Context: 1 acre-foot, a usual unit of measure for agricultural water, is a bit under 1/3 of a million gallons. 17B gallons is about 52k acre-feet.
Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert.
The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A.
Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no.
Most of those partisans have no idea what other sources of water consumption are by magnitude. They seem to quote any number as if it is a lot. A billion gallons is a lot. 500000 gallons is not a lot.
Golf courses use about 1.63 million acre feet, about 32X more, some of that probably reenters watersheds and aquifers, not necessarily great with fertilizer runoff. But they pose lower risk of human extinction, so have that going for them.
If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns.
What does it mean to be consumed in this context? After used for cooling isn’t it clean enough for drink and other uses? Can’t it go back into other systems? Can’t it be used for agriculture?
This refers to water that is evaporated for cooling of both the datacenters themselves and the power plants that give them electricity. The remaining water after evaporation is so full of minerals that it has to be discharged as sewage.
This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.
"consumed" means it was used for evaporated cooling and let off into the atmosphere. It's obviously a resource that replenishes, but wells replenish at a limited rate [and can run dry] so it's not a negligible issue.
Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.
Can that vapor be captured and condensed again? The energy transfer of evaporation happens before it reaches the cooling tower exit. It's a conservation of energy thing for sure but condensation is doable.
This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people.
However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.
I don't even know who owns forgeeks.net. They're only a couple months old and is disseminated by a new HN account. Some of the "author" social media links appear AI generated.
Red flags galore. Wouldn't surprise me if it was bankrolled by bad actors and/or a website created/operated by AI agents.
The article links to a report from the library of congress, from which it gets it's numbers. The congressional report is quite informative, and and non-partisan.
Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless.
Annual withdrawals (2015)
- Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal
- Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal
- Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal
- Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal
- Aquaculture: ~2.76 trillion gal
- Mining: ~1.46 trillion gal
- Livestock: ~730 billion gal
- Total: ~117.5 trillion gal (322 Bgal/day)
Source: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015: U.S. Geological Survey Circular - https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441
This is a good illustration how cursed the datacenter topic has become when people go out of their minds on computer cooling while continuing to eat meat which lets be perfectly clear - is mostly for entertainment purposes. I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.
> I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.
I can imagine raising issues with a specific datacenter in a specific water-constrained location, but I agree that being vocally concerned about the teaspoons of water consumed to produce an AI response while being unconcerned with the thousands of gallons used to produce a cheeseburger seems like innumerate virtue signaling.
Most people do not see data centers benefiting them in any way but do benefit from eating meat (because they like it). Also, this is an additional water consumption that in a time when water resources are already strained in many areas for all those other uses mentioned.
An analogy would be if you have $5000 a month on income but spend $4950 on rent, utilities, insurance, food, etc. then its not hypocritical to say that you shouldn't give an additional $200 to the local billionaire because that's only a small percentage of what you spend on rent. 'Hey man, if you can afford to live indoors, the least you can do is go into debt for local billionaire to become even more billionairy'
Is this a "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" objection, where even the slightest bit of hypocrisy or impurity justifies rejecting the argument?
If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environmental impact of meat production, berates you for defending data center water use, would that convince you to change your mind?
What about a vegan, who also stopped flying and doesn't drive, and is organizing a protest to shut down the local golf course?
Yeah why would someone berate you for telling them to stop eating and support data centers? Gee why would someone get so emotional when told to stop enjoying food and help the billionaires make more money?
Nice perspective. So even if all these data centers were built in the desert, it's entirely within the realm of possibility to transport 17B gallons of water, unlike the 43 trillion used for irrigation. Some back-of-the-napkin math:
- A truck holds 5000 gallons
- It would take 3.5 million trips to transport that much
- If each trip was 500 miles roundtrip, that's about 2 billion miles
- Trucks travel 140 billion miles each year in the US. That would add less than 2% to the total miles
- The trucking industry is about $1 trillion in revenue per year. So 2% of that is $20 billion total to transport 17 billion gallons. Or around $1 per gallon.
> The problem is that these comparisons do not have equal utility.
That's just your opinion, though. I would prefer a purely vegerarian society with advanced AI that can cure cancer or discover new maths to society with meat and no AI.
Right, but the utility goes in the other direction, not the one you’re maybe thinking.
Meat is basically optional, you don’t need meat to be healthy or happy. There are vegetarian body builders. Meat has, probably, negative value on most American’s lives, due to its contribution to heart disease.
That’s not to say meat isn’t tasty. It is. But from an objective standpoint, the value is ehhh.
Arguably, AI has much more value, and for 1/100th the water cost. Hey, that’s pretty good!
One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water.
It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists.
There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.
Lots of places in the US have plentiful water. Don't build data centers where there's a lack of water! And it's a dead horse at this point, but we don't need to be growing almonds in CA. If you actually care about water use, focus on that.
Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.
Potable well water should NEVER be used for such purposes. Aquifers recharge at a rate far lower than industry wants to pull from them. At some point potable water for humans will run out.
If you're using water just to evaporate it for cooling then use surface water.
Using water for cooling significantly reduces cooling energy use. The decision of whether to use dry, evaporative, or hybrid cooling approaches should be driven by the specific water availability in the area where the cooling process is to be used.
Main regions do have enough water to support evaporative cooling. When water is available, using it is prudent because it saves so much electricity.
Using surface water is not a practical approach for most cases because the process would need to be built next to a river or lake - there is limited industrial real estate in these areas.
It's weird how all these statistics could end if the owners of these data centers would just simply release the numbers for the public to learn from. Instead they are keeping these figures private and we have people trying to best-estimate the reality. Mostly for reasons we all understand: true figures would cause an even larger public backlash.
Fun fact, citizens of The Dalles, OR had to sue their own government to get them to release numbers on how much Google data centers were consuming (info Google stipulated should be kept "proprietary"):
Is anybody working on using all this waste heat for desalination?
I think cold seawater can be used for the external loop, through a heat exchanger where it would meet the heated pure water from the internal cooling loops. This would cause evaporation of the salt water which could be captured.
Support for data centers jumps a net 31 points after voters are told modern facilities can reuse the same cooling water for up to 10 years, new poll finds. -- https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2092209623583404461
Fluid renewal occurs only every 7–15 years and is performed in a fully contained process that meets state and federal environmental standards. This design ensures zero water withdrawal, zero discharge, and continuous operation — fully aligned with TeraWulf’s commitment to sustainable digital infrastructure. -- https://www.lakemarinerdata.com/closed-loop-cooling
An acre of alfalfa is typically irrigated at 5.5 AF per year. The standard center pivot field is 130 acres ~ 700 AF of irrigation, to grow alfalfa to ship overseas. Converting to gallons, 210 million gallons, for one field.
80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage.
USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.
The article source for the 17B gallons is a Congressional Research Service report and its source is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. Both are interesting reads. The 17B number is an estimate. Here are some of the inputs:
* reported numbers of server deliveries
* power draw per server
* average utilization based on various workloads, including a Llama 70B 8 node training run
* mix of data center cooling types
* do math to get to 66B liters, which rounds down to 17B galoons
Article title is extremely misleading. These are figures from 2023 - almost three years old now, and since then US datacenter power consumption has doubled.
Again, defensive HN commenters respond to facts about water consumption by citing other sources of water consumption
But fail to consider that "AI" adds to those sources and raises total water consupmtion
Is total water consumption important
Perhaps the comparision that readers will make is not (a) existing non-"AI" water consumption versus "AI" water consumption but (b) total water consumption without the additonal "AI" data centers versus total water consumption with additional "AI" data centers. IOW, "before" versus "after"
Will readers ignore (b) and only think about (a)
It's the same response from HN commenters every time: compare "AI" data centers to some other water consuming activity
The rise in meat consumption in the past year is already double the TOTAL data center consumption of water. Look at that very carefully - the few percentage points rise in meat consumption consumes more water than all data centers in the entire country.
When it comes to the rise of total water consumption like you’re talking about, data centers are a drop in the bucket. Truly negligible.
To be clear, referencing other sources of water consumption is sleight of hand, a well-recognised diversionary tactic
It's like when some Silicon Valley company is breaking the law and HN commenters attempt to defend/excuse the behaviour by pointing at other offenders. This is a juvenile response
Something like
"See, they do it, too."
or
"They need to investigate [not a "tech" company] first."
If the amount of water used by "AI" data centers was "negligible" then, one might expect, "AI" companies would be transparent about water usage instead of forcing the public to estimate
Wild to see pro-AI datacenter people pushing the vegetarian narrative. For the last 50 years people have found the whole vegetarian narrative annoying (even to those of us who have been vegetarian). Way to pick like the worst positions. Anti-human, anti-jobs, and now (newly added) and preaching to people upset that they should be a vegetarian? For being the smartest people you are horrible at understanding people.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 26.3 ms ] threadVs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert.
The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A.
Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no.
If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns.
So don't push it.
This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.
Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.
non-issue, chinese propaganda to get us to slow down.
unfortunately some people parrot it, but most are smart enough to know it's bs.
you'd think they would want to shutdown golf courses first, it's pure leisure and much more water, but it's not about that :)
However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.
Red flags galore. Wouldn't surprise me if it was bankrolled by bad actors and/or a website created/operated by AI agents.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057
Annual withdrawals (2015)
- Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal
- Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal
- Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal
- Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal
- Aquaculture: ~2.76 trillion gal
- Mining: ~1.46 trillion gal
- Livestock: ~730 billion gal
- Total: ~117.5 trillion gal (322 Bgal/day)
Source: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015: U.S. Geological Survey Circular - https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441
This is a good illustration how cursed the datacenter topic has become when people go out of their minds on computer cooling while continuing to eat meat which lets be perfectly clear - is mostly for entertainment purposes. I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.
I can imagine raising issues with a specific datacenter in a specific water-constrained location, but I agree that being vocally concerned about the teaspoons of water consumed to produce an AI response while being unconcerned with the thousands of gallons used to produce a cheeseburger seems like innumerate virtue signaling.
An analogy would be if you have $5000 a month on income but spend $4950 on rent, utilities, insurance, food, etc. then its not hypocritical to say that you shouldn't give an additional $200 to the local billionaire because that's only a small percentage of what you spend on rent. 'Hey man, if you can afford to live indoors, the least you can do is go into debt for local billionaire to become even more billionairy'
If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environmental impact of meat production, berates you for defending data center water use, would that convince you to change your mind?
What about a vegan, who also stopped flying and doesn't drive, and is organizing a protest to shut down the local golf course?
Are they stupid or something?
But that's tripled of water use across all sectors due to datacenter buildout. So no "comparison" to other uses is needed.
EDIT: Ah, I did misread it. Sorry!
- A truck holds 5000 gallons
- It would take 3.5 million trips to transport that much
- If each trip was 500 miles roundtrip, that's about 2 billion miles
- Trucks travel 140 billion miles each year in the US. That would add less than 2% to the total miles
- The trucking industry is about $1 trillion in revenue per year. So 2% of that is $20 billion total to transport 17 billion gallons. Or around $1 per gallon.
That's just your opinion, though. I would prefer a purely vegerarian society with advanced AI that can cure cancer or discover new maths to society with meat and no AI.
Meat is basically optional, you don’t need meat to be healthy or happy. There are vegetarian body builders. Meat has, probably, negative value on most American’s lives, due to its contribution to heart disease.
That’s not to say meat isn’t tasty. It is. But from an objective standpoint, the value is ehhh.
Arguably, AI has much more value, and for 1/100th the water cost. Hey, that’s pretty good!
It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists.
There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.
Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.
Main regions do have enough water to support evaporative cooling. When water is available, using it is prudent because it saves so much electricity.
Using surface water is not a practical approach for most cases because the process would need to be built next to a river or lake - there is limited industrial real estate in these areas.
Fun fact, citizens of The Dalles, OR had to sue their own government to get them to release numbers on how much Google data centers were consuming (info Google stipulated should be kept "proprietary"):
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
I think cold seawater can be used for the external loop, through a heat exchanger where it would meet the heated pure water from the internal cooling loops. This would cause evaporation of the salt water which could be captured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Multi-stage_flash...
For a closed loop cooling project:
80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage.
USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.
1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energ...
But fail to consider that "AI" adds to those sources and raises total water consupmtion
Is total water consumption important
Perhaps the comparision that readers will make is not (a) existing non-"AI" water consumption versus "AI" water consumption but (b) total water consumption without the additonal "AI" data centers versus total water consumption with additional "AI" data centers. IOW, "before" versus "after"
Will readers ignore (b) and only think about (a)
It's the same response from HN commenters every time: compare "AI" data centers to some other water consuming activity
When it comes to the rise of total water consumption like you’re talking about, data centers are a drop in the bucket. Truly negligible.
It's like when some Silicon Valley company is breaking the law and HN commenters attempt to defend/excuse the behaviour by pointing at other offenders. This is a juvenile response
Something like
"See, they do it, too."
or
"They need to investigate [not a "tech" company] first."
If the amount of water used by "AI" data centers was "negligible" then, one might expect, "AI" companies would be transparent about water usage instead of forcing the public to estimate