, gas, or nuclear power plants. 100% green energy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California

[2] https://www.convertunits.com/from/billion+gallons/to/acre+fo...

[3] "Agrivoltaics as a climate-smart and resilient solution for midday depression in photosynthesis in dryland regions" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00073-1

    > Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use

For example, if you have a 1GW coal powerplant on a river, it might draw 4 billion liters of water per day, but will only evaporate about 5-10% of that amount. The rest is returned to the river. Of course, this is much less exciting (click-baity) than writing "41% of US water use is for thermoelectric power plants".

Farming is a necessary activity and in most countries, they are also a politically influential group.

The case for data centers in the age of AI is weaker, and the only effects for the average person are noise, pollution, higher electricity costs, higher water costs, for the ultimate "benefit" of losing your job.

Nobody actually cares about water use. It's a totem for other activism efforts. Data-centre protests aren't about water, they're about wealth inequality and Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg being hated men.

Even worse, my understanding is that much of that alfalfa gets put into shipping containers and sold overseas. The agricultural drain on the aquifers does not even benefit US ranchers.

I would assume because water-wasting concerns are just another tool for the left to use against their political opponents, not an actual concern most of their constituents deeply care about. Same, for example, as right-leaning people suddenly discovered concerns regarding wind turbines killing birds or spoiling views from the shore (I bet those birds covered in oil after spills enjoy it and are a treat to the eye!).

Western lefties consider farmers their class allies, and white-collar engineers and tech billionaires their class enemies. Which is not universal BTW because those kinds of farmers that hold water right in California would have a hard time in Soviet Union, for example.

California water policy vs other western states in one image:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sandy+Valley,+NV+89019/@35...

A town of 1700 people with a rapidly depleting aquifer (600 AF/yr recharge, equal to a single one of those circles) so 1 or 2 farmers with no restrictions on water usage can grow as much alfalfa as they'd like.

The thing about data centers and thermoelectric power plants is that you can make them effectively closed cycle, vs agriculture where that is somewhat intractable.

Not saying that is true today though.

Because a lot more consumers care about the milk that comes from the dairy cows in California that consume something like 75% of that alfalfa and the meat that comes from the animals that consume the rest than care about data centers?

I know plenty of folks who got worked up over the wasteful farming that drains and damages aquifers. much like the penalties that kardashians received when they broke the water usage laws, it amounted to nada.

They do and have been - unfortunately the farms are far from most people and isolated. And in super hot arid areas. Not ideal but many people aren't directly affected

Million, billion, and trillion sadly sound kind of the same when you talk about it.

Probably because food and agriculture (in the region that produces a quarter of America’s domestic food supply) are required for life, while data centers aren’t?

There has been outrage. It's yet another tragedy of the commons.

Water pricing should be revisited to be closer to its true value -- and while food production should be recognized as essential, even that has to be rethought: is growing alfalfa for dairy less vital than growing vegetables? Especially if that dairy is produced and consumed in Saudi Arabia?

The other thing that we should be doing all over is better management of our watersheds so we can try to replenish those aquifers.

84.1% of people have <115 IQ. The minimum required to critically think about the modern world and affect its function.

With AI that minimum is expected to increase.

lol, if you bothered to check the reference your “article” stole from, you’d find a medium post that includes ANOTHER link to a follow up medium post entitled, “I was wrong about data center water consumption”

It’s not 6 billion per day. It’s 650 billion per day. In the United States alone.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

lol

I expect the people will realize how easy it is to disable agriculture pumps, located in the middle of nowhere, with no one around to protect them.

When the law fails to protect the people, they will eventually do what it takes to protect themselves.

We shouldn’t be thought of kindly. We’re essentially post food scarcity in the US and children are still sent to school starving. Not only did we fail the here and now, but we’ve failed our future brothers and sisters.

I disagree strongly and push back on this framing. It's technically correct but it subtracts the huge factor that maximizing short term profit plays, and couching that in "feeding the people" papers over that.

Just feeding people sufficiently, even at a high standard, wouldn't lead to the resource depletion and waste we are seeing today. But doing so at record profit levels does.

Quite true.

Our own individual ancestors were not perfect people. But we only exist today because they survived.

Why would any of us care what people 200 or 500 years in the future think of us?

Peak irrelevance.

The whole pension fund concept only works because it declares how much is going to be paid out.

Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?

Toward the end it briefly discusses a possible solution - expensive injection of water into aquifers that might have the side effect of triggering earthquakes like fracking for petroleum or some types of geothermal - there’s no winning.

> does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?

Water lubricates fault zones [1]. Putting it into an inactive fault makes it active. Taking it out of an active fault makes the quakes less frequent and more powerful.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00137...

The answer is desalination plants. Look at rich water-stressed countries in the Middle East and North Africa. All of them use extensive desalination plants. India has lots of very smart engineers. I am sure you can build them. Another thing: India needs to build the equivalent of the California State Water Project to move water from wet areas to dry areas. (China did the same.)

You can make this kind of claim about living in lots of different places. Some amount of engineering and technology has been necessary to enable humans to live in most parts of the world. What determines the line?

Pretty clever idea. Sadly uneconomical when compared to desalination because I love the idea of iceberg calf hunting. Ripe for a novel Moby Dick - The target is already a large white object. Call me Icemael.

Got a bit of a Cold War era pykrete like project feeling.

That is what the one expert quoted said but others thought it might still come back over a longer time period - I interpreted it to mean that method as being more accurate than the one season refill rate.

Yes, looks like they are acting like a sponge whose efficiency to retain water decreases as time passes.

> You all knew how it was going to end, for decades, and did nothing.

And the same is true for global carbon-related climate change, for which the real bill will become increasingly due over the next 10 years.

We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.

Thank you for posting that, saved me from doing so.

Ignorance and stupidity are the greatest threats to human survival - but perhaps it's for the best.

What can you realistically do?

Doing something about this is the job of the government, not of “you all”. If taking care of such essential matters is somehow the responsibility of society as a whole, we may as well get rid of governments altogether.

I think it’s somewhat fortunate when these aquifers permanently compress, it takes the land out of agriculture production as a sort of forced conservation, because in many ways, humans cannot be trusted to be responsible stewards of such a natural finite resource.

https://uttoncenter.unm.edu/resources/2026-06-1-update-paper...

https://www.organicproducenetwork.com/organic-growers/califo...