How much higher would the energy cost be without evaporative cooling? It doesn’t seem that hard to use water-air heat pumps to get rid of the heat without any water use, so the reasons it’s not used are probably economic. I suppose you could just make water more expensive?
Vertiv published a 10-year TCO analysis for a 3 MW facility that found waterless systems actually achieved lower overall cost despite higher energy draw, because water treatment, legionella testing, RO filtration, and cooling tower maintenance add up fast.
The PUE penalty is typically +0.1 to +0.4, so roughly 10-25% more energy for a hyperscaler currently at PUE ~1.1.
Microsoft announced all new builds from late 2027 onward will use zero water for cooling via closed-loop liquid cooling, which suggests the economics have already tipped for new construction.
AWS expanded recycled water use to 120+ facilities by late 2025, Google’s Douglas County GA site has used 100% recycled municipal wastewater for cooling since 2008, and Microsoft built a $31M water reuse utility in Quincy WA that cut their potable water use by 97%.
The main technical challenges are higher mineral loads causing scaling on heat exchange surfaces and increased Legionella risk from biofilm formation, but these are well-understood treatment problems with roughly a 6-year payback on the additional infrastructure.
I think it's super cool that Olympia HS has a student run newspaper, but I don't think this is something that should be posted to HN. The only source quoted on the water issue is an EE professor from a school in California, who I am guessing is not a subject matter expert on water in Washington state.
FWIW, as a Washington resident, I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages. We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water. Obviously, we need to manage it responsibly, but I haven't seen any evidence of looming issues here (please feel free to correct me, though).
The data centers in WA cluster in Quincy and Moses Lake in the Columbia Basin, which gets 7-9 inches of rain per year. The town of Quincy (pop ~8,200) uses groundwater at rates equivalent to a city of 30,000, and during the 2021 drought the irrigation district cut off data center pumps entirely.
You’re right that WA is a reasonable place relative to alternatives, and data center water use is a rounding error next to agriculture, but the strain is real at the municipal infrastructure level in the specific towns hosting these facilities.
Short answer: several operators already do. The barrier isn’t technical, it’s proximity to a municipal wastewater source and willingness to invest in on-site treatment (pre-filtration, ultrafiltration, partial RO, ongoing biocide dosing). Recycled water typically costs 30-50% less than potable once the treatment infrastructure is in place.
> Despite efforts to enforce clean energy, the bill died in committee
I wish it was easy to force issues like this into ballot measures. The citizenry should be able to rip control out of the hands of their representatives when so motivated.
It's funny that in movies like the matrix they imagine that humanity would fight back against the machines. In reality the first thing ai will do, which it has already done, is capture our governments through the application of money, and then the humans would first have to defeat their own institutions before they can even begin to fight the machines. Neoliberalism is profoundly unable to deal with threats if the threats produce short term profits. That goes for housing shortages, global warming, health care costs, falling birth rates, across the board if it produces short term profits that can be used to bribe politicians its impossible to address. AI is no different.
The amount of water mentioned in the article is completely inconsequential. Per the article, across 126 data centers they consume several foot-acres of water per day. That is incredibly efficient!
Annualized, that is 0.0001% of the water used to produce subsidized corn ethanol. If we can afford to waste that much water on corn ethanol subsidies then we can definitely afford the water for data centers.
HB 2125 was killed by the Democrats because it was a deeply unserious bill unrelated to this. For example, it required data centers to turn off their power during ordinary periods of high electricity usage. Because, you know, we can just randomly turn off the Internet during the day and there will be no bad consequences.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] threadThe PUE penalty is typically +0.1 to +0.4, so roughly 10-25% more energy for a hyperscaler currently at PUE ~1.1.
Microsoft announced all new builds from late 2027 onward will use zero water for cooling via closed-loop liquid cooling, which suggests the economics have already tipped for new construction.
AWS expanded recycled water use to 120+ facilities by late 2025, Google’s Douglas County GA site has used 100% recycled municipal wastewater for cooling since 2008, and Microsoft built a $31M water reuse utility in Quincy WA that cut their potable water use by 97%.
The main technical challenges are higher mineral loads causing scaling on heat exchange surfaces and increased Legionella risk from biofilm formation, but these are well-understood treatment problems with roughly a 6-year payback on the additional infrastructure.
FWIW, as a Washington resident, I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages. We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water. Obviously, we need to manage it responsibly, but I haven't seen any evidence of looming issues here (please feel free to correct me, though).
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/wa-bra...
You’re right that WA is a reasonable place relative to alternatives, and data center water use is a rounding error next to agriculture, but the strain is real at the municipal infrastructure level in the specific towns hosting these facilities.
I wish it was easy to force issues like this into ballot measures. The citizenry should be able to rip control out of the hands of their representatives when so motivated.
Annualized, that is 0.0001% of the water used to produce subsidized corn ethanol. If we can afford to waste that much water on corn ethanol subsidies then we can definitely afford the water for data centers.
HB 2125 was killed by the Democrats because it was a deeply unserious bill unrelated to this. For example, it required data centers to turn off their power during ordinary periods of high electricity usage. Because, you know, we can just randomly turn off the Internet during the day and there will be no bad consequences.