It… doesn’t look that bad. Electricity use is sizable. Water which usually gets all this screaming is, well, look up how much a golf course or a large hotel uses.
It varies pretty greatly, but our golf course uses untreated water from a relatively dirty river that is not used for drinking. It looks like Google is using ground water from the aquifer. These are significantly different beasts.
It’s gonna be location dependent, and all golf courses are definitely not that well sited or ecologically engineered. I’d say most probably are not.
There are DCs that use grey water, are built by bodies of water to use them as direct heat sinks, etc. which is better.
The reason they use water at all is ironically to save energy. Evaporative cooling uses a lot less power. It’s a slider: all evaporative is little power and a lot of water, all closed cycles is lots of power and no water, and you can adjust between the extremes when designing the cooling system.
Using DC heat for urban heat in winter is the best idea. Put them in city centers. I think this is done in Europe to some extent.
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.
Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.
Within the amount of water lost by a near-median-population nation, perhaps. Not within the amount of water used productively by a near-median-population.
if you look at household water consumption, most places in north america treat their water and return it to a freshwater source. you can scale cities very wide and water use might go up, but the consumption rate is actually low. more depending on how much people water their lawns.
farms on the other hand 'spray water on the ground' but it actually removes the water from the freshwater source and needs to be replenished.
leaks is water loss/consumption. human activity is no guarantee. leak in this case is still bad.
The freshwater source might be an aquifer so staying in the ground isn't a loss to the local water supply, though it may be a loss in regards to effort to move and treat it.
Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
$87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill.
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Condensing the steam back into water would undo the cooling power, so yes. Massively less efficient. Negative efficiency, as required by thermodynamics.
Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
Evaporating a gram of water is 2260 joules. Evaporating 20 gallons per minute, 1/3 of a gallon per second, gets rid of around 3 megawatts of heat.
If you had to use heat pumps to move all that out of the water, you'd have to spend about a million dollars on their electricity. If you're somewhere that you can use unassisted radiators all year, great. If you need to force the heat out part of the year, that easily gets worse than boiling off water.
Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
No, it's just that people notice when they're being asked to concern themselves with numbers this far to the right of the decimal point. It's not just that almonds are bad. It's that they're vastly, heroically worse than data centers, so much so that optimizing water usage at data centers is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic.
If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
> But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
you've hit the silent nail on the head.
The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).
If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?
It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.
None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the talk about the water consumption is a red herring intentionally spread by the PR machines of these companies because it's it reframes the debate around an aspect of the issue that is ultimately irrelevant and distracts from ones that are more important like carbon emissions, pollution, electrical/gas price spikes due to induced scarcity and ultimately how these mega projects have little benefit for the people who will experience all the negative consequences of them.
Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.
That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure and our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things.
Should I start running through the list of industries that use more water than datacenters?
Montana exports tons of petroleum products and beef. Should I illustrate how those industries also uses orders of magnitude more water than datacenters?
In fact, I would be impressed if you could come up with a single locale where a datacenter would be the primary water consumer. Even top 3 would be kind of impressive.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say other than "datacenters use water and I don't like it, and yeah those other industires in the area use 10-100x more, but like, I don't like datascneters so we need to focus on that"
I think the real snag is that average people have absolutely -zero- concept of how much water industry uses. Your local recycling plant washes all that dirty plastic you throw in the recycling to the tune of thousands of gallons an hour. And you're learning this right now for the first time in your life. But sure, datacenters running water through metal pipes, five alarm crisis here
What the water figures show is that water usage is not the problem of these data centers. It's a drop in the bucket, literally. Yet another way to see it is that given the average weather in Lincoln, NE (29 inches of rain annually) it rains 480 million gallons annually on the 600 acres campus that Google's data center is located on. So it would be possible to collect only 3% of this rainwater, and it would be enough to cover all their water needs. Water, at the local scale of this data center, an infinitely renewable resource.
Other issues than water are far worse, like pollution associated with the manufacturing and running of all the data center gear. Water is not the issue.
Because nobody reasonable believes water use is any issue, but these numbers are proxy for the usual stuff companies don't disclose for usual reasons (ones that rhyme with "competition" and "stock market")?
Because hedge funds are going to use those numbers to get better estimates of their business and revenues and use that in their forecasting which means Google loses in the stock market.
Please elucidate if I'm wrong, but, isn't the problem the distribution of the water and not the amount? If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.
I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
> If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.
Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.
Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
I think that's true, but also is the corruption of allowing works going without enough preparation.
If I remember correctly there are a considerable number of cases where habitants said they would have increased price in their bills or some even saying that their supply will be cut short or completely.
And this is not even considering other problems such as noise, pollution, etc
This feels like an important point! People comparing to leaks (or other distributed examples that aggregate similarly) are not thinking about how the amount of water used in a single location changes the scale.
No, it’s that if there’s nothing to hide, then they shouldn’t jump through so many hoops to avoid basic industrial reporting requirements.
It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.
If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.
Literally every movie ever made was made by an LLC created specifically to make that movie. This is not some nefarious thing. It’s common business practice in any number of industries
> Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
none of these are reason for the country not to demand transparent data for monitoring.
Being able to monitor things properly has high societal value - it prevents fraud (more data being visible makes it harder to fake). It prevents skirting regulations, and makes it easier for competitors to sniff out high margin opportunities (which serves to break monopolies in some sense).
Not to mention that statistics collected could have value in aggregate in research sometime in the future.
Like auditing and accounting, the country should mandate transparent data reporting of utilities usage for all industries.
I don't understand your question. I'm commenting on the figures we know from this report. I don't have to work out the motives behind them to evaluate whether they're material (they are not).
Lincoln data center "comes online" in 2026 (info from Google). These are early, non-mature operating numbers. I'm disappointed this wasn't made more clear in the story and, of course, most of the comments here don't understand the context.
You're assuming they're hiding the numbers because they think they seem bad in the discussions about data centers using too much water. The cover up is likely motivated much differently, and I would bet that doesn't really care about people complaining about waiter usage.
Perhaps not a meaningful amount at a national/worldwide scale. However, an individual datacentre consuming that amount at a local/regional scale could be more impactful.
Does the article indicate the operating state of Lincoln data center? Is it mature and at planned capacity? Hint: you're looking at early, non-mature numbers, and you may need to look beyond the article to see the full context.
So you’re limiting the scope of your analysis to this report only? Where does it mention water usage by housing built in Austin over the past two years?
You’re comfortable making those comparisons and concluding how significant the water usage is but you’re unwilling to check the context of the data in the report? Not sure I follow.
Did you stop reading the article at the first data center?
"More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports _547.88 megagallons_ for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption." (emphasis mine)
Yeah, though it says right below that 6 data centers report using 750MG, which is weird cause each of them would average 125MG, so 10 times more than the 13MG reported above.
At what point does it become significant? I’d think 200 olympic swimming pool worth of water taken out of the local ecology would have some impact. I guess it depends on the region.
The article doesnt say though if all the water ends up evaporated.
Read TFA, that is just the usage of the smallest data enter in NE, across NE their water usage is ~50x that, and that’s just Nebraska, not exactly a hub for data centers
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.
Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.
This is entirely dependent on where you are geographically in terms of rainfall and weather. Both water and energy are abundant. The trick is getting them where you need them. So the where is what matters.
The greenest solution is to not consume something at all. Growth can't last forever on this planet. Do we want to spend our limited resources like this?
I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
That’s not true. The AI side can afford more surely, but that doesn’t mean the anti-AI side is broke. Lawmakers are being lobbied, YouTubers are already being paid to make vids, seems unlikely it would stop there.
What makes you so confident? Do you have any proof of this? If so I would love to see it because it would explain some stuff I've come across, but could not place.
Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something. Giving those people concrete numbers is not gonna change such misconceptions (and that's assuming they look at such numbers in reasonable relative terms in the first place).
Seems easy enough to report multiple numbers and be clear on what water comes in (can even separate initial filling/construction from ongoing usage) vs what gets lost and what comes out as waste. I think people can understand this and it isn't a good enough reason to not share the numbers.
Great examples. I understand these concepts as a lay person and I think most others can understand them too and therefore think they should be reported.
Fair point. But if I had initially learned that google was putting data centers in and it recycled water and it was a minor amount I would be more receptive than hearing that google is bullying communities and hiding details behind NDAs.
The issue for most (well, at least those who are informed and not just bandwagoning) is that it raises the prices of utilities, in which case it doesn't really matter that it stays in the water cycle. If your local municipal water authority has to expand operations to keep up with demand, that is going to incur capital costs which will either raise rates or require tax dollars.
While this water usage might be not a big deal in places with abundant water, it could be problematic in some areas of the US.
> They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas plant. And one such installation was proposed for my city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.
Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.
> Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something.
Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.
The majority of current large data centers use open-loop evaporative water cooling which does in fact consume water.
Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.
This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.
Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].
Not sure why this is being downvoted. If you noticeably distort the local economy then people are naturally going to want to know what resources you're consuming.
but trade secrets
I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
Surely the people who have worked in tech, with datacenters or even in them for decades are wrong, and the people who learned the word "datacenter" 6 months ago are right.
The irony is that it is unlikely datacenters would hit that "above a certain size"
The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
It is worth remembering that it heavily depends on cooling system involved.
Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude
But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north
I've been spending some time in Tasmania, Aus for the last few weeks and have been following the local debate regarding 3 data centres Firmus is planning on building here.
While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.
Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.
The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].
When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.
However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.
Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.
> I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
Data centers tend to be higher security facilities for a reason. Publicizing any of their technical specs isn’t really beneficial, especially when any numbers that are provided will be dismissed unless even more information is provided to back them up.
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
Worth considering in the current climate. My impression a while ago is that the exact water and power usage of any large company's data center is seen as a trade secret of sorts; if a large company invested to become XX% efficient, it might not want competitors to know it hit a certain efficiency target.
Largely because of how many times it could have been stated prior, given it had been a talking point for some time, and the lack of actual evidence (him saying something is not often taken at face value…).
Of course, they'd like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won't get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.
That may be true, but I have a feeling that even a third party audit wouldn't appease you. If they confirm Sam's numbers, you'll claim that they were bribed. So how can we solve this problem? Can we trust government officials? Are there any non-biased organizations that could do the audit?
I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.
The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
> I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.
The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]
Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.
But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.
> 1GW of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi/Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.
I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.
This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).
> But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use
Not even close to a true statement.
EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark.
There are currently about 300,000 MW of generating capacity in the US, according to the EIA.
It seems like the size criticism is one of proportionality-of-effect (in various domains) upon the given locales in which they are proposed to be centralised.
> They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.
Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it's not efficient in terms of time to transport.
> Attacking them for size
I didn't attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don't care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.
> If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
>
Just some napkin maths. The best combined cycle gas powerplant (Nat gas + steam) have an efficiency around 60 %. So 9 GW of electricity requires enough natural gas for 15 GW (9/0.6 = 15). Natural gas is about 10 kWh/m^3, so in 1 hour, we need 15E9/10E3 = 15E6 m^3 of natural gas. In BTU this is 5.118E10 BTU. A year has 8760 hours, 4.483E14 BTU or 4.483E8 MMBTU in a year.
According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56380&src=%E... the average Nat gas residential consumption in USA is around 80 MMBTU. So these 9 GW of electricity for datacenter s represent the average Nat gas consumption of 5.6 million home in USA.
We know that by and large the biggest new proposed datacentres aren't intended to aggregate existing capacity but to add to it. Adding 26GW spread across three datacentres no doubt is more efficient than spreading 26GW across 26 or 260 new datacentres. But anything like 100GW or 400GW of total extra datacentre capacity, in the US alone https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2026/10/02/insid... , is enough of an increase that the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all, and some (I assume) relatively modest efficiency gains from taking datacentre aggregation to the next level surely won't have a decisive impact on that. Especially when it turns out that, whoops, the DCs are going to be powered by finite, highly-dispatchable and CO_2-emitting natural gas after all, not baseload nuclear stations.
Meanwhile from a local perspective the fact that a very large datacentre next door is hypothetically aggregating what would have been several other data centres, mostly built elsewhere, is not so reassuring. (Though the other side of that coin is that from the builders' point of view it may be politically easier to get a given amount of capacity built as a few very large plants in places which are less likely or less able to object: regulatory efficiency, distinct from energy efficiency.)
And also conversely, if the mega-DCs (deca-giga-DCs?) really are markedly more efficient, and if they do aggregate lots of new capacity, most especially if they do also end up aggregating existing capacity, that will worsen problems of competition and market concentration in the cloud computing market, at least once the money spigot is turned off again and it's no longer the case that any idiot can get financing for a new datacentre.
> the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all
If there is demand for it, it's "socially justified". We don't live in a command economy, and thankfully, there's not a panel of woke elders deciding what we get to build. One of the great things about capitalism (indeed, the entire purpose of the thing) is that it does a great job of balancing supply to demand.
If built out. A single DC of this scale is driving Oracle, a giant company, so bankrupt their bonds have been downgraded to junk status and they're claiming force majeure to get out of paying their debts.
1 GW is about a single nuclear rector of the Zaporizhzhia powerplant in Ukraine. Other nuclear powerplants in Europe have about 600 to 900 MW per reactor. The newest generation have reactor of 1.4 GW. Just to give an order of magnitude. Every time a 1GW data center is built, to have a continuous supply and CO2 free, it would require to build one nuclear reactor. I find this insane.
>However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that Agate LLC is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.
The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.
You're confusing MW with MWh. Older DCs did indeed consume on the order of 1MW of continuous power, like the one at [0]. The 2012-dated DC at [1] has a redundant 22kW power feed per 42U rack, so that's ~500W per RU - which for most pre-AI servers was plenty.
With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.
Along those lines just a reminder folks, China is installing about 1GW equivalent of Solar power per day [1]. Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries [2]. These are not zero-regulation, socialist wastelands.
All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?
The same one that is paying for their support for data centers and is shifting as a response [1]. Like I said, if political capital is being spent shifting peoples' stances, how much of a waste is it to know we could move them on this and we chose not to.
> Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries
This is overstating things.
Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.
You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.
A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.
If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.
> But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.
I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.
Google considers pretty much everything in hwops to be a trade secret. The point is to keep the specifics unknown as much as possible from competitors; the public at large's knowledge is just collateral damage in that fight.
It doesn't even have to be competitors their suppliers would love to know the total amount of widgets that they'll be buying. That way they know if they're the single supplier
A friend accidentally told me not just how many servers Google was deploying for Bard, but what they were putting in them and the volume of the scale up.
A competitor with that information might have made a rush on a supply-constrained component market or negotiated longer term pricing agreements.
The strategic advantage, by definition, is something you, as a company, don't know what it is. If you know, then people leaving your company take the information to competition and the it's not strategic nor advantage anymore.
So, given that you don't know what makes your company better then the competition, it's better to hide everything you can so you don't accidentally disclose useful information. God forbid competition discover your own strategic advantage before you do.
And this one in particular is a high-ticket trade secret; it has been for decades, long before the AI push.
Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything."
... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
This was more than a decade ago. Back then, the data center didn't even have public signage because Google was trying to be so secretive. Things have changed significantly since then and a lot of data is now published publicly.
Very few datacenters run by companies of any size, large or small, have signage.
Companies put signs on buildings so you can find them. Signs are important for retailers or offices where people need to find it. This isn't really the case for a data center. A sign is a waste of money at best, and a security liability at worst.
I live in northern va and I can tell you that histeria is about ballooning electric and other bills. vast majority of population is unfortunately “not there” in regards to any unrest about AI
Not saying that increases in power bills aren't caused by ai datacenters at all, but I would like to remind people that there is currently a conflict going on that is impairing 5-50% of the worlds energy supply, which even if we used none of it, still would impact us (LNG exports) and getting people angry at tech is a good distraction for this time of year.
I think there's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
there is definitely more to the story when you are not personally affected by it deeply, then you have the luxury of looking at “deeper meanings” and shit. when you are, shit is quite simple and to the point. I attend every public hearing, community open house and submit shit online (https://www.loudoun.gov/datacenterstandards if you live in the area) and it has absolutely nothing (and never will) to do with some conflict in some shithole place. it is 100% a local issue and it is not only if you have the luxury to not be personally affected by and which gives you additional luxury to dream up “global reasons…”
1. Power plants take a long time to build and large capital investments, typically both public and private dollars. The power demand for the current hyperscaler datacenter trend is happening faster than supply can keep up, guaranteeing the current spike in prices.
2. Most heavy industrial users of power are running stable businesses that are often expected to offset some of the infrastructure costs themselves, making payments over time. Not only have many hyperscalers bent the rules to avoid doing this, even if they did do things the right way, much of the rapid investment is highly leveraged and if a bubble pops, taxpayers would be stuck with the infrastructure bill anyway.
Kansas is a rural state that survives because of government agricultural subsidies as well as costly boondoggles such as ethanol that everyone else has to pay for. Complaining about government subsidies also going to other people is a bit rich.
Is it? Can you give me a link to a video that shows the issue in a straightforward manner?
Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.
I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).
I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
Sound meter shows "only" ~60 db, but that constant audible hum is, IMO, the data center actually assaulting those residents and apparently doing so 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
If someone who lived near that place set fire to the data center and I ended up on the jury and heard these recordings I would do everything in my power to nullify because that seems like a completely justified response to me in the face of the company running the data center not shutting down until the problem is fully fixed.
This is so much worse than I was expecting. You'd pretty much have to move out, and your property would be worthless for anything but industrial use at that point.
Is this something that happens by accident in the sense that the decision makers didn't know how it would sound or is there actually someone in a room at some point going "fuck it".
I mean, the latest ones are massive. Climate concerns aside, data centers don’t make great neighbors. They are never a net positive for the local community.
>They are never a net positive for the local community
Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.
The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.
Are there any stories you have heard which things have improved notably for the citizens since data centers were put in place? I see a lot of negative articles, but have yet to see where a city has used the revenue to say build a hospital, increase transit, or build something for the citizens, or just improve existing services. This could be a result of my feed being biased, so I'm genuinely curious to hear some stories about the good that these datacenters bring to local areas.
The datacenter companies are forcing local governments to sign NDAs so they can't discuss the details with other areas, leading to them being pressured in to taking horrible deals that are a net negative for the area without.
They force these NDAs so people can't collaborate and see what a horrible deal they are getting.
Two things can be true at the same time. Data centers are fundamentally extractive. They take resources in terms of space, electricity and water and make someone far away richer. They have almost no positive impact on their local communities beyond the initial build out jobs, and then after that they are huge windowless boxes that provide almost no jobs (and in the future, as they are more and more automated, they really will provide no jobs). And their negative impacts are already here, e.g. Maryland utility customers saw a huge increase in their electric bills due to data center build out.
At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology that its most significant leaders say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.
So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
There is no hysteria. We don't want to subsidise your lifestyle and to have pollution you produce dumped in our rural parts. We don't want it and it does not benefit us. Have all datacenters you want in your backyard.
More generally, societal fatigue with tech culture overtaking everything, subsuming power from every other corner. Surveillance, COVID-19, immorality, Luigi Mangione and Elizabeth Holmes, delinquency of minors, 5G and everything else that technology can share some blame for, now focused on their visible manifestations.
The trouble is, once a danger becomes visible and ubiquitous, you’ve already lost. Fighting “A.I. Data Centres” is literally quixotic.
My biggest problem with the data centers getting built around me are that they are building new natural gas power plants to power them, that will be greenhouse gases and decrease local air quality. I would be a lot more ok with it if they were using wind or solar. And maybe built it somewhere that didn't have a water shortage.
One being built near me is being built on public lands that are being sold off for datacenters. That's an additional pretty big negative (especially since the specific land was set apart as a wildlife habitat.)
I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
If we compare 2025 to 0025, a truly remarkable number of problems have been solved by, effectively, intelligent people doing research. While it is impossible that AI will fix everything it is plausible it will fix most things since it looks like it'll be able to do research faster, better and with a higher quality than humans as well as more effectively communicate the results to the masses.
Yet Altman and Amadeo are talking how AI can kill us. So either it solves some problems it creates or kills off humanity... This is a gambling addict level rationalisation of betting your house to win it all at once.
The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
The second problem is that the CO2 is diluted in the atmosphere. Consider the amount of energy needed to remove salt from ocean water, it's not simple.
It just takes a lot of energy to that what was done by burning fossils in the first place.
> The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
This is only a problem if AI won't develop cheap carbon neutral energy sources, like fusion or advanced fission, or more efficient solar with cheap grid-scale batteries.
There are many practical substances that can absorb CO2, and "regenerating" them may not be necessary (the resulting carbonate compounds can be useful without releasing the carbon) or as energy-intensive as the original reaction. This has been an active field of research for over a quarter of a century.
there needs to be some form of energy input to analyse the co2 to another molecule. the logical input would be the sun. but why not use the sun directly via solar instead of going the long way over fossils?!
Nobody in the thread is disagreeing with using solar power. The context is an argument about dealing with the CO2 that's already there, and how feasible those approaches are.
There are non-fossil sources of energy, though. Even without a major discovery like fusion power, we could in theory stop the progress of global warming at any time by building a lot of fission powerplants powering direct carbon capture.
We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.
> We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.
Well, it was true in the 90s, and it's still true today. Once climate change becomes important enough (that is, causing actual significant damage to important, wealthy countries), it takes just one such country to start a stratospheric aerosol injection project, or, if space launch costs become low enough, put a sunshade between Earth and the Sun. Such solutions have their own risks, of course. But if climate change really becomes bad, they will be tried. And from what I have read, they have a good change of succeeding.
It will still be true another 30 years from now perhaps, but nobody who has the actual funds to spend seems to care. If the world was actually taking it seriously, it would be dealt with like the ozone hole was. Instead, we're still debating whether it's real, and if it's real whether it's important, and if it's important whether it is more important than - I don't know - pretty much anything else.
What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
> What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
They are still not melting enough. Most of the negative consequences of current summer heatwaves can be pretty much solved by installing US-style ubiquitous air conditioning.
Yup, as I said. Same as rich people do everywhere, they don't have to worry, they won't run out of water or power, if things get too hot where they are they'll just move somewhere nicer. They have the money and zero incentive to solve the actual problem.
It is already causing actual significant damage to important wealthy countries. Just not in a way that directly impacts the people with the means to make a significant impact.
Climate change is a lot less important when you are rich enough that it doesn't impact you personally, and when you don't care about what the world looks like after you die.
Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that's going to impact the company's profitability, but by then your stock options will have already vested - so that's a problem for someone else!
Google, at least, purchases 100% of its electricity from renewable sources [1]. This doesn't mean that they literally have renewables feeding directly into their datacenters at all times -- but for every kWh they consume, they are purchasing a kWh of renewable energy and adding it to the grid.
Do they shutdown when there is no renewable power available? I doubt they have enough battery capacity... The whole per unit buying is misleading. In the moment is what really matters. Not to forget them paying for renewable power can move others to non-renewable sources...
What it means is that they only pay for generation that's renewable and the energy company assures them by contract that they'll only be paying for renewables.
The rest of us, who might be on green tariffs usually get a commitment that on average almost all our energy comes from renewables. When supply is short then I'm the one who's paying for gas generation rather than the company who has committed to greenwashing. But that also drives investment in renewable generation, in the UK renewables have gone from 2% of power generation in 1991 to around 50% now.
No, but they cover their fossil fuel energy usage by entering into PPAs [1] for new clean energy projects that get added to the grid. This allows renewable projects that would otherwise not have been economical to finance to get built. This is additional renewable capacity that that goes into the energy mix. It moves others onto renewable sources, often without them even knowing it.
From a climate change perspective, what happens at one particular moment doesn't matter -- it's CO2 emissions globally over time that do.
And you think they wouldn't directly benefit from solar power?
What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.
Directly? No. Indirectly? Of course they do. Everyone does.
Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.
NIMBYism isn't rational, it's a manifestation of fear of change, even if they past state of affairs was worse than the future one. I live in a city where the anti-datacentre campaign isn't about some pleasant locale, but a disused toxic industrial land in a steel-mill complex over half a km away from any actual homes.
> Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.
If we pay each farmer to generate solar (and maybe also stop paying them to grow corn beyond what's actually economically viable), why would they care what the next farm over is doing? I thought we were talking about places where people live too far apart for "backyards".
They can make all objections or decisions they want on their own private property. It seems people have too much levers to pull to control what others can do with their property.
A lot of people have dumb opinions grounded in ill-thought-out ideas like "natural cornfields are morally superior to human-built infrastructure buildings" or "solar power is a Democratic party conspiracy". In general it should be easier for property owners with skin in the game to make good land use decisions to make them without having to need small-d-democratic opposition from locals with bad incentices and values.
Anyone with kids probably should be aware of Mercury - it's an important guideline during pregnancy, all the mercury in fish. I don't have kids, so I am not sure if the doctors explain how all the mercury got into the fish...
There's also a lot of folks out there with no sense of scale getting "dihydrogen-monoxieded" by scaremongering tactics like measuring power consumption in number of atomic bombs.
It's different issues in different places, and when built/operated by different companies. Global companies that put their name on the facility will be more careful of optics than a PE firm that hides behind shell companies.
The disparity is that older data centers were for storing and serving data. They have a lot of bandwidth and storage, but aren't consuming much energy. Plus, they are there to provide quicker access to data, to provide a service to actual people.
New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.
These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.
With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
I gave this half an hour video the first 10 minutes. He
- explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)
- played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient
- showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas
- did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record
- did not disclose the actual dBA values
- kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.
If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research.
I would have hoped people would have been inoculated against the 'infrasound is harmful' nonsense when it was used as a complaint against wind turbines.
This is not really the same thing. When people are discussing the dB output of things like data centers, it's a constant volume. While your kids may be loud, they are not outputting this volume 24/7 without rest. (If they are, consider enrolling them in Opera singing lessons.)
And furthermore, the actual acoustical impact is very different from what is measurable or what might cause physical harm.
I've spent enough time on city council noise ordnance boards and understand enough about acoustics to say that the professional sound system I own would certainly be audible and annoying to my neighbors half a kilometer away even if it were not appreciably above the noise floor of the surrounding environment.
Folks are great a signal detection and it's very annoying to them to be able to detect an unwanted bass drum or similar, which they can do at pretty long distances. Even distributed noise is still often noticeable to people.
For instance, I live in the literal middle of nowhere and I still encounter real noise pollution from gas well heads and gas processing plants that are several kilometers from my home.
Yea, and if you go beyond people, animals are much more receptive. It's one thing to have a big building nearby that's sort of annoying, it's another thing when that building means all your local wildlife leaves. No birds singing, deer, raccoons, opossums gone, etc.
Look at your local megascale datacenter on Google Maps satellite view. How many parking spots does it have? How many of those parking spots are occupied? Are you seeing hundreds of cars, or is it just the mandatory pair of security guards and maybe a remote hands technician or three?
The tax breaks are well-established in the media, see for example [0].
It comes in about 0.2-0.3 people per MW, but as the size rises the number of people per MW reduces.
So, a 100MW DC will have about 20-30 people and a 1GW campus will be 200-300 people.
Those numbers can be boosted if the site has a significant non-operational support staff such as security and cleaning. But a significant part of security us heavily automated, to the point where when Meta had a major network failure they couldn't get on-call support staff into the facilities to fix the issue because the security doors were linked to the main network.
You can’t collect tax revenue by giving away tax breaks worth almost the entirety of the taxes that would otherwise be collected. This is particularly common in the the gulf south - see Louisiana with Hyperion, which also has been an absolute disaster of a construction project (deaths, school can’t operate, all kinds of violations and damage) and is estimated to produce double digit jobs.
>For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW.
This is always kind of funny to me. How's an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?
How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed "data" center?
Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they'd like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.
Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can't decide if it's zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I'd be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can't be purely about power consumption.
>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?
What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because you aren't receiving the benefits is naive. No one's doing all this for free.
>If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We've been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?
You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?
And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.
Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you're not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.
>How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.
Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.
This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.
I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].
Thank you. This seems a good start to a desperately needed credible "externalities report" to ground political and economic discussion.
The flood of anecdotal thumping seems to distract and undermine deliberation. The sad lack of peer reviewed data and impact analysis hinders thoughtful policymaking.
The Fireball one is concerning. 1.5 million gallons a day?
"More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption."
> I've read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn't fly.
So, first of all, I agree, that's still top much. But I think it's important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).
I absolutely believe that there's leftover noise around the facilities, too, specially low-frequency humming for electrical equipment, but I have yet to see _actual_ reporting demonstrating newer AI-centered datacenters produce even near the amount of noise OP was claiming.
> Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB.
That would mean 130dB of noise inside the facility, which sounds (pun intended) impossible to me, no matter how bad the acoustic planning is.
edit: just understood what "Extra zero" meant. The original comment before being edited said 100m and that's what I was quoting.
as someone who has driven by Google data centers in Iowa and Facebook in Oregon, I can report you that I can’t hear anything from them from the roadside.
That makes sense, indeed. I've yet to see one of these new datacenters, but I've recently visited a hyperscaler's datacenter and most of the noise did seem to come from the outside ventilation.
I still heard almost nothing ~20m from it, but neither I (nor the company who built it) knew what kinds of workloads ran there and I suspect it was mostly traditional workloads.
> So, first of all, I agree, that's still top much. But I think it's important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).
For someone who knows enough to point out that dB is logarithmic, you seemed to have neglected the fact that sound is inverse-square for distance? Unless these neighbors are _literally_ located 100m outside the data center?
No. They point out that 60dB is 1000 less than 90dB, which is true. In order to make that point they gloss over the fact that one measurement was taken at 100m (90dB) and another (much lower) at whatever distance the neighbors are at. Both measurements can be true (while the comment suggests that the 90dB is false).
dB should generally be expressed at what distance it was measured, and you'll see this done all over the place.
In this case, you'd reach 70dB at about 1km from the 90dB at 100m source, but they could also be completely different datacenters.
I haven't really glossed over that fact, although nothing you've said here is factually wrong.
OP was talking about datacenters in residential areas and quoted the 90db @ 100m value, which indeed is 70dB @ 1km distance, which is absolutely absurd and would make it impossible to live nearby. That's the original comment I've answered.
Then, OP edited the post and said it was 90dB @ 10m, which means 50dB @ 1000m, an okayish value (depending on the type and duration of the noise), but that's not a distance we were talking about before.
I know datacenters in my city that are less than 500m from residential zoning (I should note I'm not in the US and this is not a new datacenter), so I didn't think that the original (distance) measurement sounded absurd, that's why I pointed out how much the (noise) measurement seemed to be out-of-scale.
Anyways, I think OP's measures where just completely made up or misremembered, because I'm any way I've framed the data (and the edited data), it doesn't match my personal observations around the few datacenters I've been to nor the data that's been released.
I did agree about the possibility of low-frequency noises being a huge nuisance, though, as those types of noises feel much worse than random noises at random intervals at higher dB.
Bright lighting is typically an artifact of the commercial property insurance policy in effect (namely, "Protective Safeguards"). It's asking you to demonstrate that you've done enough to create a barrier towards theft/loss.
It doesn't have to be really bright lighting but that's the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter's request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.
Doesn't matter to Bob, who lives across the road from the datacenter and has an artificial sun outside his bedroom 24/7 and wants to burn the thing to the ground.
I live very near to two industrial facilities, but they deal with agricultural products instead of high-value GPU farms. They've got some lights outside and they're not bothersome.
It's been my experience that living urban means black out curtains and ear plugs are a must. Sub damaging levels, a continual hum is better than spiky sounds like sirens, loud exhausts, and people thinking fireworks are cool beyond July 4th.
The noise issue kinda needs to be treated separately to the other issues imo. As I understand it the loud part is the gas turbine generators that some datacenters run, so while it’s associated, it’s not strictly a datacenter thing.
"Rechnen" is short for the now obsolete "rechenen", which seems to be where the words "Rechenzentrum" and "Rechenaufgabe" came from. It's a word that predates what we call computers today, too.
A "Rechenzentrum" was a place where lots and lots of people were sitting down crunching numbers with pen on paper. This job also existed in the USA, where originally "computer" was the job title of someone working in such a computer center.
But then electronic computers became better at crunching numbers than human computers, so the job became obsolete. The word stayed around, but the meaning changed. Same way we dial phone numbers despite phones no longer having dials. We also still hang up the phone, despite there being nothing to hang the phone on anymore.
I sometimes forget the meaning of data in English. In my language, a computer is a «data machine», so a «data center» is obviously just a center of computing, which would have fit.
> At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
> Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
I'd also question whether that is inside or outside. We already have regulations that govern the acceptable noise levels around commercial and industrial properties so I highly doubt that a datacenter is going to have an exception.
The only case that would match for 90dB anywhere outside a datacenter are abominations like the xAI one with ton of barely-legal to straight out illegal (before recent rule change) gas turbines providing power, which is an issue downstream from US grid being utter shit
They're reporting early numbers from a nonmature operating state, first of all, and on top of that you're comparing them to what you saw ten years ago? Not sure that warrants any conclusions about public perception or outlandish accusations.
I can’t actually understand the incapacity of the richest country on the world to build infrastructure. Why would people be fighting over resources like that when you can just build a hell lot of wind, solar and gas plants along with batteries and whatnot.
From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.
Because the US president considers solar and wind to be a woke scam, and no company wants to build legacy coal plants because it's a terrible investment at this point. So the datacenters are just building their own gas plants next to the buildings causing all of the noise and air pollution people are mad about.
I don't really understand the hand-wringing about data centers and water. Unlike fossil fuels, when you "use" water, it doesn't go away, it goes back out into the environment. And since DCs use it for cooling, not some industrial process, it doesn't even contaminate the water in any meaningful way.
The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
Mostly, but not entirely. It is a huge issue in the Southwest, and it seems like a lot of DCs are being proposed and/or built in areas where water is far from abundant.
The water for the datacenter comes from the same place residents, farmers, etc get their water. If there is already not a lot of water, the datacenter can cause running out of water. Sending used water downstream doesn't magically reappear upstream.
If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.
For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.
Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
The problem in California is that competition for water doesn't raise prices. Much of our water supply is allocated based on property rights rather than as a commodity so prices for some users remain artificially lower than the market price. This causes waste and shortages. Eventually we'll have to reform the system but there's no political will to do so.
This data center is in Nebraska, not California, and motionlessveloc's comment that I replied to wasn't even limited to the US as there are local protests against data center water use in other countries.
Yes, water rights law is complicated. California's access to water from the Colorado River is due to the Colorado River Compact, which exists because state disagreed on the details of how water "goes back out into the environment".
That said, I was under the impression that many data centers use municipal water, which is more subject to market price, and not water allocated by property rights. While certainly some do, it isn't always so.
True if you're using a closed-loop system. But if you're using evaporative cooling (which is the main cause for concern) then the place where the water 'comes back into the environment' may be quite far away (at least in a useful sense).
20-25% of the water consumed for evaporative cooling becomes contaminated waste water. It is used to clean out the residue left behind by the 75-80% of the consumed water that is evaporated.
The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
There is sometimes incorrect conflation between what the datacenter is permitted for and what the datacenter actually draws.
> Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1]
This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either.
He’s a Pro-AI ideologue who engages in the same motivated reasoning he complains about others using. His piece on heat island effects fell over under scrutiny because he just doesn’t have the analytical background to actually do these investigations.
He's done just terrible things, the accusations are true. No one wants to associate with him because of all the bad things he's done. Everyone knows he's a liar, and anyone asking for evidence of it is a perfidious pro-AI ideologue.
A lot of people think it does, surprisingly. People memed too hard about "querying ChatGPT drains lakes" and anyone who contested it was deemed a booster, so it stuck.
Historically large data centers used evaporative cooling. So the water disappeared in sense that it's no longer available in a useful form in it's original locations. That's changing with growing use of closed-loop systems.
From a redaction point of view: I can't believe this is still happening. Surely by now all government and local government offices have a data/records person and policies about information handling. I guess it's not really sensitive info like the name of a government informant. Maybe they intentionally leaked it with a 'whoops, we tried' excuse.
If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that.
If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
If everything was on the up and up they wouldn’t be hiding things behind shell companies and ndas. The water and electric usage is the least of our worries. These things will make cancer alley look like a Sunday picnic. There is a reason executives won’t live anywhere near the hot zone.
Sure, I think the rebuttal is that while your numbers are correct (and possibly even more in your favor than you may have guessed) they aren't particularly relevant.
First, the numbers. My searching says that for some particular lake in Nebraska, "Average annual gross lake evaporation ranges from
about 48 inches to 54 inches". Let's call it 4 feet per year, which means 4 acre-feet of water evaporates per acre per year. Trusting some numbers someone gave in a comment earlier, the data center in questions used about 40 acre-feet per year. So 10 acres of lake would evaporate about the same rate as the data center. At a very rough guess, there are something like 200,000 acres of non-seasonal lakes in Nebraska, so this is indeed a tiny percentage.
Next, the relevance. The lakes are more or less in a steady state. But if you were actually to double the evaporation rate for a 10 acre lake, you might quickly end up with a muddy pit instead of a lake. The fish would be gone, and the users of that lake would have good reason to complain. If lake was 10 times larger, so that you were only increasing the evaporation by 10%, over time you'd still probably have a major effect on the shoreline and any infrastructure there. What used to be useful pier might look over a mud flat rather than the water, and launching a boat would be impossible until you built a new one.
But the real issue is that water use isn't actually fungible. Water continuing to evaporate from a lake at the rate it always has definitionally doesn't make people's life worse than it was. But suddenly pumping of the same amount of groundwater might be really bad for the neighbors who previously were using the same water to irrigate their fields. And trying to double the output of a small municipal water system might (at least in the short term) make things much harder for all the existing users on the system. This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done, but it's a harm that should be considered.
That's my good faith attempt to answer you. In return, I have a quick research question that I think is essential to understanding whether or not data center water usage is a big deal or not, and that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments: Where is this water for these new data centers coming from? Is it from new wells they drill? Existing irrigation wells they buy and repurpose? From the local municipal water supply? Rainwater collection? Diverting a nearby river?
I feel like there's no way to answer the question of whether data center water usage matters without considering the actual local impact, and no way of determining the impact without considering the specifics of the source. But somehow I haven't seen any mention of this on either side of the debate.
kind of confusing numbers here. the 13 million gallon figure refers to one specific datacenter, but you add on five more datacenters and the number grows to... 765 million gallons? The datacenter in Papillion accounts for 548 million of those. Is it bigger? Is it less efficient? not a lot of info apparent in this report.
If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
> Agate LLC reports expecting a refund of $55,822,472 from 2025 taxes. Fireball LLC is expecting a refund of $39,171,573.39 from 2025 taxes. Westwood Solutions LLC, the Google-owned data center in Omaha, is expecting a refund of $22,558,881 from 2025 taxes.
Yea, that stuck out to me more than the resource usage.
Id find it difficult to believe that these companies are giving that much money in free loans to the government the way a retail worker estimating their taxes and getting a refund of a few hundred to thousand a year does.
Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Nebraska had a unexpected 86 million dollar gap in tax revenues collected last year[1] and these tax 3 tax breaks on their own account for 130% of that
> Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Given the numbers I've seen for tax breaks for other big construction projects (malls, factories, etc), I wouldn't be surprised if the state ends up in the red on datacentres. It's not all that uncommon for the state to offset project cost 100% on the promise of job creation.
I dont like the olympic swimming pool comparisons so I converted to immigrant population comparisons. How many people's worth of electricity and water are the data centers consuming , of course all the analysis was done on gemini since we are talking about google data centers :) here's the output
> Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska.
> Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
you can say something like data centers are using as much electricity as if 33% new people started living in Nebraska. they are like our new neighbors. A new county of benevolent super-smart scientists in a data center.
I understood your point when I read it, and it didn't bother me. But the term inadvertently triggers a different hot-button issue in people's minds, so I think a clearer term might have been "marginal population increase".
I think triggering that hot-button issue was the point - the OP was likely expecting that people who are vehemently anti-data-center are also vehemently pro-immigration (which is probably an accurate generalization). So talking about the resource use of data centers by comparing to the resource use of immigrants has the potential to force cognitive dissonance in anti-data-center people who might otherwise use data center resource use as a straightforward talking point.
The reason I dislike this is data centers aren’t houses, they are industry. Industry and farms takes up more power and water than some peoples houses, because your house doesn’t need to create the power and food and stuff you need to survive.
The concern around data centers is a moral panic. They've been around for decades and nobody cared before the backlash against AI. They're like any other industrial building, subject to the same resource constraints and zoning laws. I suspect if the owners of that land built a steel mill, a semiconductor fab, or anything other than a data center with similar power and water requirements, nobody would care.
You are overlooking scale and pace. No one is trying to build more steel mills in the next 3 or 4 years than have been built over the entire history of the steel mill industry so far, with each new steel mill using around an order of magnitude more energy in the same space than steel mills built a few years ago.
I'm not against local governments setting zoning laws and regulations if they're concerned about the pace of growth. Personally, I'm not concerned because I think we can and should invest in infrastructure to keep up with demand. This will benefit all industries, not just AI.
My point is that I suspect (I'll admit that I haven't done any research on this) that people wouldn't be against other facilities with the exact same footprint if they didn't carry the label "data center" and this is primarily driven by a backlash against AI and not the resource use itself.
After Prohibition was repealed, we didn't outlaw public drinking, but we did outlaw public drunkenness. There's only about a factor of 2-3 between the legal and the illegal activity. A fairly narrow margin between acceptable and excess, if you ask me. But it's not unique in that regard. We have the same kind of rules for interest rates, for instance. We accept this much, but not a larger amount.
Tonto, dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.
I am not really aware of the laws around walking down a public sidewalk with a beer in hand. It is certainly gauche but a done-thing to sit at a bus stop and have a Fireball or two.
However, any drinking establishment that serves alcohol will stop you at the door and won't permit anyone to carry drinks outside of their premises. That's a strict thing. My apartment community bans drinking in walkways and stairwells, which was probably done more by non-residents than my neighbors. So there are a lot of bans on public drinking, even if it is not blanket-outlawed.
A couple of major developments at the shopping mall, though: traditionally all American movie theaters were dry, but that rule has been relaxed, and even the major chains are serving alcohol now. At the mall there has been instituted a "sip & stroll" policy, where designated bars can serve you a plastic cup, and you can roam around the mall with drink-in-hand, as long as you observe the borders of it, where you can't walk into the parking lot or off-premises with your booze.
In general, I have seen many liquor-related laws be relaxed and lightened across my county and state. It seems that there's a general lack of will to crack down on the demand-side, when there is lots and lots of profit to be had on the healthcare-side, where you will get a diagnosis and medication and treatment, whether that is IOP or in-patient, so why not encourage more drinkers to overindulge? Broken window fallacy FTW!
tl;dr details vary by state and municipality, but with very few exceptions you can't walk around a random town drinking fireball. Or, well, you can as long as you don't get caught.
I've seen what you're talking about though. It seems like the big trend for millenials has been "<blank> but with booze." Barcades. Sip & stroll at malls. Booze in movie theaters. Paint & Sip. The microbrewery craze that's partly just "bars but make them fancy"
If you really want to get thrown for a loop, go read up about the Tavern League. One of the most powerful lobbies in Wisconsin state government is a massive cartel of... bars.
These new proposals, which have been suspiciously hidden under NDA’s, misdirection, etc. are ENORMOUS. And the local permitting in my area has data centers categorized as “light industrial”, and thus passed a 1-year moratorium to revisit the code. I am fully aware of smaller data centers along the highway I drive every day with no issue, and as such I do not consider myself crazy.
But are the NDAs new, or were you manipulated into caring about them this time and not the 1000's of other times it's happened (across various industries)
Roughly 40 acre feet of water for the Lincoln DC. An acre of corn uses maybe a couple of acre feet a season. Corn irrigation alone uses tens of millions of acre feet of water per season in the USA.
Regardless of the comments below there seems to be a crazy ideology forming about being completely pro or anti AI. On both sides people are either under or ober reporting how much power these datacenters actually use
Data centers are ugly and dystopian. We can likely survive as a species without building a single other one. Society and general well-being does worse because of them and what they bring.
This article seems to focus on one of the less interesting data centers (in terms of water usage) because the paper is from Lincoln and that data center is in Lincoln.
The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon.
Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one.
Update: in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient.
Because prices are higher in cities there’s a too-common misconception by rural people and pastoralists that cities are horribly inefficient blights on the landscape that take, take, take. When really they are more efficient than having everyone spread out so that the incremental costs of providing a good or service to one more person involves a large additional outlay in resources, such as travel time. The carbon footprint and public services costs of an individual in a city is generally lower than a rural person.
But because capital is attracted to cities, the market will bear higher prices, so real estate and food prices go up, which is the “evidence” for why they are inefficient.
Instead it’s probably better to think about all of the niche businesses that can only exist in cities. Even with sky high rents, it’s only that density of people that can support a person who specializes in repairing violins, a direct tea importer, a store that has African instruments next to bag pipes, a pirate paraphernalia business, a store that sells gargoyle statuary exclusively. They’re also the only places, prior to the internet, that can sustain special interest groups and support groups for people with rare conditions. You need the density for anything but the majority to be seen and supported.
And it’s cheaper per gallon to build a giant water treatment plant than a tiny one for 600 people.
People shouldn't be latching onto side effect costs of AI data centers like water or energy use, it seems like an abstraction layer above the core complaint. If we don't want AI, or LLMs, or data centers that should be the complaint. Once it is abstracted to water use or similar it opens the door for data to show the actual water use is comparatively small.
Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
I agree with your first point but not the analogy. Climate change is causally related to carbon emissions; if we had 100% carbon-free energy, there would be no concern with waste beyond inefficiency. Data centers could increase electricity/water prices so it's not a completely illegitimate worry, but that's not a foregone conclusion. The answer is either to increase supply by building more infrastructure, or decrease demand by limiting how much industrial buildings can pull from the network. But yes, the conversation about utilities seems more like a proxy for political frustration with AI.
I'm not actually sure where you land on climate change being causally linked.
Don't get me wrong, I think carbon emissions matter but primarily because we should simply do better if we can. But I've never found a study that proves causation, at best its correlation shown primarily through modeling.
That doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it does mean that reducing carbon specifically isn't guaranteed to reduce or reverse climate change.
Surely you must agree thst such a complex system as the global climate can't be driven by a single factor, or a single element on the periodic table.
I'd suggest you have a conversation with AI about the physics of the enhanced greenhouse effect and the IPCC's methodology on attributing global warming to human activities.
Yes, those are all well researched and well understood concepts based on a large body of modelling studies. Both can be true at the same time, and just because the data can only support correlation doesn't mean its irrelevant or not useful, it simply means we can't extrapolate to an argument of causation.
I'm not sure what you mean by "correlation" in this context. The things I mentioned are strong evidence of causation. CO2 in the atmosphere directly causes warming and human activities account for most of the warming above pre-industrial levels. As I said, have a conversation with AI and try to convince it that there is no evidence of causation between CO2 and global warming. AI is better than humans at presenting the right arguments and evidence for your specific line of questioning in a way that you'll be receptive to.
If you aren't familiar with the distinction between correlation and causation in scientific research and statistics I really would recommend you look into it.
Modelling studies can never prove likely causation, at best they prove likely correlation. Meaning, two things seem highly likely to happen together but we can't say one caused the other.
Carbon emissions and carbon in the atmosphere has been shown highly correlated with the increase in average global temperatures, weather pattern changes, etc. That doesn't directly say carbon emissions caused those though, they could both be side effects of a more fundamental root cause.
Said differently, we know carbon emissions and average temperatures after the year 1850 both went up at similar rates. We also know, though, that many other things changed over that time. We can't run a controlled study of the entire environment is impossible, we can't isolate variables and compare outcomes when only one facto changes (in this case carbon).
When laws are unjust, resistance is duty. And you usually have to come at them sideways, to delay while the wheels of justice slowly grind toward repeal.
Legislation gets easier once public opinion has turned against an idea or a company. But it takes a while to build that up.
I think I may agree with you here, but in this context can't you add more details? Your comment here is pretty high level and not specific to this topic or how we might go about trying to handle it.
Well then you're taking the opposite view. Your argument wouldn't be to stop data centers due to water use, it would be to secure water use for clean drinking water first before other uses are considered.
That angle opens the argument to concerns from various fronts, including data center use but also concerning things like agricultural use if that's a concern for you.
The drinking water concern also would hinge on having to define "clean drinking water." Humans have made do with drinking from streams, rivers, and ground water for most of human history. Today into he west at least we largely drink recycled waste water treated with bleach and various other chemicals. Drinkable yes, but I'd personally rather drink some rain water than bleach water.
I just know they have better options for cooling than water, and that fresh water supplies need to be prioritized for other uses as the resource becomes more and more limited.
That scrutiny should be applied to all industries. We can compare agriculture and data centers, but you can’t water plants with coolant.
That's usually the point where it becomes a "let's just not build this" situation for me.
There are environmental impacts of both the production and disposal of glycol coolants and similar. I'd assume they would at least he disposed of "properly" at the scale of a data center, but even just understanding the externalities on the environment and water use there is a can of worms.
I mean, they’re using jet turbine engines to power some of them, destroying ecosystems to clear space for them, not to mention the chemicals that leech into the water they discharge. The environmentalists can’t win.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 84.3 ms ] threadThere are DCs that use grey water, are built by bodies of water to use them as direct heat sinks, etc. which is better.
The reason they use water at all is ironically to save energy. Evaporative cooling uses a lot less power. It’s a slider: all evaporative is little power and a lot of water, all closed cycles is lots of power and no water, and you can adjust between the extremes when designing the cooling system.
Using DC heat for urban heat in winter is the best idea. Put them in city centers. I think this is done in Europe to some extent.
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.
if you look at household water consumption, most places in north america treat their water and return it to a freshwater source. you can scale cities very wide and water use might go up, but the consumption rate is actually low. more depending on how much people water their lawns.
farms on the other hand 'spray water on the ground' but it actually removes the water from the freshwater source and needs to be replenished.
leaks is water loss/consumption. human activity is no guarantee. leak in this case is still bad.
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
If you had to use heat pumps to move all that out of the water, you'd have to spend about a million dollars on their electricity. If you're somewhere that you can use unassisted radiators all year, great. If you need to force the heat out part of the year, that easily gets worse than boiling off water.
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/water/
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
you've hit the silent nail on the head.
The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).
If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?
It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.
None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.
Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.
That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure and our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things.
For a small locality it is a real amount of water. And if there's a draining reservoir, then that's _even more_ water being pulled out of a reservoir.
The almond discussion is tiring as well. We're not growing almonds in most of the world. The water in Montana isn't the water in Cali as well.
If the facts aren't on your side on a specific issue, at least have the courage to accept it.
Montana exports tons of petroleum products and beef. Should I illustrate how those industries also uses orders of magnitude more water than datacenters?
In fact, I would be impressed if you could come up with a single locale where a datacenter would be the primary water consumer. Even top 3 would be kind of impressive.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say other than "datacenters use water and I don't like it, and yeah those other industires in the area use 10-100x more, but like, I don't like datascneters so we need to focus on that"
I think the real snag is that average people have absolutely -zero- concept of how much water industry uses. Your local recycling plant washes all that dirty plastic you throw in the recycling to the tune of thousands of gallons an hour. And you're learning this right now for the first time in your life. But sure, datacenters running water through metal pipes, five alarm crisis here
Other issues than water are far worse, like pollution associated with the manufacturing and running of all the data center gear. Water is not the issue.
I wouldn't be surprised if this 4x difference was purely caused by lawns.
I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.
Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
If I remember correctly there are a considerable number of cases where habitants said they would have increased price in their bills or some even saying that their supply will be cut short or completely.
And this is not even considering other problems such as noise, pollution, etc
It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.
If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.
It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.
Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.
Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.
none of these are reason for the country not to demand transparent data for monitoring.
Being able to monitor things properly has high societal value - it prevents fraud (more data being visible makes it harder to fake). It prevents skirting regulations, and makes it easier for competitors to sniff out high margin opportunities (which serves to break monopolies in some sense).
Not to mention that statistics collected could have value in aggregate in research sometime in the future.
Like auditing and accounting, the country should mandate transparent data reporting of utilities usage for all industries.
So by ignoring the other 33 higher users and just focusing on DCs, what are we actually trying to accomplish?
I was replying to "Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?".
Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.
You’re comfortable making those comparisons and concluding how significant the water usage is but you’re unwilling to check the context of the data in the report? Not sure I follow.
At what point does it become significant? I’d think 200 olympic swimming pool worth of water taken out of the local ecology would have some impact. I guess it depends on the region.
The article doesnt say though if all the water ends up evaporated.
Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.
The greener solution is to use water.
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.
Both sides of this issue are doing the same thing, you’d be a fool to believe otherwise.
Creator outreach guy at ControlAI talking about the same type of thing https://lnkd.in/p/ehkuYFkw
Future of life has a program for digital media outreach https://futureoflife.org/project/digital-media-accelerator/
The PACs are well reported on
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/30/ai-safeguards-public-first-...
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/17/ai-safeguards-millions-repu...
Are they drawing from a flowing source or an aquifer? Is it depleting a limited resource?
Is it evaporative or does the waste get discharged?
Is the waste water treated for the metal that it leaches from the cooling system?
Is it allowed to reach thermal equilibrium first or is the water discharged warm which can cause algae blooms or other problems?
They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
While this water usage might be not a big deal in places with abundant water, it could be problematic in some areas of the US.
Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas plant. And one such installation was proposed for my city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.
Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.
Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.
Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.
This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.
Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
but trade secrets
I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude
But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north
While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.
Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.
The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].
When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.
However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.
Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.
[1] https://www.tasmaniancountry.com/newspaper/tasmanian-country...
Doesn’t the article you replied to confirm that Google indeed uses enormous amounts of water?
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
Now that it has been, though…
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
Noticeably they initially shared this info and then stopped. It seemed to stop around the time researchers started investigating the projects.
Of course, they'd like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won't get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.
https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.
The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.
https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...
https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...
The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]
Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.
But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.
1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.
This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity...
Not even close to a true statement.
EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark.
There are currently about 300,000 MW of generating capacity in the US, according to the EIA.
https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...
If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh).
It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.
Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.
Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it's not efficient in terms of time to transport.
> Attacking them for size
I didn't attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don't care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.
FLOPS per watt, in this case.
> I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate.
Literally the same thing.
Just some napkin maths. The best combined cycle gas powerplant (Nat gas + steam) have an efficiency around 60 %. So 9 GW of electricity requires enough natural gas for 15 GW (9/0.6 = 15). Natural gas is about 10 kWh/m^3, so in 1 hour, we need 15E9/10E3 = 15E6 m^3 of natural gas. In BTU this is 5.118E10 BTU. A year has 8760 hours, 4.483E14 BTU or 4.483E8 MMBTU in a year.
According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56380&src=%E... the average Nat gas residential consumption in USA is around 80 MMBTU. So these 9 GW of electricity for datacenter s represent the average Nat gas consumption of 5.6 million home in USA.
Meanwhile from a local perspective the fact that a very large datacentre next door is hypothetically aggregating what would have been several other data centres, mostly built elsewhere, is not so reassuring. (Though the other side of that coin is that from the builders' point of view it may be politically easier to get a given amount of capacity built as a few very large plants in places which are less likely or less able to object: regulatory efficiency, distinct from energy efficiency.)
And also conversely, if the mega-DCs (deca-giga-DCs?) really are markedly more efficient, and if they do aggregate lots of new capacity, most especially if they do also end up aggregating existing capacity, that will worsen problems of competition and market concentration in the cloud computing market, at least once the money spigot is turned off again and it's no longer the case that any idiot can get financing for a new datacentre.
If there is demand for it, it's "socially justified". We don't live in a command economy, and thankfully, there's not a panel of woke elders deciding what we get to build. One of the great things about capitalism (indeed, the entire purpose of the thing) is that it does a great job of balancing supply to demand.
For those who haven't clicked through, that article mentions a 9GW datacentre planned for Utah by Kevin O'Leary's company as well as a 10GW datacentre planned for Ohio by Softbank https://apnews.com/article/ai-data-center-ohio-uranium-enric... and Facebook's planned 7GW data centre in Louisiana https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... , all largely to be gas-powered it seems.
1 GW is about a single nuclear rector of the Zaporizhzhia powerplant in Ukraine. Other nuclear powerplants in Europe have about 600 to 900 MW per reactor. The newest generation have reactor of 1.4 GW. Just to give an order of magnitude. Every time a 1GW data center is built, to have a continuous supply and CO2 free, it would require to build one nuclear reactor. I find this insane.
Given the current power consumption of states, I find it hard to believe.
The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.
It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24/7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.
Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.
With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.
[0]: https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delf...
[1]: https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/dat...
A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.
1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.
A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.
All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
[2]:https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6121776-gop-worried-data...
This is overstating things.
Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.
You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.
A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.
If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.
I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.
A competitor with that information might have made a rush on a supply-constrained component market or negotiated longer term pricing agreements.
So, given that you don't know what makes your company better then the competition, it's better to hide everything you can so you don't accidentally disclose useful information. God forbid competition discover your own strategic advantage before you do.
Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything."
... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
Companies put signs on buildings so you can find them. Signs are important for retailers or offices where people need to find it. This isn't really the case for a data center. A sign is a waste of money at best, and a security liability at worst.
I think there's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
2. Most heavy industrial users of power are running stable businesses that are often expected to offset some of the infrastructure costs themselves, making payments over time. Not only have many hyperscalers bent the rules to avoid doing this, even if they did do things the right way, much of the rapid investment is highly leveraged and if a bubble pops, taxpayers would be stuck with the infrastructure bill anyway.
The global impact of AI doesn't change when you force DCs to build in another area.
Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.
I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).
I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
https://youtube.com/shorts/AAQsnrAHy5Y?si=vgmEGHS38mzzs2G9
https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1uleoa2/sound_...
Sound meter shows "only" ~60 db, but that constant audible hum is, IMO, the data center actually assaulting those residents and apparently doing so 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
If someone who lived near that place set fire to the data center and I ended up on the jury and heard these recordings I would do everything in my power to nullify because that seems like a completely justified response to me in the face of the company running the data center not shutting down until the problem is fully fixed.
Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.
The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.
We hear about their tax breaks though. Why don’t they get treated the same as other local businesses, and pay the same rates?
There is debate about that - and wrapping it all in NDAs makes it hard to assess.
https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/ai-dat...
They force these NDAs so people can't collaborate and see what a horrible deal they are getting.
At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology that its most significant leaders say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.
So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
More generally, societal fatigue with tech culture overtaking everything, subsuming power from every other corner. Surveillance, COVID-19, immorality, Luigi Mangione and Elizabeth Holmes, delinquency of minors, 5G and everything else that technology can share some blame for, now focused on their visible manifestations.
The trouble is, once a danger becomes visible and ubiquitous, you’ve already lost. Fighting “A.I. Data Centres” is literally quixotic.
I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
The second problem is that the CO2 is diluted in the atmosphere. Consider the amount of energy needed to remove salt from ocean water, it's not simple.
It just takes a lot of energy to that what was done by burning fossils in the first place.
This is only a problem if AI won't develop cheap carbon neutral energy sources, like fusion or advanced fission, or more efficient solar with cheap grid-scale batteries.
Well, it was true in the 90s, and it's still true today. Once climate change becomes important enough (that is, causing actual significant damage to important, wealthy countries), it takes just one such country to start a stratospheric aerosol injection project, or, if space launch costs become low enough, put a sunshade between Earth and the Sun. Such solutions have their own risks, of course. But if climate change really becomes bad, they will be tried. And from what I have read, they have a good change of succeeding.
What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
They are still not melting enough. Most of the negative consequences of current summer heatwaves can be pretty much solved by installing US-style ubiquitous air conditioning.
I'll grant you social media and advertising, but the other two are not new, and were way worse in the past.
Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that's going to impact the company's profitability, but by then your stock options will have already vested - so that's a problem for someone else!
Personally I will forgive them the Datacenter carbon if they are willing to stop flying private jets.
[1] https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
The rest of us, who might be on green tariffs usually get a commitment that on average almost all our energy comes from renewables. When supply is short then I'm the one who's paying for gas generation rather than the company who has committed to greenwashing. But that also drives investment in renewable generation, in the UK renewables have gone from 2% of power generation in 1991 to around 50% now.
From a climate change perspective, what happens at one particular moment doesn't matter -- it's CO2 emissions globally over time that do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_purchase_agreement
They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.
They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.
Not everyone is a software developer.
What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.
Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.
NIMBYism isn't rational, it's a manifestation of fear of change, even if they past state of affairs was worse than the future one. I live in a city where the anti-datacentre campaign isn't about some pleasant locale, but a disused toxic industrial land in a steel-mill complex over half a km away from any actual homes.
The corn field is a known quantity.
If we pay each farmer to generate solar (and maybe also stop paying them to grow corn beyond what's actually economically viable), why would they care what the next farm over is doing? I thought we were talking about places where people live too far apart for "backyards".
Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.
At a large enough scale, it doesn't matter how efficient you are - you're still causing a more damage than the region or the world can take.
The concern is real and very much deserves the opprobrium voters are showing.
New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.
These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.
With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable
- explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)
- played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient
- showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas
- did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record
- did not disclose the actual dBA values
- kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.
If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
Yes, data centers are loud. Fortunately, some time ago humans invented important technological breakthroughs called "earplugs" and "ear protectors".
I've spent enough time on city council noise ordnance boards and understand enough about acoustics to say that the professional sound system I own would certainly be audible and annoying to my neighbors half a kilometer away even if it were not appreciably above the noise floor of the surrounding environment.
Folks are great a signal detection and it's very annoying to them to be able to detect an unwanted bass drum or similar, which they can do at pretty long distances. Even distributed noise is still often noticeable to people.
For instance, I live in the literal middle of nowhere and I still encounter real noise pollution from gas well heads and gas processing plants that are several kilometers from my home.
The tax breaks are well-established in the media, see for example [0].
So, a 100MW DC will have about 20-30 people and a 1GW campus will be 200-300 people.
Those numbers can be boosted if the site has a significant non-operational support staff such as security and cleaning. But a significant part of security us heavily automated, to the point where when Meta had a major network failure they couldn't get on-call support staff into the facilities to fix the issue because the security doors were linked to the main network.
This is always kind of funny to me. How's an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?
How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed "data" center?
Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they'd like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.
Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can't decide if it's zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I'd be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can't be purely about power consumption.
>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?
What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because you aren't receiving the benefits is naive. No one's doing all this for free.
>If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We've been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?
You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?
And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.
Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you're not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.
tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.
Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.
This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.
I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1tes0rr/ai_data_cen...
[1]https://global.honda/en/environment/initiatives/data/
[2]https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv...
[3]https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/health-care.p...
[4]https://electricityplans.com/how-much-electricity-does-an-ap...
[5]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5058574/ for water usage per square meter for hospitals
[6]https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2017/1131/ofr20171131.pdf for water per person per year
The flood of anecdotal thumping seems to distract and undermine deliberation. The sad lack of peer reviewed data and impact analysis hinders thoughtful policymaking.
"More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption."
I absolutely believe that there's leftover noise around the facilities, too, specially low-frequency humming for electrical equipment, but I have yet to see _actual_ reporting demonstrating newer AI-centered datacenters produce even near the amount of noise OP was claiming.
That would mean 130dB of noise inside the facility, which sounds (pun intended) impossible to me, no matter how bad the acoustic planning is.edit: just understood what "Extra zero" meant. The original comment before being edited said 100m and that's what I was quoting.
I still heard almost nothing ~20m from it, but neither I (nor the company who built it) knew what kinds of workloads ran there and I suspect it was mostly traditional workloads.
For someone who knows enough to point out that dB is logarithmic, you seemed to have neglected the fact that sound is inverse-square for distance? Unless these neighbors are _literally_ located 100m outside the data center?
dB should generally be expressed at what distance it was measured, and you'll see this done all over the place.
In this case, you'd reach 70dB at about 1km from the 90dB at 100m source, but they could also be completely different datacenters.
OP was talking about datacenters in residential areas and quoted the 90db @ 100m value, which indeed is 70dB @ 1km distance, which is absolutely absurd and would make it impossible to live nearby. That's the original comment I've answered.
Then, OP edited the post and said it was 90dB @ 10m, which means 50dB @ 1000m, an okayish value (depending on the type and duration of the noise), but that's not a distance we were talking about before.
I know datacenters in my city that are less than 500m from residential zoning (I should note I'm not in the US and this is not a new datacenter), so I didn't think that the original (distance) measurement sounded absurd, that's why I pointed out how much the (noise) measurement seemed to be out-of-scale.
Anyways, I think OP's measures where just completely made up or misremembered, because I'm any way I've framed the data (and the edited data), it doesn't match my personal observations around the few datacenters I've been to nor the data that's been released.
I did agree about the possibility of low-frequency noises being a huge nuisance, though, as those types of noises feel much worse than random noises at random intervals at higher dB.
It doesn't have to be really bright lighting but that's the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter's request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.
I would have traded a data center for the dairies I lived near as a kid
Maybe we should be calling them "compute centers" instead of "data centers".
> At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
A "Rechenzentrum" was a place where lots and lots of people were sitting down crunching numbers with pen on paper. This job also existed in the USA, where originally "computer" was the job title of someone working in such a computer center.
But then electronic computers became better at crunching numbers than human computers, so the job became obsolete. The word stayed around, but the meaning changed. Same way we dial phone numbers despite phones no longer having dials. We also still hang up the phone, despite there being nothing to hang the phone on anymore.
> Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
I'd also question whether that is inside or outside. We already have regulations that govern the acceptable noise levels around commercial and industrial properties so I highly doubt that a datacenter is going to have an exception.
From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.
As a non American, I find this incomprehensible.
Why can’t it be discussed?
The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.
For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.
Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
Yes, water rights law is complicated. California's access to water from the Colorado River is due to the Colorado River Compact, which exists because state disagreed on the details of how water "goes back out into the environment".
That said, I was under the impression that many data centers use municipal water, which is more subject to market price, and not water allocated by property rights. While certainly some do, it isn't always so.
The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
The excess minerals don't worry me much.
> Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1]
This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either.
[1] https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?ope...
Do you have a link for this? I'm interested in learning more about why Masley is wrong on heat islands.
If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that.
If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
First, the numbers. My searching says that for some particular lake in Nebraska, "Average annual gross lake evaporation ranges from about 48 inches to 54 inches". Let's call it 4 feet per year, which means 4 acre-feet of water evaporates per acre per year. Trusting some numbers someone gave in a comment earlier, the data center in questions used about 40 acre-feet per year. So 10 acres of lake would evaporate about the same rate as the data center. At a very rough guess, there are something like 200,000 acres of non-seasonal lakes in Nebraska, so this is indeed a tiny percentage.
Next, the relevance. The lakes are more or less in a steady state. But if you were actually to double the evaporation rate for a 10 acre lake, you might quickly end up with a muddy pit instead of a lake. The fish would be gone, and the users of that lake would have good reason to complain. If lake was 10 times larger, so that you were only increasing the evaporation by 10%, over time you'd still probably have a major effect on the shoreline and any infrastructure there. What used to be useful pier might look over a mud flat rather than the water, and launching a boat would be impossible until you built a new one.
But the real issue is that water use isn't actually fungible. Water continuing to evaporate from a lake at the rate it always has definitionally doesn't make people's life worse than it was. But suddenly pumping of the same amount of groundwater might be really bad for the neighbors who previously were using the same water to irrigate their fields. And trying to double the output of a small municipal water system might (at least in the short term) make things much harder for all the existing users on the system. This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done, but it's a harm that should be considered.
That's my good faith attempt to answer you. In return, I have a quick research question that I think is essential to understanding whether or not data center water usage is a big deal or not, and that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments: Where is this water for these new data centers coming from? Is it from new wells they drill? Existing irrigation wells they buy and repurpose? From the local municipal water supply? Rainwater collection? Diverting a nearby river?
I feel like there's no way to answer the question of whether data center water usage matters without considering the actual local impact, and no way of determining the impact without considering the specifics of the source. But somehow I haven't seen any mention of this on either side of the debate.
If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
Wow!
Id find it difficult to believe that these companies are giving that much money in free loans to the government the way a retail worker estimating their taxes and getting a refund of a few hundred to thousand a year does.
Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Nebraska had a unexpected 86 million dollar gap in tax revenues collected last year[1] and these tax 3 tax breaks on their own account for 130% of that
[1]https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/15/nebraska-ends-fiscal...
Given the numbers I've seen for tax breaks for other big construction projects (malls, factories, etc), I wouldn't be surprised if the state ends up in the red on datacentres. It's not all that uncommon for the state to offset project cost 100% on the promise of job creation.
> Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska.
> Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
My point is that I suspect (I'll admit that I haven't done any research on this) that people wouldn't be against other facilities with the exact same footprint if they didn't carry the label "data center" and this is primarily driven by a backlash against AI and not the resource use itself.
Tonto, dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.
I am not really aware of the laws around walking down a public sidewalk with a beer in hand. It is certainly gauche but a done-thing to sit at a bus stop and have a Fireball or two.
However, any drinking establishment that serves alcohol will stop you at the door and won't permit anyone to carry drinks outside of their premises. That's a strict thing. My apartment community bans drinking in walkways and stairwells, which was probably done more by non-residents than my neighbors. So there are a lot of bans on public drinking, even if it is not blanket-outlawed.
A couple of major developments at the shopping mall, though: traditionally all American movie theaters were dry, but that rule has been relaxed, and even the major chains are serving alcohol now. At the mall there has been instituted a "sip & stroll" policy, where designated bars can serve you a plastic cup, and you can roam around the mall with drink-in-hand, as long as you observe the borders of it, where you can't walk into the parking lot or off-premises with your booze.
In general, I have seen many liquor-related laws be relaxed and lightened across my county and state. It seems that there's a general lack of will to crack down on the demand-side, when there is lots and lots of profit to be had on the healthcare-side, where you will get a diagnosis and medication and treatment, whether that is IOP or in-patient, so why not encourage more drinkers to overindulge? Broken window fallacy FTW!
Relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law
tl;dr details vary by state and municipality, but with very few exceptions you can't walk around a random town drinking fireball. Or, well, you can as long as you don't get caught.
I've seen what you're talking about though. It seems like the big trend for millenials has been "<blank> but with booze." Barcades. Sip & stroll at malls. Booze in movie theaters. Paint & Sip. The microbrewery craze that's partly just "bars but make them fancy"
If you really want to get thrown for a loop, go read up about the Tavern League. One of the most powerful lobbies in Wisconsin state government is a massive cartel of... bars.
The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon.
Seemingly much better article (pictures, better comparisons): https://flatwaterfreepress.org/data-centers-can-guzzle-serio...
Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one.
Update: in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient.
But because capital is attracted to cities, the market will bear higher prices, so real estate and food prices go up, which is the “evidence” for why they are inefficient.
Instead it’s probably better to think about all of the niche businesses that can only exist in cities. Even with sky high rents, it’s only that density of people that can support a person who specializes in repairing violins, a direct tea importer, a store that has African instruments next to bag pipes, a pirate paraphernalia business, a store that sells gargoyle statuary exclusively. They’re also the only places, prior to the internet, that can sustain special interest groups and support groups for people with rare conditions. You need the density for anything but the majority to be seen and supported.
And it’s cheaper per gallon to build a giant water treatment plant than a tiny one for 600 people.
Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
Don't get me wrong, I think carbon emissions matter but primarily because we should simply do better if we can. But I've never found a study that proves causation, at best its correlation shown primarily through modeling.
That doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it does mean that reducing carbon specifically isn't guaranteed to reduce or reverse climate change.
Surely you must agree thst such a complex system as the global climate can't be driven by a single factor, or a single element on the periodic table.
Modelling studies can never prove likely causation, at best they prove likely correlation. Meaning, two things seem highly likely to happen together but we can't say one caused the other.
Carbon emissions and carbon in the atmosphere has been shown highly correlated with the increase in average global temperatures, weather pattern changes, etc. That doesn't directly say carbon emissions caused those though, they could both be side effects of a more fundamental root cause.
Said differently, we know carbon emissions and average temperatures after the year 1850 both went up at similar rates. We also know, though, that many other things changed over that time. We can't run a controlled study of the entire environment is impossible, we can't isolate variables and compare outcomes when only one facto changes (in this case carbon).
Legislation gets easier once public opinion has turned against an idea or a company. But it takes a while to build that up.
How do we responsibly plan for clean, drinkable water becoming a resource only people/businesses with a certain income can afford?
That angle opens the argument to concerns from various fronts, including data center use but also concerning things like agricultural use if that's a concern for you.
The drinking water concern also would hinge on having to define "clean drinking water." Humans have made do with drinking from streams, rivers, and ground water for most of human history. Today into he west at least we largely drink recycled waste water treated with bleach and various other chemicals. Drinkable yes, but I'd personally rather drink some rain water than bleach water.
I just know they have better options for cooling than water, and that fresh water supplies need to be prioritized for other uses as the resource becomes more and more limited.
That scrutiny should be applied to all industries. We can compare agriculture and data centers, but you can’t water plants with coolant.
There are environmental impacts of both the production and disposal of glycol coolants and similar. I'd assume they would at least he disposed of "properly" at the scale of a data center, but even just understanding the externalities on the environment and water use there is a can of worms.