Google’s just-released 2025 sustainability report is an instructive example. The company said it consumed 10.9 billion gallons of water—a 34% increase from 2024—almost all for data-center cooling.
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Google consumes around three times as much water indirectly as directly, according to a paper published earlier this year by Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at the Netherlands-based university VU Amsterdam.
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My take: they should report this in acre-feet instead of gallons, and then compare it to a crop, alfalfa for example.
My back of the envelope says even at the larger number Google is using the enough water to grow about 23,000 acres of alfalfa. That would produce about 138,000 tons which would sell for about $34 million.
I find golf courses to be a more effective framing. Even if the alfalfa is consumed by animals, it's still a part of the food supply chain and gives people the easy response, "yeah, but we need to eat, we don't need datacenters."
Google's 10.9B gallons in 2025 is equivalent to ~55 18-hole golf courses (200M gallons/year average in the US). Which provided more value to the economy and to you as an individual last year? Google or 55 out of ~15k total golf courses in the US?
You might not use any Google products. But pretty much all of your goods and services providers do. Google is providing significant value to you second hand.
Desalination, turning unlimited sea water into fresh water which is one of the most expensive sources of fresh water, is ~0.50 $/m^3. They can literally manufacture the water they use with zero impact on the water table for ~20 million dollars.
Neat, implementing this would be a great marketing move for Google/OpenAI/Amazon/MS. Relatively cheap way to win a lot of goodwill from the millions of people who don't know much about the space but are swayed by current water usage arguments.
Of course location matters a ton in the water usage argument but I'm not sure how relevant this actually is when it comes to winning over hearts and minds.
I saw a criticism of the alfalfa comparison because, given the circumstances, there isn't anything better to plant where alfalfa grows. That you'd spend more water growing corn in other places or something like that. If we want to deal with alfalfa water use, eat less red meat.
Not sure how legit it is, but there is certainly more nuance to water usage.
I prefer the golf course analogy, which uses 2-3x the water of data centers and has dubious benefit to society beyond the entertainment for those who can afford the "green" fees
You can just not plant anything. It’s not required that every inch of desert is used for irrigated cultivation.
Alfalfa is the cleanest case of a crop that would not be planted nearly as much if western water law (prior appropriation) wasn’t so colossally stupid.
tl;dr: Because the power plants they rent power from, and have very little control over, use water too
Is that water cleaned and put back in the environment?
Can the municipalities use the tax cash influx to clean up their power sources?
Not answered or considered which is weird for an org as storied as WSJ.
The bottom line is Heartland re-industrialization will use resources and look different from previous industries.
Can we keep the political focus on the oligcharcal control over our government instead of making something as dry as data centers some kind of new frontline on the Omni-cause
> Can we keep the political focus on the oligcharcal control over our government instead of making something as dry as data centers some kind of new frontline on the Omni-cause
I imagine every side jumping on the water issue is exactly trying to distract from this. You'll notice you hear about water consumption issues much more than oligarchy and wealth inequality much more on "progressive media".
It's a real issue, and it feels like a bad faith claim that people are "jumping" on the issue as a distraction.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can call out wealth inequality and oligarchy, and also talk about the very real water issue with regard to data centers (and electricity, and loss of rural land, and other many other aspects).
I wasn't trying to make the claim in bad faith. I think as a casual observer, it's fairly obvious when a certain part of a conversation comes to dominate the bigger and more problematic part.
I'm all for responsible water use in data centers and I don't doubt that the cheapest, most environmentally destructive option is the one being used. That should be talked about, pushed back against, etc.
However, let's not argue in bad faith and say that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and then quietly forget about the walking (oligarchy/wealth inequality/decreasing quality of life/increasing cost of life, etc) while everyone yells and throws water stats around.
I wish these articles would clarify that there are climates where datacenters exist where water is not used food cooking.
Just because the U.S. uses it doesn’t mean the rest the world does in every build.
Buildings are built for the climate of where they exist.
If a building can’t cool itself above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, that sounds like it could be common in the U.S.
It works not be the same in a country like Canada, it is northern climates.
This narrative is being used to undermine new datacenters in other countries, and it’s kind of sprinting a publication world so willingly not learn a little about buildings being cut differently in different countries with different climates.
Maybe, my point is that there's a lot of misinformation, misdirection and noise on this on default assuming everyone builds datacenters like the hottest parts of the US.
Datacenters will always be efficiency driven, and that includes putting them in places that need less heating, less energy/power, etc.
There's probably interests in datacenters that might not want attention going to other locations that might be more viable than the ones they have.
I feel like it’s never made clear in what way the water is used up in these cases.
It’s not like it’s consumed like fuel. And it is not absorbed like in agriculture. But I understand it is not trivially recyclable either, the heat of the water alone can be harmful if released as-is. Does cooling happen via evaporation and is that how the water is “lost”? And I am not sure if it is contaminated in other ways.
What is the actual impact or opportunity cost of using the water in datacenter (or energy plant) cooling versus other uses?
When you're using water in a open-loop data center, you get in cool/cold water, add biocides and other chemicals to protect your infrastructure, then heat it and pump it back to the body of water (i.e. river, lake or an underground hole, or somewhere).
The result is unusable, somewhat toxic (since you can't remove the chemicals), deoxygenated (hot water can dissolve less oxygen) which can't be used for anything, incl. farming.
It's water, but it's not. It's not suitable for anything. Practically, waste.
> When you're using water in a open-loop data center, you get in cool/cold water, add biocides and other chemicals to protect your infrastructure, then heat it and pump it back to the body of water (i.e. river, lake or an underground hole, or somewhere).
These are not power plants, there are zero data centers using open loop cooling that discharge loop water back into a waterway. It’s unnecessary when you’re cooling a data center.
The system is filled with water and begins operating. As water is lost to evaporation in the cooling towers, more water is added to the cooling loop.
At no point is any of the cooling loop water discharged back into a waterway, it gets recirculated through the system.
First, I don't see the banks of dry coolers or chillers required to cool that amount of water in many of the data center photos.
Second, our closed loop data center is not losing that amount of water, so losing 10 billion gallons of water to evaporation across that many data centers seems unrealistic, even with evaporation for humidity balancing and dry-cooler boosting reasons.
Sitting on top of a data center and directly working on it has its perks, apparently.
Adding evaporative cooling towers to a chilled water loop that uses chillers can double the efficiency.
A power plant that draws water from an intake, uses it to reject heat, cools it down, and then discharges it back to the stream/lake/ocean is once-thru cooling.
Obviously water is renewable, but the constraint here is finite public water system capacity. When that capacity is allocated to data centers less is available for other community needs. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02705
Almonds producers in California use roughly 60-85 times more water annually than all US data centers combined, depending on the exact figures and whether indirect power-plant water is included.
Wake up, people! Stop the evil producers of almonds!
I feel like we've already had this discussion with respect to Crypto; crypto used more energy than banks (which proved to be false, but whatever); and water. Now AI uses magnitude more energy than crypto (or humans) and somehow they're now saying it's okay?
How is framing it the way society at large frames it dishonest? That “per transaction” is exactly the kind of nuance that never makes it to the public discussion.
How much water AI data centers use feels like the least interesting reason to dislike them.
If I wanted to dislike them for environmental reasons, then I’d focus entirely on the energy consumption and CO2 emission from the generators directly hooked up to the data centers since the grid can’t provide them with enough juice.
If I wanted to dislike them for economic reasons, I’d focus entirely on the weird circular deals and mountain of debt.
If I wanted to dislike them for social reasons, I’d focus on how AI proponents themselves admit that the whole point is to take all of our jobs.
The water thing feels like a weird hill to die on. It doesn’t feel serious. It’s by far not the biggest problem!
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 39.0 ms ] thread…
Google consumes around three times as much water indirectly as directly, according to a paper published earlier this year by Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at the Netherlands-based university VU Amsterdam.
—
My take: they should report this in acre-feet instead of gallons, and then compare it to a crop, alfalfa for example.
My back of the envelope says even at the larger number Google is using the enough water to grow about 23,000 acres of alfalfa. That would produce about 138,000 tons which would sell for about $34 million.
Google's 10.9B gallons in 2025 is equivalent to ~55 18-hole golf courses (200M gallons/year average in the US). Which provided more value to the economy and to you as an individual last year? Google or 55 out of ~15k total golf courses in the US?
And I don't even golf.
Desalination, turning unlimited sea water into fresh water which is one of the most expensive sources of fresh water, is ~0.50 $/m^3. They can literally manufacture the water they use with zero impact on the water table for ~20 million dollars.
Of course location matters a ton in the water usage argument but I'm not sure how relevant this actually is when it comes to winning over hearts and minds.
Not sure how legit it is, but there is certainly more nuance to water usage.
I prefer the golf course analogy, which uses 2-3x the water of data centers and has dubious benefit to society beyond the entertainment for those who can afford the "green" fees
Alfalfa is the cleanest case of a crop that would not be planted nearly as much if western water law (prior appropriation) wasn’t so colossally stupid.
Is that water cleaned and put back in the environment?
Can the municipalities use the tax cash influx to clean up their power sources?
Not answered or considered which is weird for an org as storied as WSJ.
The bottom line is Heartland re-industrialization will use resources and look different from previous industries.
Can we keep the political focus on the oligcharcal control over our government instead of making something as dry as data centers some kind of new frontline on the Omni-cause
I imagine every side jumping on the water issue is exactly trying to distract from this. You'll notice you hear about water consumption issues much more than oligarchy and wealth inequality much more on "progressive media".
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can call out wealth inequality and oligarchy, and also talk about the very real water issue with regard to data centers (and electricity, and loss of rural land, and other many other aspects).
I'm all for responsible water use in data centers and I don't doubt that the cheapest, most environmentally destructive option is the one being used. That should be talked about, pushed back against, etc.
However, let's not argue in bad faith and say that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and then quietly forget about the walking (oligarchy/wealth inequality/decreasing quality of life/increasing cost of life, etc) while everyone yells and throws water stats around.
With the planet heating up at an enormous pace and we have a new hip word called "Water Scarcity" with a cool map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity#/media/File:Wat...),
I don't think this is a distraction.
Just because the U.S. uses it doesn’t mean the rest the world does in every build.
Buildings are built for the climate of where they exist.
If a building can’t cool itself above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, that sounds like it could be common in the U.S.
It works not be the same in a country like Canada, it is northern climates.
This narrative is being used to undermine new datacenters in other countries, and it’s kind of sprinting a publication world so willingly not learn a little about buildings being cut differently in different countries with different climates.
With drycoolers or chillers, you can pump out enormous amount of heat energy out of water, even in hot climates.
Datacenters will always be efficiency driven, and that includes putting them in places that need less heating, less energy/power, etc.
There's probably interests in datacenters that might not want attention going to other locations that might be more viable than the ones they have.
It’s not like it’s consumed like fuel. And it is not absorbed like in agriculture. But I understand it is not trivially recyclable either, the heat of the water alone can be harmful if released as-is. Does cooling happen via evaporation and is that how the water is “lost”? And I am not sure if it is contaminated in other ways.
What is the actual impact or opportunity cost of using the water in datacenter (or energy plant) cooling versus other uses?
The result is unusable, somewhat toxic (since you can't remove the chemicals), deoxygenated (hot water can dissolve less oxygen) which can't be used for anything, incl. farming.
It's water, but it's not. It's not suitable for anything. Practically, waste.
These are not power plants, there are zero data centers using open loop cooling that discharge loop water back into a waterway. It’s unnecessary when you’re cooling a data center.
The system is filled with water and begins operating. As water is lost to evaporation in the cooling towers, more water is added to the cooling loop.
At no point is any of the cooling loop water discharged back into a waterway, it gets recirculated through the system.
First, I don't see the banks of dry coolers or chillers required to cool that amount of water in many of the data center photos.
Second, our closed loop data center is not losing that amount of water, so losing 10 billion gallons of water to evaporation across that many data centers seems unrealistic, even with evaporation for humidity balancing and dry-cooler boosting reasons.
Sitting on top of a data center and directly working on it has its perks, apparently.
Adding evaporative cooling towers to a chilled water loop that uses chillers can double the efficiency.
A power plant that draws water from an intake, uses it to reject heat, cools it down, and then discharges it back to the stream/lake/ocean is once-thru cooling.
Wake up, people! Stop the evil producers of almonds!
BTW, I believe that AI is a good thing in its ideal case, but we need to sort its energy use and data ethics issues.
The true accusation was that crypto used more energy than banks per transaction. Your framing is very dishonest.
If I wanted to dislike them for environmental reasons, then I’d focus entirely on the energy consumption and CO2 emission from the generators directly hooked up to the data centers since the grid can’t provide them with enough juice.
If I wanted to dislike them for economic reasons, I’d focus entirely on the weird circular deals and mountain of debt.
If I wanted to dislike them for social reasons, I’d focus on how AI proponents themselves admit that the whole point is to take all of our jobs.
The water thing feels like a weird hill to die on. It doesn’t feel serious. It’s by far not the biggest problem!