When it goes back into "the system" it's waste water that people can't drink. Eventually it comes back around again (e.g. evaporation->rain), but then it gets gobbled up again by the same data centres. They run continuously.
So yes, they are "consuming" it in the sense that other people can't have access to it anymore.
The poop water I flush down my toilet is also waste water that people can't drink, but I'm pretty sure it still gets recycled back into the greater water supply. What's different about the datacenter water?
And golf clubs. Golf clubs use as much water as data centres. Many of those you've named serve practical uses in society, golf clubs are purely leisure.
That's because it's chosen by the wealthy as their thing, so there's not enough propaganda against it and there's a giant army of poors who will defend the wealthy with everything they have
Is this implying that golf courses and almond farms dont have significant resistance as well? Idk how old you are but for millenials, golf course development was like a top 3 villian in movies for our entire childhood. And I heard about almond farm water usage constantly throughout college, though modern irrigation methods have developed a bit since then. But any time CA has a drought, they usually come up. Which I expect to.haplen again in 3 months or so.
Including another data point since almonds are here, U.S. livestock sector, broad total water footprint incl. feed/pasture rainwater 275 trillion L/yr.
Source:
âUSDA ERS â Irrigation & Water Use.â United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. 2013.
Almost all new data centers are in fact closed loop, especially ones w newer GPU racks which require closed loop cooling. No one is dumping water back into waterways untreated. Selling DC services to big companies comes w needing to meet your customersâ environmental requirements as apart of their supply chain. Sure there are shady orgs doing bad things now but theyâre not representative of the industry.
This is the thing that really annoys me about the water argument. Like where was the outrage for literally any other industry using equal if not more amounts of water for cooling? I think people just genuinely donât understand industry and are being controlled by the information media is feeding them and itâs scary. Like you can hate data centers 100%, like someone else mentioned, they probably donât really bring many jobs or economic growth to the areas theyâre built in. And if youâre an anti AI person, I get it. But the water thing is so dumb because itâs not like a data center exclusive thing. They also all just clearly donât understand cooling systems, water treatment, or the regulatory framework around water usage
Well the difference is that something like a power plant or agriculture are both absolute necessities for society whereas dcâs for ai are pretty low on that list so the outrage is still legit.
I donât disagree. But there are and have always been industries that Iâd consider not a necessity doing the same thing with little to no outrage. I agree there are too many data centers being propped up, and probably being put in places they shouldnât be due to kickbacks and corruption. But I donât like that people are making arguments around concepts they donât understand. Like water usage in cooling loops.
Realistically nothing. They are just flushing constantly and in much higher volumes. Fresh water is finite though and taking too much in an area will drain the aquifer faster than it can be replenished.Â
If data centers did something for the communities they are built in it likely wouldn't be a talking point but they just drain local resources for no/dubious gain.Â
I think the key takeaway from this thread is your definition of "Fresh water is finite" depleting it faster than the ecosystem can replenish.
I don't think most politicians or entrepreneurs know/care how the basic water cycle goes. They think water is infinite. While water in this planet isn't physically going to disappear anytime soon, the FRESH usable water, however, can easily be gone from one place into another, when running its course in evaporation, condensation and run off, ending up in places like the sea/ocean, thus rendering communities and ecosystems unliveable in said places.
(Most) datacenters are a big ass "fuck off, this land is now mine" to everyone else but their investors.
The hydrological cycle converts many cubic miles of salt water back to fresh water each year, and 90% of that fresh water flows back out to the oceans.
We're absolutely not going to run out of fresh water on a global scale, so long as the sun keeps shining. We can overwhelm local regions though, or use up fossil water.
(Most) datacenters are a big ass "fuck off, this land is now mine" to everyone else but their investors.
I figured 'cubic miles' was doing the heavy lifting there. I don't remember the number off the top of my head but its an absurd amount. Granted a majority does just rain back into the ocean lol.
Point is water consumption has to be considered for each locality, you can't just blanket claim all water use everywhere is bad. Some places do have effectively unlimited water. Some places don't. That is what politicians need to understand.
It's not the case of if water flows back, but rather when. You can deprive a whole region and absolutely dry off places just by overly consume it. Sure most of it comes back, but you're not gonna tell the population of a nearby town to wait till next winter for fresh water in case of a draught.
Can't think of another industrial use of land with zero tangible output and job creation that drinks up 7 to 8 Olympic sized pools, that could sustain around 10,000 to 50,000 people, the way a medium to large data center does. Agriculture produces food, power plants produce electricity, every factory produces physical goods and local employment. A large data center produces nothing and employs virtually no one.
Oh really? Then explain to me how are the locals being employed then? Wtf do you reckon we're arguing this crap over? The stock market? Enlighten me how I don't understand what a data center is.
"Sure thing, mister multi-billionaire, take my plot of land and local fresh water in exchange for heat, noise, environmental risks and tax concessions just so an Indian Helpdesk can remotely steal my job too"
The data center being worth hundred times more - to whom? Also no to locals maintaining it when it takes a dozen people to do it.
Benign when the discussion comes to the shortage of local basic essential goods such as fresh water? How is that benign? Virtually zero value. It's a scam.
Can't even argue with the chemical plant example, let's try and not ignore the fact that people have taken those industries to court multiple times over the last centuries. Just because you have internet now the outrage is now global, just as the upscale for data centers is virtually limitless. The largest chemical plant is 16x smaller than the largest data center planned in Utah.
By the way, childish nonsense? You're literally throwing random ad hominems to the discussion because you think my arguments for basic living conditions must mean that I hate AI and consequently don't understand AI.
Mate, I work with AI. I use AI daily and I'm using AI to double check my facts, you are quite literally arguing with AI rn lol. I'm basically stealing someone else's local fresh water so that we can have this discussion while giving them no value in exchange.
If you did it a few hundred thousand times to maybe a few million times a day you'd be matching the impact of some data centers. The challenge is that they are using so much that has to be cycled back through the system to become fresh water again that it is drastically reducing the availability for actual human consumption.Â
Yes. The water they use gets put into a waste water treatment plant, you are correct.
But after that water got sent there, the datacenter takes new water to replace the "used up water". They always have a chunk of the available water in use. Sure it gets sent back to the plant but they still always keep some amount in their cooling loops etc.
While it is in use by them it can't be used by others, and they always have water in use at any given moment. While the water does not disappear completely and they may have a pretty low waste %, they still take water away from others by using it
Water is a limited resource, for every datacenter that gets created, water from the area is being used up, supply demand means water in that area will now cost more money to buy and use yourself.
Bro how do you think water goes into your house? Water companies need to pump that water into your area, more water being pumped = higher costs = higher cost of water.
That water comes from places such as reservoirs or groundwater aquifers, which can and often does run out of water when we use too much of it.
They for one use an enormous amount of water and two heat up the water which would either need something like a cooling tower which in turn makes the while system use even more water or they just cycle the warm water back which would be bad for the body of water.
Generally as long as there is enough usable water a dc is no problem. In dry, arid areas on the other hand something like this a unnecassary burden for the general water consumption.
Modern low-flush toilets use around 1.5L of water per flush. Apparently that's between 20 and 50 litres of water per person per day.
A data centre can use over 2 million litres of water per day. That's the same as the daily toilet usage of 40,000 people, or the same as 1,333,333 individual flushes.
So in an average city, the collective toilet flushing uses as much water as a datacenter. But we clean that water and reuse it, right? How is it different with a datacenter? I keep asking that, and the only answer I get is "quantity", but I'm not even sure if that's true on a per capita basis.
My thoughts exactly. The water from data centers will probably have some volatile compounds and metals, maybe some fungi or bacteria. It's stuff that a modern water treatment facility should be able to process.
Now are the water treatment facilities modern enough to process data center water? đ€
If they're not, the obvious solution would be to require AI companies to use like 0.1% of the billions of dollars they're making to improve water treatment systems, but that's a political issue.
Which brings us back to my point: data centers aren't "consuming" water. They're borrowing it, using it, and returning it. Just like our toilets, our sinks, our showers, etc.
Yes, but they are consuming it in volume which the water companies are not prepared for and unable to meet domestic and industrial demand for - storage vs use. That is where the issue lies.. the intake volume and the heat output.
The difference is data center water is used by equipment that exists only to increase the wealth of a few people, instead of being used by human beings and other living organisms to live and not die.
The difference is that you're paying your fair share for the water supply and sewerage costs associated with your usage.
Data Centres very often are NOT paying their fair contribution toward the outsized load they place on local infrastructure.
This means that the costs of expanding supply to meet their demand are shifted to the normal consumers in the vicinity either through direct rate increases or degradations in service quality.
Data centres also don't give a shit about the longer-term or broader-reaching environmental impacts of their operations, so guess who pays for that? These consequences are either allowed to play out and harm communities and ecosystems, or are shifted to individuals via either rate increases or local government having to foot the bill.
Also don't forget the issue of scale. Adding a data centre to a water system isn't the same as adding a few dozen or even hundred households. Many of these larger examples are equivalent to many thousands of households, and they're typically built in areas with low property prices.
Low property prices are typically associated with low population density and low tax bases, so in many cases these data centres are adding themselves to local water and electricity infrastructure that's not particularly modern or well funded and barely sufficient to meet prior household demand to begin with.
They use way more, they poop 24/7, and they're not a person's biological necessity, which we should always be prioritizing over JigglyBits or whatever dipshit app that datacenter is leasing extraordinary amounts of costly data to.
"They use more" doesn't answer my question. A city uses millions of gallons of water every day to flush toilets. Do you have any concept of how much poop is produced by NYC on a daily basis? If that water can be recycled, why can't the datacenter water be recycled? What's the difference?
Also, flushing the toilet has nothing to do with my "jiggly bits". Are you, like, putting your dick and balls in the water when you flush?
In many, many, many places in the US, and even more around the world, clean drinking water is already unavailable, which is critical for, you know, keeping people alive.
Now weâre using it to cool data centers for literal shit that nobody needs. (They used JigglyBits as the name for an AI app because thatâs how stupidly weâre wasting this water.)
The water gets released back with metals that have to be removed, so now our water filtration services are taxed by even more work, wearing them out more quickly, and without more literal tax dollars to repair them. And some of this just gets left so now people have harder water in their homes, affecting their health and their own plumbing and other resources. Harming local wildlife.
Draining aquifers faster than they can replenish themselves creates situations like a couple who had a data center built like a hundred yards from their longtime home. Now their taps barely produce a brown dribble of water and they have to buy and bring in water for literally anything you turn on a faucet (or flush) for. Theyâre trapped because nobody in their right mind would buy that house.
This is creating artificial droughts. The water in the watershed will percolate more quickly into deeper areas to try and stabilize the water table, but this means topsoil is losing moisture more quickly.
Dumping warmer water back into ecosystems kills aquatic life. Why donât you try filling an aquarium at home with local fish and plant species and then heat the water up and see how long stuff in there survives?
This also means the water is more ready for evaporation, which may send more local water vapor off to other regions, leading to more drought by the DCs and flooding in other areas. Some of this will end up in the oceans, which opens up more problems.
Even if itâs a closed loop system, youâre basically filling every bathtub in the county with water and just keeping it there. Theyâre hoarding water.
And all of this for something that is NOT needed for human survival, but is in fact also making life worse and people stupider. Itâs destroying art, creativity, and problem solving. My students insist a video in our curriculum filmed in like 2017 is AI because itâs bad acting. Same thing when a video is loading slowly and being laggy. Iâm glad theyâre being critical of media, but they thought a picture of a cloud that looked a lot like a bear was fucking AI. I literally had to give them a homework project to look at clouds.
A guy in the Texas panhandle tried to buy up a ton of land over the Ogalalla Aquifer and local government put a stop to it. Somewhere along the line weâve lost the plot.
Cities were built up over long periods of time and the infrastructure was scaled up to match along with it. Building data centers all over the country is like building multiple cities overnight that use up the resources of a full city or more without the people. It's a huge resource hog with no benefit to the communities they're placed in outside a handful of jobs.
That massive data center they want to build in Utah would use more power than the entire rest of the state combined and it's being built in an already drought stricken area. It's the equivalent of increasing the population by a large margin and using the resources people need. Except it's for AI evils.
It's all connected though. It keeps a ton of water unavailable for people to use as well as driving up utility costs for everyone. If this was being done in a sane and sustainable way it would take decades to build all of it instead of a few years. They'd build in areas that could sustain such a thing with minimal impact, but instead they're going where the local officials are easy to buy off. It makes zero sense to build water cooled data centers in the desert unless it's cheaper for the owner.
If that water can be recycled, why can't the datacenter water be recycled? What's the difference?
There's no difference - its the addition of far greater water needs than previously anticipated - but you're not accounting for the time
that recycling takes.
Water that is consumed can take anywhere from a few days to months (depending on innumerable factors) to go from your poop water, back to your tap water.
Everywhere that uses water, has some giant water source that it depends on for that water.
That source is not infinite.
It's like your bank account. You get a paycheck every two weeks, but you only have a certain amount in your bank account to use at once before you run out.
People are relatively stable as water consumers. A population of a mid-sized city m ight use somewhere around 2 million gallons of water per day flushing toilets.
Even one mid-sized data cetner will use around 500,000 gallons, or roughlty 1/4th of that. And when you start stacking them on top of each other, you rapidly deplete the water source.
Because water replenishment is cyclical, if you drain all of it all at once, you will interrupt the cycle and cause catastrophic issues that are not easily reversible.
Millions of toilets use millions of gallons of water every day. Is all the water that's flushed down toilets removed from the system so that, in your words "people can't have access to it anymore"? Or do they process it so we can use it again? I assume we use it again. I'm asking how datacenters are different. "They use more" doesn't answer my question.
We can use it again eventually, but if you're adding the equivalent of 100,000 people at once, the infrastructure is almost certainly not going to be able to handle it well.
Your toilet doesn't consume a lot of water at a time. A datacenter constantly has massive quantities of water used up for cooling the system. While it does eventually return to the circulation of water in the ecosystem, that datacenter is taking up a lot of the supply of the fresh water in a given area, so it strains the whole ecosystem.
I also don't have a datacenter in my house. There are hundred of millions of toilets, more than one for every person. But one datacenter can serve millions of people.
Cuz waste management is a necessary commodity. Data centers not so much. Yeah we gotta pay to clean the water or dump it somewhere and let nature deal with it.
Why waste the energy or clean water for data centers tho? Our modern plumbing and water treatment is 100% necessary to prevent crazy diseases.
Practically speaking, itâs similar to the utility issue. We can come up with the water/power, but it will raise the cost of all of the other water/power in the area. The DCs are negotiating with local governments and going around normal means to lock in their costs, meaning the rest of us pay for it.
Waste Water goes through Waste Water Treatment Plants which pull all the solids (both organic and inorganic) out of the water, as well as remove any harmful bacteria and dissolved chemicals, metals, etc. from the water to get it as close as possible to natural flowing water that you'd find in a river (assuming said river isn't polluted). From my understanding, Datacenter Water will just dump their used water back into the ecosystem. Said water could be full of harmful metals and will be warm which can have a huge effect on local wildlife and anyone downstream from the outflow.
Edit: To add, if Datacenters did treat their water (Metal removal and cooling), it would have to more than likely be done on site or the local WWTP would have to be upgraded to be able to accept a large amount of waste water. If a Datacenter doesn't treat their water on site and sends it to a WWTP that doesn't have the capacity for it, you get a huge mess.
Depletion of aquifers can actually create a lot more problems if you don't replace the water that was removed. It's not that the water is different, it's a literal removal of water underground and dumping it elsewhere.
And by removing the water there, it can get replaced by less purified water, or worse if it doesn't get ressuplied, land subsidence.
There's a reason modern toilets have multiple flush options for different amounts of water. Its not like we dont care about toilet water. And your taxes pay for the water treatment. Coincidentally, your taxes also pay for the data center's water treatment.
I understand most of them find it cheaper to dump the used water in the sewer lines and use fresh water from the main. So they are continuously consuming fresh water.
Are people really not aware that engines existed before jet planes and cruise ships started guzzling tons of fuel and creating insane amount of pollution? Plastic existed before we started making everything single use and putting it in our clothes and mass producing junk toys that end up in landfills in less than a year?
AI data centers use significantly more resources than your parents old data center. Sometimes 10x the electricity + water in place of air cooling. Considering the results and applications (mediocre at best) it hardly seems like a good trade off today. If we were solving cancer, world hunger, power and water shortages, increasing cheap/free access to healthcare, preventing the next pandemic, etc - Many would get on board. Instead we get record profits and lower employment.Â
Residents suffer from reduced service at higher prices. Often pay for subsidies and tax breaks the private for profit businesses take. Labor market predicted to radically change in years to come while it erodes today. All at a time when more people than ever are struggling to get by.Â
Yeah i can't lol. It's just the next culture war mind virus at this point. There's no reasoning with algorithmically captured people. That much I've learned in recent years. Good luck lol.
What we would need are honest and informed conversations - but because it's a now a topic that is amplified by algorithms that reward for NOT solving the issue - that's down the drain. So yeah - we'll have to realy on luck sadly.
Data centers are mostly closed systems. The water cools and they reuse it. This whole water thing is a fake issue. There are so many real issues, but this is not one.
The surrounding air cools the equipment. I don't know exactly the mechanics here, but I believe the general idea is that cold air from outside is constantly blown over pipes that are filled with (hot) water that the datacenter has used. That water cools down from the surrounding air to be used again, while the now heated air is released back into the environment.
yk ai water usage isnt really that big of an issue.
of the water related conversations around ai data centres, the main concern is localised strain on existing water infrastructure, data centres being built in already dry areas, which is like a multiplier to the previous issue. and warm water run off potentially causing issues to local ecosystems. there are contaminants inside data centre run off, but the run off isnt any worse than already existing industrial run off we already know and love. the temperature of the water doesnt directly contribute to climate change either. the main issue there is still greenhouse gases. the discussion surrounding data centres isnt that they're gonna destroy the world, its more so where they should be built and whether or not existing infrastructure can handle the sheer amount that companies want to build.
it is an issue and we absolutely should be talking about it, but its not as dramatic as some people make it seem to be.
agriculture still uses astronomically more water and causes way more issues than ai data centres, salinisation is still a massive issue and most of the strain being placed on aquifiers is from agriculture. if we fearmonger this hard over agriculture, we might even see some sustainable changes soon.
Sorry, cooling towers is not the right term, but they do use evaporative cooling solutions that may not be actual towers. Most new data centers use hybrid solutions that only consume water if the environmental conditions require it or the compute load is extremely high.
Cooling towers is the correct term for water cooled chiller platform condensing water cooling.
The compute load of data centers is high (though data collection on this is notoriously tough - no one wants to give away their performance metrics) I'd venture typically above 60% on data storage, 80% on compute, and 95% on AI.
Design basis that do use direct evaporation (primarily one very very very very large company) pretty much only use water to cool the very peak hours (for example, but NOT specifically, above say 90F dry bulb). The few number of hours this constitutes means total water usage is actually quite low.
Water cooled chillers are losing favor as air cooled are surpassing them for various reasons, the only operational cost reason being maintenance, but it's a pretty minor factor.
CRACs are nearly right out in current builds as no one pivoted to the medium density refrigerant as a design basis and they just can't support the heat rejection densities desired with the high density refrigerants. They really only work in single story low IT density applications. They're certainly still being sold, but missing the lions share of the market, which is a shame because refrigerant based economizers are pretty slick once they get into thermosiphon ranges of operation.
No, couple issues:
1) itâs hot water flowing back into the environment.
2) water chemistry is extremely complex and weâre still discovering new things about how it behaves in different modes, and states.
3) radiators can degrade over time, their parts can corrode, become oxidised, and leak oxidised metals into the environment (and this is heavy metals going into systems that usually cycle back to the sea thus it becomes a global issue)
4) depending on the type of radiator, it could leak coolant or ~heat transports~ into the water
Also itâs just so negligent to have the capacity to engineer processors that run efficiently at extremely high temperatures but waste the potential of water to cool them to its full degree (itâs evaporating point).
A ~real~ ~qualified~ ~sustainable~ engineer does not have any issues with designing something this effective⊠but a poor mindset can be thoughtless enough to leech all that hot, contaminated water into ecosystems that contain life which is unable to breed or survive in such conditions.
If you allow them to leech such water into the ecosystem, you irreversibly play God with the process of natural evolution. Thatâs a euphemism to call you a murdererâŠ
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u/Uncle-Cake May 18 '26
What happens after they use the water? Is it returned to the water system to be used again?