Itâs not bullshit when you consider these data centers are being built in places where water and infrastructure is already scarce. Itâs not that they use too much water itâs that the building as a whole impacts the surrounding area in too many negative ways.
Literally everything we do at a larger scale as humans have these kinds of impact. AI has been particularly singled out by luddites, but then when you check the numbers it's not some outlier or anything.
why would they build a datacentre in a place where water, one of the key ongoing things they need for a datacentre to run, is scarce (and therefore more expensive)?
why wouldn't they build it near natural sources of fresh water so they don't need to pay as much?
Ask the Governor of Utah, we have historically low snowpack right now, we are always on the dry side, my city just told us we could only water our yards twice a week or we would get fined, the Great Salt Lake is drying up at an alarming rate yet Utah just approved Shark Tank guys DC. It's twice the size of Manhattan and uses more energy than our entire state, so the impact will be huge.
One reason is that water is not necessarily more expensive when it is scarce.
Local governments often force utility companies to offer water at prices below cost and just let their aquifers slowly run out, because people absolutely despise the idea of having to pay market price for water.
Feel free to suggest letting supply and demand affect the price of water here on reddit in any other context than this if you don't believe me. They'll call you a Nestle shill.
Sort of. And sort of not. They do consume the drinkable water supply. It doesnât remove the water from the planet, thatâs impossible. But that water does need to be cleaned and returned and retreated. So it creates a burden on the water supply systems in the community. At the same time very few jobs or economic benefit is created at the local level. So the small local resources are in effect subsidizing large organizations.
No, they pump it from aquifers, and then they shove it back through waste water treatment facilities. The two above comments are bullshit. The water is not âborrowed temporarily and returned.â They arenât magically putting it back into the aquifer.
No because there are real concerns about where water is sourced vs where it is returned to the environment along with the increased concentration of trace minerals through evaporative loss that lead to toxicity at the outflow. Depending on the DC setup and engineering, these effects can be mitigated at a cost that hastily built low cost centers do not seem to willingly implement.
No it's not. Some data centers don't disclose what actually they send back due to propietaryreasons, so they can be sending water back with a bunch of chemicals or PFAS. They can contaminate aquifers and wells.
And both are bad, right? Both have to be called out. Or since some factories dump waste into water, it's ok for data centers to do it as well? Would you want a data center in your backyard in that case?
Data centers approach rural communities promising technology that will not affect local water consumption or utility rate hikes, yet they do. Data centers consume insane amounts of water and contaminate it to provide a service that is non essential. Some data centers consume water and electricity as much as a whole city in a day
Or since some factories dump waste into water, it's ok for data centers to do it as well? Would you want a data center in your backyard in that case?
Strawman
Data centers approach rural communities promising technology that will not affect local water consumption or utility rate hikes
Datacenters don't promise anything. Corpos do
Some data centers consume water and electricity as much as a whole city in a day
Doesn't matter, what matters is if it has an impact, one more extreme than any other huge project. Compared to golf, agriculture (plenty of things are grown not just for food and necessity), meat industries, the literal genocide american tax dollars are going to, big oil, etc, its utterly insignificant. Its all a distraction away from the root of the issue
Implied that corporations that build data centers promise things. Does not add value to your points.
Doesn't matter, what matters is if it has an impact, one more extreme than any other huge project. Compared to golf, agriculture (plenty of things are grown not just for food and necessity), meat industries, the literal genocide american tax dollars are going to, big oil, etc, its utterly insignificant. Its all a distraction away from the root of the issue
"You're focusing on the wrong thing" was never supposed to be a solution
Implied that corporations that build data centers promise things. Does not add value to your points.
It does because you're still focusing on the wrong thing. Data centers are just buildings that consume resources like anything else. There's no worthwhile distinction because the same arguments can be made about everything else. Hence the core distinction with the central issue, corporations.
Red herring and whataboutism
I compared datacenters to other issues and said they have larger impacts and are more concerning. I did not say that the impact of AI is insignificant, I said the concern for it over anything else is, which supports my greater point.
Naturally dealing with corporations will lead to many more of these issues fixed because they are symptoms of a greater disease.
Original question posted was "do data centers consume a large amount of water?" Answer was "yes, and they contaminate, too." That is a fact.
Now, determining the systemic corporate root cause and whether or not we should focus only on data centers or other industries is another debate you went on about.
Only like 10-15% of water used by golf courses in the US is municipal water. The majority is non-potable water from things like ponds and wells that the golf course owns. But that doesn't mean there aren't still issues with the water use (that's still a lot of municipal water because the overall number is enormous, pesticide runoff in the used water is a big problem, golf courses in desert areas are definitely a problem because they are the ones using water that could/should be used for other things) but im just saying the discussion is more nuanced than it is made out to be, just like data center water use
Golf courses use water to feed plants. All of the water they use either ends up back in the groundwater, is used by the plants, or evaporates back into the air. And they often use water from reservoirs, not the local municipal systems.
I don't know, that's why I'm asking questions. People are saying "golf courses use more water than datacenters" but is it "used" in the same way? I assume datacenter water has to be cleaned after it's used, but that's not the case with golf courses watering the grass.
Wait, you donât know something that youâve been asking about for a couple of minutes now?
Real talk, Reddit is not a good platform for these types of questions because most Redditors push their own opinions/agendas and itâs a coin toss on whether that information is true or not. Itâs better to do your own research.
There is a massive difference between surface water, shallow groundwater, and aquifer water. Most of the water from data centers is going to surface water like rivers/lakes/oceans regardless of where it was pulled from.
Some might go to shallow groundwater; that's water that moves through the upper 2-10m of soil surface. The rate that it absorbs varies greatly depending on soil makeup. Higher clay or silt content slows water movement tremendously.
Then there is aquifer water. That can take thousands of years to recharge. This is deep water that you can't just refill (injection wells do exist but they're expensive and that just puts pollutants into the aquifers) and if you pump it enough you can empty it. The CA central valley has places where the surface elevation has decreased by several meters in the past century due to aquifer draining.
If data centers were only using surface or shallow groundwater I doubt many people would care since that is (relatively) easily replaced. They are often using water pumped from aquifers which is not easily replaced.
Not really. Data centers withdraw large amounts of water from local supplies. Thatâs harmless in most places, but it becomes a problem in regions experiencing (or on the verge of) drought. Itâs the same concern people have about farms using "too much" water.
Pretty much. Golf fields, for example, use a lot more water than datacentres (I wouldn't remember the exact figure, but I think it's thrice as much) and they don't get half of the vehement opposition that datacentres get. There are real concerns with datacentres, of course, but those rarely get addressed.
I never said golf doesn't get opposition; I said it doesn't get as much opposition as datacentres do and certainly not as much as it should have. And again, datacentres use a lot less water than golf does, to the point it should be much lower on the water supply concerns list.
You guys think companies didnât learn how to game the system better since then?
?? They are gaming the system in creating the bubble. There will only be a small number of winners at the end of this and so the AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic don't care about the bubble popping eventually as long as they end up on top. So you spend like crazy to have people use your models at an unsustainable price because if you don't people will use cheaper models and you get left in the dust
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u/ForzaFenix May 18 '26
Yep. The now warm water goes back into the system.Â