Playing the devil’s advocate: don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies? If so, why would a private company provide this information?
I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that.
Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
> the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry
Data centers tend to concentrate their water usage within urban areas, causing a strain on local resources. The value of their output is much less tangible. Their water consumption scales up around tenfold if you consider the indirect usage from generating the electricity.
Essentially, telling people to go vegan and get rid of their golf courses is going to piss them off, hence the reaction people have to being told that datacenters are more important than their comfort.
I'm personally willing to change my life to help the planet and nature in general to the point it doesn't affect my wellbeing (as in health and safety). For me, personally, the problem is not changing per se, but people finding no amount of change enough, always moving the goalposts with "but, what if" clauses.
The problem with datacenter water use is the state of the water leaving the data center. Agriculture and meat industry can reuse the water multiple times from cleaner to dirtier processes and return it to the nature with reasonable processing.
The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
> The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
Why would any water be returned?
Datacenters (and literally every industrial process that requires cooling) use water for evaporative cooling. The water evaporates, then returns as rain elsewhere.
The only water being "returned" I can think of would be from the intermittent or continuous blowdown systems to maintain TDS levels; but blowdown is a small fraction of the water consumed and is typically returned back via the city sewer system.
We're talking about water that's released in general use, right? I would expect a closed cooling loop to have some biocides but have almost none of that leave the system.
And one datacenter had a weird bacteria that one time.
> But on the other hand; yes, it would also help enormously if people ate less meat.
At first you had me, but then I realised it's not true if the price is building more data centres! That was just a trick to make the climate worse! Grr /s
By “strain on local resources” are you just stating the fact that they use resources? Or are you trying to imply that it causes problems for those resources?
Companies don’t just buy land, connect to water and power, and then the utilities get caught off guard when the water system is suddenly strained by water going somewhere. There are processes for approving this before connection.
If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.
I agree that utility planners have their work cut out to plan for data centers. It's a different paradigm than what they're used to. I think they are being caught off-guard, but it's a matter of process and infrastructure. They typically plan around averaged or linear trends, but data centers can have volatile usage spikes, and supply can depend on e.g. seasonal rainfall which is challenging to predict.
Households with yards will have far more volatile water usage spikes related to seasonal rainfalls than a fully built out datacenter will.
A recent datacenter proposal near me was going to be built on a ~35 acre site. The entire site projected to use ~300 gallons of water a day when fully operational. That's including toilets, irrigation, etc. A household on a quarter acre lot in that area often uses 10-15,000 gallons of water in a month. 35 acres cut into quarter-acre-ish lots means a bit under 140 households. We'll cut it down and say 100 after streets and what not. That lot being a neighborhood like the others nearby would probably use at least a million gallons of water in a month, about 33,300+ gallons a day.
> A typical data center uses 300,000 gallons of water each day (equivalent to the demands of about 1,000 households), but large data centers can use an estimated 5 million gallons of water each day
Only if allowed to. Most data centres I've used have no connection to water from the data centre halls other than to the toilets. Using open loop water cooling is a cost cutting measure it's a choice whether or not to allow.
> If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.
Call it an echo chamber but when it comes to data centers that's the preponderance of news that I read. These two stories are about the county next door to mine. The first story highlights how the builders of the data-center continuously broke zoning laws. The second story from a month later describes how the board of commissioners let all that slide and approved construction to continue.
Those guys were fined a "record" $1.1 million, and:
> The state is mandating DataOne apply for and obtain the required permits or cease operations, but is giving the company 45 days to do so, according to a NJDEP spokesperson. During that time, regulators are allowing the facility to continue running the generators.
We're talking about an order of magnitude increase in the number of data centers in less than a decade and way more than an order of magnitude increase in the power needs because the AI data centers use a lot more power than even the big data centers of several years ago.
That's way beyond what utility planners can reasonably plan for.
The Netherlands does not have areas sufficiently far removed from urban areas for this to matter. In fact the entire country has a managed water table, the bodies which govern it are the oldest demicratic institutions in the world (over a millenium), and survived any change in ruler country and government in the meantime.
There's no river or creek not used for drinkwater consumption or management, and they are all connected to agricultural use and transportation (canal water levels) as well. It's one big system, and farmers cheating on how much they pump up is already too big of a proboem for this to not matter.
You are totally right to point this out, and I apologize for the whiplash. Let's clarify exactly how overblown data centre water usages is compared to the agriculture industry.
In data centres all that water is so that some wimpy cunt gets to hit return after spending no more than 5 minutes in an half baked prompt so he can insert the answer into his pitch deck, or PR review — and now with pacing the frontier models, he actually doesn't need to insert it, it's inserted automatically wherever it might fit. When it comes to agriculture, that is to produce things like food. This requires obviously much more water, which means that's what we really should be cutting down. Agents don't need food so the solution is just to replace humans with agents.
If you have any other stubborn question resisting clarification just hit me up, and I'll explain it to you immediately and clearly.
> And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
This is a Dutch website and here in the Netherlands we have demand issues. In these same areas where issues exist, data centres are being planned and built. There are waiting lists now for normal businesses who want a new connection to the net, or connections with more capacity. These are lists waiting for capacity to become available: The demand on the current net is already too high.
The are resources acquired from the government in most places. You have to be able to plan and expanding capacity which requires public funds.
I live right next to a waste valorisation plant[1]. They have to exactly specify what amount of water they use and what amount of water they then send out to the waste water treatment facility. It also has to be clean to a very specific standard before it leaves which is also checked.
We have datacenters in Switzerland too, but very little outrage or debate because there are strict rules in place in most places. They can build all they want but it costs significantly more to meet environmental requirements.
The valorisation plant next to my home has a water cooling tower/fans significantly oversized just to make sure the noise is keep under the required level.
> why would a private company provide this information?
Because there's a building populist push against these developments.
Presumably they still want to build these things. If I was trying to convince people who hate me to let me do what I want, I would not play so secretive as it may look suspicious. Especially if, ostensibly, the data is in my favor.
Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
> Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
This is extremely inappropriate on HN. Or anywhere, really.
I can think of a few reasons that companies might not share data. A big one is that people have no idea what a responsible amount of water usage is, so your information will be weaponized no matter what.
People keep comparing datacenter water use to agricultural water use, and it doesn't make sense to me. I can't tell if it's a bad-faith comparison or if people really know that little about how water is used in these industries.
The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.
That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.
It doesn't make sense to me either, but in a different way...
We need the food, we'll die without food, telling people to eat less of whatever food, so a few "tech bros" can build a new datacenter is outright evil.
People here generally don't believe that the water usage in DCs is enough to affect agriculture or that the areas so short on water are the ones we should be growing food in anyways.
The downvotes are probably about reasoning about your your conclusions instead of the things that led you to them. Though it'd be nice if that had been discussion instead of silent downvotes.
Golf courses are a better comparison. Data centers use a fraction of the water that it takes to keep the grass green for a hobby enjoyed by a handful of people.
Not sure why you think your finger-in-the-wind wind understanding of future AI compute demand should trump the projections of companies who actually operate in this area?
But if you do end up being correct, then the data centers in question will just sit partially or fully idle, using no / a tiny fraction of the electricity and water they could use (which as others have said on this forum, water usage concerns are massively overblown in most data center builds anyway)
Not sure why you think the interests of companies who operate in this area, should trump environmental concerns for the people who live next to where they plan to build the data centers? I for one prefer quality of life for actual people over speculative profits for tech billionaires.
I'm also not sure why you think it's a good thing to produce a bunch of electronics using conflict minerals and let them sit idle? Surely you must see the negative "externalities" of this?
And as we all know, investments of vast amounts of capital by companies can never be contrary to the well-being of humans... See Purdue, Monsanto, Union Carbide, etc.
> don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies?
As others (including TFA) have noted, this is false because there's an EU directive requiring "private companies" to disclose this.
In any case, the "it's a private company" defense is as tired now as it was when it was about blocking people from social media, or debanking etc. Just because the legal system hasn't yet caught up to regulating companies in a certain way, doesn't mean that it's not in everyone's best interest (except perhaps the owners of the companies in question) to have such regulation.
> I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry.
The important distinction being that agriculture provides food, while data centers provide AI slop and advertising.
> If so, why would a private company provide this information?
Because the law says they have to.
Water usage in terms of total volume is meaningless and certainly an overblown concern on a global scale. In fact, it is not a concern at all on a global scale, but it can be a local problem. If a datacenter uses water normally intended for households and the infrastructure is not designed for this, it is definitely a problem. And that's a good reason for having to report water usage, not just to punish them, but also to plan distribution accordingly.
That isn't a good reason for them to do so. Laws need to be enforced to be effective. If no one is going to make them disclose the info, then the smart move it to just not do it, as they are.
My private company complies with laws that make sense to us and also with laws that we find annoying. We do that because we prefer the efficiencies and benefits of living in a high-trust society, and part of that is behaving that way ourselves.
“Smart” in a selfish way, but not in a bigger-picture kind of way.
I’d rather spend tax money on bridges (or tax rebates) than on bankrolling a muscular cadre of enforcers on the assumption that laws are meaningless and everyone will cheat without a cop breathing down their neck.
mate the reason why you can't just build a house without a permit is because the government needs to account how you're using existing public infrastructure, not because they just wanna throw bureaucracy at you (though it might be the case most of the times)
that's all there is to it, accounting for existing infrastructure, and somehow 500kwh is enough to invoke a reason to do so
Construction permits for housing also ensure that the next owner of the house isn’t dealing with a bunch of problems down the road due to substandard methods and materials. That’s the primary benefit in my opinion, along with life safety.
Yes, a single hamburger takes 620 gallons(!) of water to produce. Eat plants. Plenty of great plant protein alternatives available, plus they are healthier and don't depend on killing living beings.
"California could solve its water shortage if every household ate sixteen less almonds per day." -- I said this at the conclusion of an all-day water resources hackathon to illustrate the fact that ag water and urban water are not the same.
Conflating them is category confusion. Lying about water usage is part of CA culture.
EU is in such a weird position. They are realizing that software, robotics, and generally automation through AI is the industrial future, but they seem to be paralyzed to actually start the build-up that will feed that frontier industry and economy.
Assuming you are right, the "build-up" of more physical datacenters isn't really the difficult part, training frontier models is. The open-weight Chinese models are several months behind frontier models at this stage and as long as you're not interested in burning cash to stay in the lead you can just wait it out. Many signs (upcoming ridiculous IPO figures and benchmarks) point to the current LLM paradigm reaching a plateau.
I think that currently the EU is focusing on strengthening itself from a military perspective due to US policy shifts, so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people, thus prioritizing safety and perhaps energy production, as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China. If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
> so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people
The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
> as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China
Yes, there are government policy reasons behind why this is the case. Some would argue that these policy decisions are a net negative for the EU.
> If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
Fair point, these are good things to focus on. However, EU citizens are going to love it when there are no frontier-tech opportunities left in their countries, with everything in this area having to be imported from the US and China (note that just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons).
> just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons
China is not providing "open weight" models just because they think it's good for humanity. It is a competitive strategy to stay relevant at the forefront of the industry. The reality is that China is severely compute-constrained mostly due to Nvidia chip and ASML embargo. Nearly all available compute capacity has to go toward training, leaving very little for inference. It is why they release their models openly allowing third parties in EU and USA to host inference for them.
This will change when China reaches a critical scale of domestic AI chip production, which is inevitable.
Yes, I'm sure that EU doing its best to ignore building any technology frontier capabilities in its population will lead to a good solution for this lack of VC funding... ;-)
No shortage of visionaries in EU leadership these days :-)
The problem is that EU has no money. France is virtually broke. Germany and eastern/central Europe is hemorrhaging its most valuable industries to cheaper Chinese competition. The whole bloc is carving out $100 billion military aid packages for Ukraine basically every year with no end in sight. And now EU is getting into a trade war with China. Energy costs were bad even before the Ukraine war and Iran, and now they're at the boiling point.
It's why the USA and Chinese vultures are swarming. It's a bad situation.
They refuse it because if they would say "1 million liters a year!" the knee-jerk reaction will be completely predictable even though that's just tiny compared to a small swimming pool or industrial or agricultural site.
The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.
Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).
If they are taking reasonable steps to mitigate consumption and pollution then they should be able to clearly explain that to the public. The fact they won't suggests they aren't.
Just because people haven't cared about the environment before doesn't mean they shouldn't start now. And just because there are worse existing polluters doesn't mean we shouldn't resist new ones.
A new golf course used to be seen as a great thing to have in your back yard and now we know their pesticide use increases the risk of Parkinson's. People are waking up and caring more. We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
> We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
Funny thing is, we could probably have a very sustainable economy if we just changed a few laws to limit the influence of the 1%-ers and their current abilities to extract rent and profit off the work of normal people.
Just need to hope enough people "wake up" so to speak. Unfortunately way too many people are still dreaming of becoming such a 1%-er and themselves living off the backs of others. "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" so to speak.
I’m European and I’m extremely sure that when 90% of people hear "x m^3" they don’t think of it as "1000*x litres". And the majority of people likely can’t recall on the spot that 1 l = 1 dm^3 (a unit nobody uses), even if they remember that you multiply by 1000 to go from m^3 to dm^3. In any case most people don’t do conversions like that unless someone specifically asks them to.
Volumes are in general very unintuitive to people due to the cubic scaling. It’s further confused by the fact that the widely used decilitre, centilitre, and millilitre do scale linearly, unlike cubic metres. So 1 l = 1 dm^3 but 1 dl = 100 cm^3…
I don't know where do you live but even my small nephews and nieces understand that a 1 meter cube of water is A LOT OF WATER, because mentally, we have lots of 2 liters bottles to compare it to
>Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way.
In the Netherlands it is not just about AI datacenters, even before the rise of AI pushback against Meta's planned datacenter made them cancel it. There has been a lot of criticism of the municipality that allowed Microsoft to expand its datacenters.
The argument is that this is a small country that already has to make tradeoffs to get to its desired energy mix (wind turbines near cities on land) and then these datacenters are built that consume the power that is generated by sacrificing the little remaining open space.
In the last few years there is actually a electricity shortage in some regions so "we can hook up this 200 MW datacenter but not your house" is a bad look.
It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.
From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.
The people who don’t care about environmental impact and resource use are the same people pushing for more and faster datacenter deployment. The Republican Party is the one getting rid of environmental protection rules, it’s the party most financed by fossil fuel companies, and the party that was/is against solar and windmill development. The party that gutted all the regulatory agencies and is colluding with the AI industry.
But they should be made to report this. AND their use of water should be regulated - they don't need to use any water at all, it's just cheaper for them - and they should be contributing enough to mitigate negative effects on energy prices.
The problem isn't data centres. The problem is not pricing in and regulating externalities, whether caused by data centres or other things.
It would also quickly show us who actually cares about the environmental effects and who are using it as an excuse.
Most of it comes from concerns about water and electricity rates sky rocketing and also simply not being available when humans need it. At least at the local level.
> the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment
And here you have people seemingly caring about the environment, even if it's only as you say a "green-washing" (that's not what that term means, normally) of AI fears. And you're telling them to stop it?
Also, the claim of "people would misinterpret the information, so better not release the info at all" is just some sort of elitist "the average person is dumb" sentiment. If you take that to its logical conclusion, nobody should tell the public anything at all. Reminiscent of a lot of the public debate during the covid times.
This figure is about the water consumption only. The estimate about the electricity consumption, in that same article, is much higher than that.
The main problem is, in my opinion, that those are just estimates. If we are supposed to accommodate the current and potential future needs, we need real data. Not estimates.
> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.
I do not understand how that is even possible.
If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.
I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.
I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.
And I wouldn't be so sure on being 'eventually' obliged, someone has to enforce it for that to happen and it's not looking like anyone has profit in it
Perhaps this article is one step in the process of forcing disclosure. The Dutch parliament has recently (April 2026) clarified its law implementing the EED.
The purpose of these laws is to give the state the option to crack down on anyone they feel like at any time. They are not meant to be obeyed, and that is obvious to anyone with eyes.
It's probably because directives have to be read into law at the country level.
(Directives are binding on states. They transpose them into national law, possibly adding additional clauses as it goes past (EU directives set a minimum standard, not a maximum) at which point they're binding on people.)
Nobody ever said the EU was efficient. Look for a deadline for that transposition on the original directive.
You make a very good point. However, in this case, the deadline is two years in the past. From Article 12:
> 1. By 15 May 2024 and every year thereafter, Member States shall require owners and operators of data centres in their territory with a power demand of the installed information technology (IT) of at least 500kW, to make the information set out in Annex VII publicly available, except for information subject to Union and national law protecting trade and business secrets and confidentiality.
> 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to data centres used for, or providing their services exclusively with the final aim of, defence and civil protection.
European Union has procedures for infringement or non-conformity in the reception of directives, but in practice, the fines are relatively small compared to a country budget (or how much money a country gains from taxes by not applying the directive) [1]
Cool, thanks for looking that up. This gets us closer to where the fault lies. Has the Netherlands implemented the directive yet?
Chatbot says "partially", and "Article 12, concerning data centres, has already been implemented. The relevant Dutch decree was published in May 2024 and entered into force on 7 May 2024." and a link to https://wetgevingskalender.overheid.nl/Regeling/WGK026248
But I neither read Dutch, nor trust the chatbot to do so, so all I can do is report the link.
National governments kind of suck at enforcing these. In some cases, like the notorious Ireland Apple tax shelter, they may not want to enforce the rules because they feel they are benefiting from the evasion.
This kind of basic regulatory work is pretty thankless even when it's important. But I suspect the toxic politics of data centers will kick up some enforcement action sooner or later.
> In some cases, like the notorious Ireland Apple tax shelter, they may not want to enforce the rules because they feel they are benefiting from the evasion.
I thought it turned out the EU had no business in national tax affairs.
The line between a tax break and illegal state aid is exceedingly blurry. (It swung back and forth as it went through the courts, but the final ruling was "illegal state aid")
Extra-national laws are a real minefield, though. Ireland is in a great position without having too do very much of its own to have got there other than sign the right agreements.
It's probably because that 500kw number is too arbitrary. I work in a single warehouse with robotics based logistics that uses 500kw. Nobody is asking us how much water we use.
Reality is if a regulation is too broad it tends to get overwhelmed and dies when it requires 100 people to enforce.
Even a basic in house data center can push 100kw with a few servers.
500kW is basically 0kW when it comes to data centers. That’s only 600A at 480V three-phase, a McDonalds restaurant has a larger electrical service than that, lol.
I have more than one customer with a single motor that uses that much power.
I think it would be helpful for people in this thread to understand the differences between EU Regulations and Directives :
• EU Regulation: A binding legal act that applies immediately and identically in all EU countries as soon as it takes effect, without needing national laws.
• EU Directive: A legislative act that sets a mandatory goal that all EU countries must achieve, but allows each nation to pass its own laws to implement it.
It takes time for directives to take effect, unless a member state's national law already implements them.
In the US, the rhetorical trick is to include the 3.4T* gallons of water utilized for power generation along with cooling (160B) to make this number super scary when water was utilized for power generation because it's a good cheap relatively clean power source so the datacenters were built near hydroelectric plants.
We can't do much about the 160B, but we could do a lot to build more power generation and storage. As just one example, in west Texas, natural gas is flared into the sky en masse from depleted oil wells because methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Some sites could be tapped to hit hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt of power generation. And any power you don't need can be exported to the Texas power grid so it can make money the day you turn it on. And if you're willing to spend a little more, you can sequester the CO2 and make the power generation mostly green.
Cue crickets from Silicon Valley on this one because it's neither nuclear nor renewable, but the crypto people love it so I would guess they'll eventually come around. That they haven't already is one facet of my disenchantment with tech culture. Their absurd belief in Star Trek Voyager-like scenarios playing out with AI in the next decade the other major one.
*Which is slightly more than the 3.3T gallons of water Americans used to water their lawns. So, ya know, where's the outrage?
Less than they do if there were people living on that same land, and way less than they use in China. Get over it, data centers and progress is the future.
Can someone explain the data center water usage? Data center don't drink water. It cools down the machine.
What's preventing them getting cool water from a lake and draining to it again to cool down? Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
It cools down the machines by evaporating, and is then released into the atmosphere. That also means the water needs to be clean, pretty much drinking water, because otherwise the evaporation would deposit minerals and stuff.
Turning water into steam uses much more energy than heating water, which means it's a much more effective means of cooling.
Evaporation losses will move the water to a different locality. DC's not only cool servers, but control humidity by adding or removing water to the air.
Warm water fed back into the ecosystem will (relatively) quickly cause unwanted changes to the lake's biosphere.
Unless it's properly filtered, returned water will be contaminated by material in the cooling system.
It puts local demand on the water system competing with human need.
> Unless it's properly filtered, returned water will be contaminated by material in the cooling system.
Any wastewater is regulated and typically doesn't need to be "filtered." For regular operations, water is treated but the evaporative process leaves most treatment chemicals behind.
>What's preventing them getting cool water from a lake and draining to it again to cool down?
Some do, but most don't since the requirements for using cooling water are relatively strict due to the pipes, equipment, and heat exchangers the water flows through. The water used needs to be free of any biological contaminants (such as bacteria and algae), maintain proper pH levels, and are often then treated with other chemicals such as biocides.
Lake water certainly can be treated to the level needed and used, it's just often cheaper to buy domestic water from the local utility than to construct and operate a small scale water treatment system along side the industrial process.
> Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
Most of the water is "consumed" via open loop evaporative cooling systems, so the water is never really "used" as in destroyed or anything. The majority of it is evaporated and returns to the land as rain and the rest is returned via sanitary drains, to city sewer systems.
Didn't you know? Once you heat up water that's it, you can't use that water ever again. It's even worse if you make it evaporate, not just useless but GONE.
Now try again with local and short term impacts on the whole ecosystem instead of saying "Ackchyually water never leave the atmosphere so it's unlimited"
> According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030.
Yeah, so 2030 sounds like a long way off. It's 3 years away. We are not going to be meeting any climate targets.
Clause Opus 5.5 reports that based on the 5.1 billion kWh used it's about 9.2 billion liters in Europe (cited from the Water Usage Effectiveness WUE industry-average). About 1.8 liters per kWh.
Maybe I'm being naive, but the policies needed here feel quite simple.
First, since data centers likely need some kind of treated (i.e. demineralized) water, and they want to use local municipal supplies, then they can do so only if they pay full market rate for that water. I would push for them to pay 1% to 5% above market rate to help offset other costs, but market rate at minimum. At no point should homeowners and/or residential customers subsidize this usage.
Second, commercial users (including data centers) should only get water produced by treatment plants in excess of residential needs. Plants can only treat so much, pipes can only carry so much, and priority goes to residential first.
Third, ground water is off limits for any commercial/industrial evaporative cooling uses. If data centers want to cool that way, then they need a different source of water.
If they pay market rate, the clearing price will go up making things more expensive for everyone. If they go off-grid they make the machines needed to produce water or electricity or whatever more expensive. If they borrow money, they make government bond yields go up and cause governments to start thinking about cutting pensions and stuff, not to mention increased mortgage rates for whoever wants to buy a home or is on a variable rate mortgage. There's no world in which this AI stuff doesn't increase costs for the rest of us.
The main thing is evaporative cooling is incredibly wasteful. The water should be returned to the system, if it's going to be used, and not sent into the atmosphere. This is especially important in regions with limited access to water, which, ironically, is where many data centers seem to be located.
I don't know which data center it is, some remote location of Canada, that has 100 million litres of fuel trucked up each month for it's generators. I don't think that has a long term plan behind it because 100m liters of anything is a lot, and with the price of fuel now it's definitely not a small line item.
Btw I heard this second hand a friend in the mining industry.
Imagine fretting about water and electricity usage in europe, where we'll never ever have a datacenter build-up because electricity prices are too high anyway.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadI personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that.
Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
Data centers tend to concentrate their water usage within urban areas, causing a strain on local resources. The value of their output is much less tangible. Their water consumption scales up around tenfold if you consider the indirect usage from generating the electricity.
I'm personally willing to change my life to help the planet and nature in general to the point it doesn't affect my wellbeing (as in health and safety). For me, personally, the problem is not changing per se, but people finding no amount of change enough, always moving the goalposts with "but, what if" clauses.
The problem with datacenter water use is the state of the water leaving the data center. Agriculture and meat industry can reuse the water multiple times from cleaner to dirtier processes and return it to the nature with reasonable processing.
The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
Why would any water be returned? Datacenters (and literally every industrial process that requires cooling) use water for evaporative cooling. The water evaporates, then returns as rain elsewhere. The only water being "returned" I can think of would be from the intermittent or continuous blowdown systems to maintain TDS levels; but blowdown is a small fraction of the water consumed and is typically returned back via the city sewer system.
We're talking about water that's released in general use, right? I would expect a closed cooling loop to have some biocides but have almost none of that leave the system.
And one datacenter had a weird bacteria that one time.
At first you had me, but then I realised it's not true if the price is building more data centres! That was just a trick to make the climate worse! Grr /s
By “strain on local resources” are you just stating the fact that they use resources? Or are you trying to imply that it causes problems for those resources?
Companies don’t just buy land, connect to water and power, and then the utilities get caught off guard when the water system is suddenly strained by water going somewhere. There are processes for approving this before connection.
If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.
A recent datacenter proposal near me was going to be built on a ~35 acre site. The entire site projected to use ~300 gallons of water a day when fully operational. That's including toilets, irrigation, etc. A household on a quarter acre lot in that area often uses 10-15,000 gallons of water in a month. 35 acres cut into quarter-acre-ish lots means a bit under 140 households. We'll cut it down and say 100 after streets and what not. That lot being a neighborhood like the others nearby would probably use at least a million gallons of water in a month, about 33,300+ gallons a day.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water...
> You can't build an apartment complex here, because our water/sewer system is already over capacity
/ignores that statement and builds the apartment complex because "omg, we need more housing" arguments are used to not pay attention to consequences
/water and sewer system can't keep up and all kinds of expensive problems occur
Call it an echo chamber but when it comes to data centers that's the preponderance of news that I read. These two stories are about the county next door to mine. The first story highlights how the builders of the data-center continuously broke zoning laws. The second story from a month later describes how the board of commissioners let all that slide and approved construction to continue.
https://www.cpr.org/2026/08/07/weld-county-ai-data-center/ https://www.cpr.org/2026/09/10/weld-county-officials-approve...
But it's not just my state:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/25/new-jers...
Those guys were fined a "record" $1.1 million, and:
> The state is mandating DataOne apply for and obtain the required permits or cease operations, but is giving the company 45 days to do so, according to a NJDEP spokesperson. During that time, regulators are allowing the facility to continue running the generators.
That fine is a slap in the wrist.
That's way beyond what utility planners can reasonably plan for.
When you apply for a connection to a utility, they make you tell them your potential usage so they can assess if they can even connect you.
There's no river or creek not used for drinkwater consumption or management, and they are all connected to agricultural use and transportation (canal water levels) as well. It's one big system, and farmers cheating on how much they pump up is already too big of a proboem for this to not matter.
In data centres all that water is so that some wimpy cunt gets to hit return after spending no more than 5 minutes in an half baked prompt so he can insert the answer into his pitch deck, or PR review — and now with pacing the frontier models, he actually doesn't need to insert it, it's inserted automatically wherever it might fit. When it comes to agriculture, that is to produce things like food. This requires obviously much more water, which means that's what we really should be cutting down. Agents don't need food so the solution is just to replace humans with agents.
If you have any other stubborn question resisting clarification just hit me up, and I'll explain it to you immediately and clearly.
Meat too is wasteful, but yet again, here we are. All these are direct result of choices made by the majority...
This is a Dutch website and here in the Netherlands we have demand issues. In these same areas where issues exist, data centres are being planned and built. There are waiting lists now for normal businesses who want a new connection to the net, or connections with more capacity. These are lists waiting for capacity to become available: The demand on the current net is already too high.
I live right next to a waste valorisation plant[1]. They have to exactly specify what amount of water they use and what amount of water they then send out to the waste water treatment facility. It also has to be clean to a very specific standard before it leaves which is also checked.
We have datacenters in Switzerland too, but very little outrage or debate because there are strict rules in place in most places. They can build all they want but it costs significantly more to meet environmental requirements.
The valorisation plant next to my home has a water cooling tower/fans significantly oversized just to make sure the noise is keep under the required level.
[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/
Because there's a building populist push against these developments.
Presumably they still want to build these things. If I was trying to convince people who hate me to let me do what I want, I would not play so secretive as it may look suspicious. Especially if, ostensibly, the data is in my favor.
Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
This is extremely inappropriate on HN. Or anywhere, really.
I can think of a few reasons that companies might not share data. A big one is that people have no idea what a responsible amount of water usage is, so your information will be weaponized no matter what.
The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.
That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.
People need to eat, it's non negotiable. We do not need data centres.
We need the food, we'll die without food, telling people to eat less of whatever food, so a few "tech bros" can build a new datacenter is outright evil.
The downvotes are probably about reasoning about your your conclusions instead of the things that led you to them. Though it'd be nice if that had been discussion instead of silent downvotes.
They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.
But if you do end up being correct, then the data centers in question will just sit partially or fully idle, using no / a tiny fraction of the electricity and water they could use (which as others have said on this forum, water usage concerns are massively overblown in most data center builds anyway)
I'm also not sure why you think it's a good thing to produce a bunch of electronics using conflict minerals and let them sit idle? Surely you must see the negative "externalities" of this?
According to whom and by what metric? The companies investing vast amounts of capital into them seem to disagree.
As others (including TFA) have noted, this is false because there's an EU directive requiring "private companies" to disclose this.
In any case, the "it's a private company" defense is as tired now as it was when it was about blocking people from social media, or debanking etc. Just because the legal system hasn't yet caught up to regulating companies in a certain way, doesn't mean that it's not in everyone's best interest (except perhaps the owners of the companies in question) to have such regulation.
> I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry.
The important distinction being that agriculture provides food, while data centers provide AI slop and advertising.
Are you suggesting we should stop using water to grow food for humans?
Because the law says they have to.
Water usage in terms of total volume is meaningless and certainly an overblown concern on a global scale. In fact, it is not a concern at all on a global scale, but it can be a local problem. If a datacenter uses water normally intended for households and the infrastructure is not designed for this, it is definitely a problem. And that's a good reason for having to report water usage, not just to punish them, but also to plan distribution accordingly.
That isn't a good reason for them to do so. Laws need to be enforced to be effective. If no one is going to make them disclose the info, then the smart move it to just not do it, as they are.
“Smart” in a selfish way, but not in a bigger-picture kind of way.
I’d rather spend tax money on bridges (or tax rebates) than on bankrolling a muscular cadre of enforcers on the assumption that laws are meaningless and everyone will cheat without a cop breathing down their neck.
that's all there is to it, accounting for existing infrastructure, and somehow 500kwh is enough to invoke a reason to do so
Conflating them is category confusion. Lying about water usage is part of CA culture.
I think that currently the EU is focusing on strengthening itself from a military perspective due to US policy shifts, so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people, thus prioritizing safety and perhaps energy production, as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China. If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
> as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China
Yes, there are government policy reasons behind why this is the case. Some would argue that these policy decisions are a net negative for the EU.
> If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
Fair point, these are good things to focus on. However, EU citizens are going to love it when there are no frontier-tech opportunities left in their countries, with everything in this area having to be imported from the US and China (note that just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons).
China is not providing "open weight" models just because they think it's good for humanity. It is a competitive strategy to stay relevant at the forefront of the industry. The reality is that China is severely compute-constrained mostly due to Nvidia chip and ASML embargo. Nearly all available compute capacity has to go toward training, leaving very little for inference. It is why they release their models openly allowing third parties in EU and USA to host inference for them.
This will change when China reaches a critical scale of domestic AI chip production, which is inevitable.
There isn't a lot of VC funding available in Europe compared to the US, so without government intervention catching up will be very tricky.
No shortage of visionaries in EU leadership these days :-)
It's why the USA and Chinese vultures are swarming. It's a bad situation.
There is currently no real trade war EU-China; Chinese EVs are streaming into the EU while the US is blocking them completely for one example.
While Germany and more specifically Volkswagen is having some issues, EU industrial production actually had growth last year.
The $100 billion aid packages to Ukraine are also a bit overblown based on public figures https://www.kielinstitut.de/media/news/ukraine-support-track....
I feel like your comment pulls on some real threads, then blows things out of proportion.
It's kind of sad that the only European LLM lab of significance is not even setting their model as a default one any longer.
Realizing something is not the same as acting on it and Europe is falling further and further behind.
The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.
Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).
Just because people haven't cared about the environment before doesn't mean they shouldn't start now. And just because there are worse existing polluters doesn't mean we shouldn't resist new ones.
A new golf course used to be seen as a great thing to have in your back yard and now we know their pesticide use increases the risk of Parkinson's. People are waking up and caring more. We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
Funny thing is, we could probably have a very sustainable economy if we just changed a few laws to limit the influence of the 1%-ers and their current abilities to extract rent and profit off the work of normal people.
Just need to hope enough people "wake up" so to speak. Unfortunately way too many people are still dreaming of becoming such a 1%-er and themselves living off the backs of others. "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" so to speak.
Volumes are in general very unintuitive to people due to the cubic scaling. It’s further confused by the fact that the widely used decilitre, centilitre, and millilitre do scale linearly, unlike cubic metres. So 1 l = 1 dm^3 but 1 dl = 100 cm^3…
In the Netherlands it is not just about AI datacenters, even before the rise of AI pushback against Meta's planned datacenter made them cancel it. There has been a lot of criticism of the municipality that allowed Microsoft to expand its datacenters. The argument is that this is a small country that already has to make tradeoffs to get to its desired energy mix (wind turbines near cities on land) and then these datacenters are built that consume the power that is generated by sacrificing the little remaining open space. In the last few years there is actually a electricity shortage in some regions so "we can hook up this 200 MW datacenter but not your house" is a bad look.
It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.
From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.
That is not corrective. There is an EU directive, but it would have to be adopted as local law to become actual law.
The datacenters are following the laws in their jurisdiction.
There is a very obvious pattern here
But they should be made to report this. AND their use of water should be regulated - they don't need to use any water at all, it's just cheaper for them - and they should be contributing enough to mitigate negative effects on energy prices.
The problem isn't data centres. The problem is not pricing in and regulating externalities, whether caused by data centres or other things.
It would also quickly show us who actually cares about the environmental effects and who are using it as an excuse.
And here you have people seemingly caring about the environment, even if it's only as you say a "green-washing" (that's not what that term means, normally) of AI fears. And you're telling them to stop it?
Also, the claim of "people would misinterpret the information, so better not release the info at all" is just some sort of elitist "the average person is dumb" sentiment. If you take that to its logical conclusion, nobody should tell the public anything at all. Reminiscent of a lot of the public debate during the covid times.
> In the Netherlands, it is estimated that they account for about 0.1 percent of total consumption.
If that's true, what's the problem?
The main problem is, in my opinion, that those are just estimates. If we are supposed to accommodate the current and potential future needs, we need real data. Not estimates.
Continuing a conversation is often just a slow-drip Streisand effect.
> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.
I do not understand how that is even possible.
If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.
I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.
I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.
And I wouldn't be so sure on being 'eventually' obliged, someone has to enforce it for that to happen and it's not looking like anyone has profit in it
(Directives are binding on states. They transpose them into national law, possibly adding additional clauses as it goes past (EU directives set a minimum standard, not a maximum) at which point they're binding on people.)
Nobody ever said the EU was efficient. Look for a deadline for that transposition on the original directive.
> 1. By 15 May 2024 and every year thereafter, Member States shall require owners and operators of data centres in their territory with a power demand of the installed information technology (IT) of at least 500kW, to make the information set out in Annex VII publicly available, except for information subject to Union and national law protecting trade and business secrets and confidentiality.
> 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to data centres used for, or providing their services exclusively with the final aim of, defence and civil protection.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ%3AJOL...
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/law/application-eu-law/implemen...
Chatbot says "partially", and "Article 12, concerning data centres, has already been implemented. The relevant Dutch decree was published in May 2024 and entered into force on 7 May 2024." and a link to https://wetgevingskalender.overheid.nl/Regeling/WGK026248
But I neither read Dutch, nor trust the chatbot to do so, so all I can do is report the link.
The Dutch newspaper participating in this article (https://www.trouw.nl/duurzaamheid-economie/nederland-weet-am...) states that a quarter of the statistics are public, but also that within Europe, that's one of the more transparent numbers.
It looks like nobody is really enforcing these laws anywhere.
Directives are not the same as regulations .
Directives are goals that must be achieved by adapting existing national laws or introducing new ones, and that takes time.
This kind of basic regulatory work is pretty thankless even when it's important. But I suspect the toxic politics of data centers will kick up some enforcement action sooner or later.
(Why is it so toxic? Well, the explicit promise from AI companies of mass unemployment combined with higher electricity prices, and maybe even destroy the world https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/anthropic... is why.)
I thought it turned out the EU had no business in national tax affairs.
Reality is if a regulation is too broad it tends to get overwhelmed and dies when it requires 100 people to enforce.
Even a basic in house data center can push 100kw with a few servers.
I have more than one customer with a single motor that uses that much power.
• EU Regulation: A binding legal act that applies immediately and identically in all EU countries as soon as it takes effect, without needing national laws.
• EU Directive: A legislative act that sets a mandatory goal that all EU countries must achieve, but allows each nation to pass its own laws to implement it.
It takes time for directives to take effect, unless a member state's national law already implements them.
We can't do much about the 160B, but we could do a lot to build more power generation and storage. As just one example, in west Texas, natural gas is flared into the sky en masse from depleted oil wells because methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Some sites could be tapped to hit hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt of power generation. And any power you don't need can be exported to the Texas power grid so it can make money the day you turn it on. And if you're willing to spend a little more, you can sequester the CO2 and make the power generation mostly green.
Cue crickets from Silicon Valley on this one because it's neither nuclear nor renewable, but the crypto people love it so I would guess they'll eventually come around. That they haven't already is one facet of my disenchantment with tech culture. Their absurd belief in Star Trek Voyager-like scenarios playing out with AI in the next decade the other major one.
*Which is slightly more than the 3.3T gallons of water Americans used to water their lawns. So, ya know, where's the outrage?
Can someone explain the data center water usage? Data center don't drink water. It cools down the machine.
What's preventing them getting cool water from a lake and draining to it again to cool down? Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
Turning water into steam uses much more energy than heating water, which means it's a much more effective means of cooling.
What you describe is the type of cooling used in certain power plants. That heats the lake though, which has its own environmental effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution
Some smaller data centers have a cool solution where they deposit extra heat into the municipal hot water grid, which is pretty neat https://www.techradar.com/pro/finally-some-good-usage-this-d...
Warm water fed back into the ecosystem will (relatively) quickly cause unwanted changes to the lake's biosphere.
Unless it's properly filtered, returned water will be contaminated by material in the cooling system.
It puts local demand on the water system competing with human need.
Any wastewater is regulated and typically doesn't need to be "filtered." For regular operations, water is treated but the evaporative process leaves most treatment chemicals behind.
Some do, but most don't since the requirements for using cooling water are relatively strict due to the pipes, equipment, and heat exchangers the water flows through. The water used needs to be free of any biological contaminants (such as bacteria and algae), maintain proper pH levels, and are often then treated with other chemicals such as biocides.
Lake water certainly can be treated to the level needed and used, it's just often cheaper to buy domestic water from the local utility than to construct and operate a small scale water treatment system along side the industrial process.
> Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
Most of the water is "consumed" via open loop evaporative cooling systems, so the water is never really "used" as in destroyed or anything. The majority of it is evaporated and returns to the land as rain and the rest is returned via sanitary drains, to city sewer systems.
> According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030.
Yeah, so 2030 sounds like a long way off. It's 3 years away. We are not going to be meeting any climate targets.
First, since data centers likely need some kind of treated (i.e. demineralized) water, and they want to use local municipal supplies, then they can do so only if they pay full market rate for that water. I would push for them to pay 1% to 5% above market rate to help offset other costs, but market rate at minimum. At no point should homeowners and/or residential customers subsidize this usage.
Second, commercial users (including data centers) should only get water produced by treatment plants in excess of residential needs. Plants can only treat so much, pipes can only carry so much, and priority goes to residential first.
Third, ground water is off limits for any commercial/industrial evaporative cooling uses. If data centers want to cool that way, then they need a different source of water.
Did I miss anything?
Btw I heard this second hand a friend in the mining industry.