Context: 1 acre-foot, a usual unit of measure for agricultural water, is a bit under 1/3 of a million gallons. 17B gallons is about 52k acre-feet.
Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert.
The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A.
Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no.
I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?
The question is how much is returned to the original source. Given that the water is ~100% evaporated in the case of DCs it’s a genuine and reasonable question to ask
No, the water is extremely hot. It takes a massive amount of infrastructure before this water can be "released." Unless you are one of those massive polluters that think discharging extremely hot water into the ground is safe and not something that immediately kills the life it's dumped into.
At least ~30% of water is evaporated when you use it in agriculture (that is the whole point; plants typically don't go the the trouble of absorbing water just to pump it back into the ground).
Even if you use such an extremely conservative ratio (and assume that all water used in datacenters is 100% evaporated away for cooling) the argument stands.
Most of those partisans have no idea what other sources of water consumption are by magnitude. They seem to quote any number as if it is a lot. A billion gallons is a lot. 500000 gallons is not a lot.
Each datacenter uses as much water as 1,000 homes. You're welcome to put such resource constraints in your own local community if you don't care about the increased demand.
That is a number that gets quoted, but I just ran the latest numbers for my local city.
A couple of dozen planned data centers, with an estimated combined use of 160k gallons per day.
Apparently the average household uses 300 gallons a day, which seems insane to me. I guess a lot of people water their lawns. That gets us to a mere 23 households per data center. Even with 100 gallons per day per household or less, the local data centers are not at 1000 households per data center.
And where I live, water is not a concern. They are building a pipe out from Lake Michigan, which has been in the works now for 10 years. That primarily gets the tri-city area off of the aquifers which have been drained at an unsustainable rate for the last 100 years.
If I lived along the Colorado river system, that's a different discussion.
The Colorado water system is a disaster that long predates the invention of computers. The way water rights are implemented in the western US (doctrine of prior appropriation) meant that anyone who owned land through which the river flowed could take enough of it to plant lettuce in the desert.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma_Lettuce_Days
That's nuts. These practices took so much water that native populations could no longer sustain themselves from the river. Complaints about the relatively low use of water by data centers seems pretty weak in comparison, although I still wouldn't locate them in the desert; the desert is a better place to load up with solar and wind farms.
> The Colorado water system is a disaster that long predates the invention of computers.
Totally agree, and that's part of why I was bringing it up. I recently was going down the rabbit hole of the story of the Salton Sea. Absolutely insane.
Golf courses use about 1.63 million acre feet, about 32X more, some of that probably reenters watersheds and aquifers, not necessarily great with fertilizer runoff. But they pose lower risk of human extinction, so have that going for them.
If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns.
It’s more nuanced, the water consumption can be a real local problem. The evaporated water doesn’t necessarily come back to the original source, and if the water supply was already stressed you’re adding even more pressure to it. You have to look about the actual details, like all arguments about resource consumption
Yeah, but the anti-datacentre people won't care about that. That is an issue for local people and specific cases. Myrmidon isn't addressing the comment at people who have actual local issues with water issues; it was advice for the partisans.
You'd have to look locally at individual datacenter projects then and not be against all of them.
If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry.
But I just don't see that happening. Noone is going without water because of datacenters. Noone is going without water other than people in California who get there's stolen from farms. That's a real issue, not a hypothetical.
Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them
> Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them
This is exactly my problem. I'm not saying you're wrong about this in any way. But your (and many others) core problem with datacenters is not actually the water use. The water argument is just a strawman to increase environmental legitimacy, and thats a really bad and harmful practice (I do realize that this might seem minor given incompetent political leadership that spews uninformed drivel all day, but coherency and correctness still matter!)
The water argument is simply never helpful. If water is scarce locally, then let local administration reject datacenter projects for exactly that reason. If they fail to do that, fix/campaign against the local administration (because that's where the problem is at). But blanket arguing against datacenter buildout because of water usage is just bad-faith campaigning, and it is gonna hurt credibility elsewhere.
What does it mean to be consumed in this context? After used for cooling isn’t it clean enough for drink and other uses? Can’t it go back into other systems? Can’t it be used for agriculture?
This refers to water that is evaporated for cooling of both the datacenters themselves and the power plants that give them electricity. The remaining water after evaporation is so full of minerals that it has to be discharged as sewage.
This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.
"consumed" means it was used for evaporated cooling and let off into the atmosphere. It's obviously a resource that replenishes, but wells replenish at a limited rate [and can run dry] so it's not a negligible issue.
Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.
That's a small portion of the consumption. According to the article, the vast majority of the water is for electricity generation, and the vast majority of that water is from hydroelectric power generation. Hydroelectric generation does not evaporate the water, it releases it downstream in a clean, usable form.
Can that vapor be captured and condensed again? The energy transfer of evaporation happens before it reaches the cooling tower exit. It's a conservation of energy thing for sure but condensation is doable.
The worst designs evap up to 80%. New designs use closed-loop system where very none to little evaps (0-6%) depending on the system.
Many designs in-between with air cooling, hybrid, etc.
Still a non-issue, it's going back into the water cycle.
Any water issue would be specific to the municipality, it's not a national issue, nor is it an issue specific to datacenters, it's true for anything being built in the town (golf courses, power plants, etc.)
Okay I feel like maybe I'm missing something. In a closed loop system, nothing evaporates. If you use an air cooled design, nothing evaporates.
If you use a hybrid design, you still evaporate ~80% of your cooling water - you just use less overall cooling water.
The water going back to the water cycle doesn't mean it's potable.
And yes, I do understand that it is a very small fraction of overall water use. I am actually in favor of using water where it will reduce electricity use. But let's not be inaccurate - the water used for cooling is absolutely evaporated or sent to sewage, with the exception of whatever sits inside the system's closed loop (which exists whether or not the system is cooled evap/dry/hybrid).
Hybrid systems keep the primary process fluid in a closed loop, they spray water on pads to cool the coils during the hotter parts. Basically a stop gap when air cooling is not enough.
There's also close loop systems that lose none, it's just more expensive to build. They are already being deployed in areas with scarce water. Microsoft and a quite a few others already built a few.
This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people.
However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.
They use closed loop systems. That reduces the water consumption on-site, but you still need to move the energy out of the DC, which requires a lot of energy. That extra energy itself is likely produced by upstream power plants evaporating water. In practice you mostly move the consumption upstream.
With regards to evaporative cooled DCs (either primarily cooled that way or assisted some of the time): Imagine an air conditioner that instead of requiring energy to drive the compressor to make the phase change work, all the phase change was provided by taking in liquid water and evaporating it off as vapor, taking the latent heat of vaporization (2257 kJ/kg or 970 BTU/lb) with it.
People have always used a closed loop to move heat in and out of the data hall - but something has to keep that closed loop cool. That's often a cooling tower which uses evaporating water to reject heat into the air in a way that's very energy efficient.
Additionally, the power plants which supply electricity to the data centers have the same cooling problem. They also typically use cooling towers.
It's not dishonest at all. Datacenters and fossil fuel power plants are absolutely evaporating fresh water for cooling. The piece that's missing from that discussion is that it helps them use less electricity.
I don't even know who owns forgeeks.net. They're only a couple months old and is disseminated by a new HN account. Some of the "author" social media links appear AI generated.
Red flags galore. Wouldn't surprise me if it was bankrolled by bad actors and/or a website created/operated by AI agents.
The article links to a report from the library of congress, from which it gets it's numbers. The congressional report is quite informative, and and non-partisan.
Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless.
Annual withdrawals (2015)
- Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal
- Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal
- Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal
- Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal
- Aquaculture: ~2.76 trillion gal
- Mining: ~1.46 trillion gal
- Livestock: ~730 billion gal
- Total: ~117.5 trillion gal (322 Bgal/day)
Source: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015: U.S. Geological Survey Circular - https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441
Yes I use LLMs at work because I'm "highly encouraged" to as a condition to keep my job. All I see is more paying customers finding more bugs and having a worse experience using our products.
You don't see the issues with your line of thinking? You get to absolve yourself of the responsibilities of your choice because "someone is making you" use it? How can you say you value almonds more than LLM slop when your individual choices don't reflect those values?
Well let's not shit post so hastily because it's not my company. I don't have dominion over my peers, and I don't have authority to lead initiatives as worker. I do what they say or I get fired. It's pretty simple, this isn't a unique experience for the vast majority of workers either.
Also telling people to simply leave is very anti-human + anti-democratic. Workers should have the right to have a say in the company, they are the ones that do the work after all.
Telling people to simply leave just favors those with money compared to those without. There's also the whole you know... losing access to healthcare when quitting jobs; also IDK if you've been in a coma the last 3 years but the tech winter is still ongoing, LLM induced mania hasn't resulted in downstream companies hiring more.
You have to look at the local level, water isn’t distributed the same way around a country as large as the US. Some regions have no water problems while others have a lot of consumption and competition to get access to it
I haven't seen a single article doing that though (from either side) and I honestly think that nobody would even trust these companies at this point (Meta et al) to give an honest analysis anyways.
Agreed, reporting on anything technical like DCs is very surface level. Just some aggregated numbers and a list of grievances or random quotes from someone with conflict of interests
Good context, but aren't many of your examples simply putting that water back into the ground? Also, where the water is taken from is the key issue. If this was ocean water nobody would care, but if it's Reston, VA that's a local issue.
I'm not sure what led you to believe that the water is being put back into the ground "simply" or otherwise but maybe you shouldn't be acting like it's a non-issue when you clearly don't understand the problem.
DCs are pumping the water through evaporative cooling towers because the latent heat of vaporizaton means there's a huge amount of heat sucked up in the phase change from liquid to vapor. None of the water is being "put back into the ground" except maybe that used during flushing and other maintenance.
"Dry" cooling exists, where there is a closed coolant or refrigerant loop run through radiators, but those require more power, which increases cost and limits how much power can be used for compute (but they also get the say "it makes us use more power, bad for the environment! We're being Green by using evaporative cooling!")
For perspective, the total annual water consumption of all US data centers is about 100 days' water production of the nearby water treatment plant to Reston, VA. Or put differently, all of the US data centers can be comfortably supplied solely with the water from the next phase of expansion of said treatment plant (an upgrade of 75MGD).
"17 billion gallons of water a year" sounds like a lot of water, but it's really not.
If you need to denigrate pure context as "whataboutism", then maybe your core argument is trash?
I mean, sure, lets not build datacenters that are 100% evaporation-cooled into each desert-oasis.
But if general water availability is your concern, than datacenters are so far down the priority list that any argument involving them is just laughable. And if you are against datacenters, then find a proper argument instead of making environmentalism look stupid.
Datacenter water usage exploded over the last year… “Here, look how much water gets used by everyone flushing their toilets.”
I don’t even care about that comparison. They’ll do whatever they’re going to do. But throwing around random numbers about water usage doesn’t make the point you think you’re making. It’s deflection, and nothing more. Not every random datapoint is context just because it uses the same metric.
It’s basically: “Frank is 8 years old and still poops his pants. So if he can do it, I can poop my pants too, Mom.”
This is a good illustration how cursed the datacenter topic has become when people go out of their minds on computer cooling while continuing to eat meat which lets be perfectly clear - is mostly for entertainment purposes. I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.
Well the thing with the livestock is that you have to give a cow water.
Datacenters do not need water. It is just slightly cheaper for them than cooling with electricity.
Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption, and ideally in a way where it isn't a ghastly eyesore.
So? Many people are not willing to give up their cloud services either?
And there are other kinds of meat that cost less water to produce. I don't think someone who isn't willing to give up beef for chicken is at a higher moral ground than someone who wants cheap tokens.
Give up your meat consumption because it's more about societal excess than anything else.
Meat is and mostly always has been(in euro societies) a luxury item meant mostly for the rich.
Capitalism turned meat into a MUST HAVE item for keeping up with the Joneses.
We consume absolute insane amounts of meat nowadays, and we waste about half of it, just so people can feel good cuz theyre eating a high class excess meal.
Lol most people throughout history didn't eat much meat. It's wild how modern western people refuse to see how we'll destroy the planet trying to feed 8 billion people with the most inefficient method of creating calories(beef). The inefficiency IS THE POINT.
From the above stats, a 2.3% change to USA meat consumption, up or down, has the same impact as a 100% change to data centre water consumption, up or down.
If I read the USDA stats correctly, US red meat and poultry production went up about 5.6% from Jan-Jun 2025 to Jan-Jun 2026, i.e. the increased production of meat led to an increase in water use that was twice as much as the water use of all the data centres combined.
It's not quite that simple. Most people who reduce/eliminate meat consumption are going to substitute something else rather than eat less, and what they substitute may be just as water intensive as the meat they replace.
For example, if a person's meat diet is virtually all chicken (reasonable given prices lately), substituting the chicken for almonds is a net neutral change. Almonds use every bit as much water as chickens do.
Granted, that may be an extreme example, as almonds are one of the more water-intensive crops, and chicken is one of the most water-efficient meats. There will likely be decent water savings in many cases, but at the very least, anything a person substitutes for their existing meat diet is going to use some water as well.
True. I was going to hate the environmental destruction being wrought for the purpose of funneling more of our wealth to a handful billionaires who will use the AI against us, but then I remembered how bad meat eaters are for the plight of the common man, and now data centers don’t seem so bad after all.
You don't need a law to force people to pay for resources they consume; basic economics already ensures that. If there are externalities not already accounted for by that (increased demand for water/electricity driving up costs for others, noise, "eyesores", etc.) you could pass laws to ensure those costs are paid by the responsible party but that's not a datacenter-specific issue.
How does that work in a market where you are bidding amongst other participants and capacity is constrained? Supply is limited and demand is growing, the market response is to charge more.
Well, just off the top of my head... if you wanted to treat the increased prices caused by the spike in demand as an externality (and I agree that's not exactly the right way to think of it, but people seem determined to in this case and I can't really fault them for that given the practical effects of such price increases) I think the way to do that would be to give existing consumers futures contracts for water for the next ~10 years proportional to their existing usage.
People could then either use the futures contracts to keep the price they pay for water the same as it was, or voluntarily reduce their water usage and sell the contracts to the datacenter for a profit. Same deal for power.
This would of course be a bit complicated for most people to manage, so maybe instead of giving consumers the contracts directly you could have some intermediary manage the contracts for them with approximately the same result.
Alas, we do, because in the case of water, basic economics are stymied by pre-existing water-rights laws that are batshit insane. As such, we need legislative action to (at minimum) clean up that mess.
> Datacenters do not need water. It is just slightly cheaper for them than cooling with electricity.
As long as electricity at least partially produced using fossil fuel I would prefer data-centers to use as little electricity as possible. There are regions which are getting plenty of rainfall on average (which can be collected and stored) or were getting some water from rivers will have negligible ecological impact.
But currently DC operators have little incentives to choose DC location based on outdoor temperature or water availability and there are plenty of DCs in hot and arid regions.
Differences in air temperature are largely below the noise floor in terms of impact on data center cost. Slightly lower energy prices and other operational or capital costs are more than enough to offset significantly hotter climate. Arid climates improve evaporative cooling efficiency.
> Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption, and ideally in a way where it isn't a ghastly eyesore.
Fact is, almost nobody "needs" meat in their diet, and even if all meat eaters did actually need it rather than merely want it, there are meats which use less than the average quantity of water.
From the above stats, the mean American's loss of water due to unnecessary use of water for unnecessary meat raised in their territory, is about 43 times the mean American's loss of water due to the unnecessary water use of datacenters that are in their territory.
> Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption
I think we can all agree on this one yet this is not what's being argued in most discussions. What hangs up the discussion is the complexity of development e.g.: to build a datacenter it takes 1 year but to build energy infra it takes 5. So this complexity needs equally complex policy and people just don't have time for that when there's free range raging served right to your palm screen.
calling it "actual food" is clearly misleading when majority of meat is used purely for entertainment not for survival sustenance. By that logic compute is "actual medicine" because some of compute is used for medicine?
The datacenter topic is cursed because people are afraid of ai. People seized on water usage because it is a more legible and tractable focus for their fear.
There would need to be some articulable upside to data centers, though. Even if we agree there should be less livestock, I don't see how that has any bearing on the data centers topic.
I assume HN runs on machines in a datacenter. The servers that serve my business also reside in a datacenter. I see lots of upsides to datacenters, and they've been around long before they were controversial.
It's to put water usage in perspective. I think the best example is golf courses.
If you think datacenters are a waste of water and you want to do a global campaign to stop building / shutdown golf courses first, then your values don't really make sense.
Golf is pure leisure, and uses 531 gallons compared to 17.4 gallons a year.
Datacenters on the other hand, power the site we're using right now to discuss the "problem". You wouldn't be able to have this conversation without them.
--
Why aren't people screaming constantly about golf courses and pressuring to shut them down?
Why the focus on datacenters if the bigger win is staring you right in the face (if you're that concerned about water usage)?
I would get rid of every single golf course in the world if I could. One of the worst uses of land out there. Imagine the horrible, gross volume of herbicides each course uses to ensure that only the "correct" grass is growing over all those acres.
> I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.
I can imagine raising issues with a specific datacenter in a specific water-constrained location, but I agree that being vocally concerned about the teaspoons of water consumed to produce an AI response while being unconcerned with the thousands of gallons used to produce a cheeseburger seems like innumerate virtue signaling.
Is this a "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" objection, where even the slightest bit of hypocrisy or impurity justifies rejecting the argument?
If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environmental impact of meat production, berates you for defending data center water use, would that convince you to change your mind?
What about a vegan, who also stopped flying and doesn't drive, and is organizing a protest to shut down the local golf course?
Yeah why would someone berate you for telling them to stop eating and support data centers? Gee why would someone get so emotional when told to stop enjoying food and help the billionaires make more money?
> But that's tripled of water use across all sectors due to datacenter buildout. So no "comparison" to other uses is needed.
You're saying almond farm water use tripled due to data center buildout? What other meaning of "all sectors" could make sense of this claim? The report clearly says 17 billion while all other sectors are in the trillions.
Nice perspective. So even if all these data centers were built in the desert, it's entirely within the realm of possibility to transport 17B gallons of water, unlike the 43 trillion used for irrigation. Some back-of-the-napkin math:
- A truck holds 5000 gallons
- It would take 3.5 million trips to transport that much
- If each trip was 500 miles roundtrip, that's about 2 billion miles
- Trucks travel 140 billion miles each year in the US. That would add less than 2% to the total miles
- The trucking industry is about $1 trillion in revenue per year. So 2% of that is $20 billion total to transport 17 billion gallons. Or around $1 per gallon.
The problem is that these comparisons do not have equal utility. Trying to compare them to AI datacenter consumption is equivalent to justifying a gambling habit on a fixed income because groceries consume plenty of dollars as well.
> The problem is that these comparisons do not have equal utility.
That's just your opinion, though. I would prefer a purely vegerarian society with advanced AI that can cure cancer or discover new maths to society with meat and no AI.
Right, but the utility goes in the other direction, not the one you’re maybe thinking.
Meat is basically optional, you don’t need meat to be healthy or happy. There are vegetarian body builders. Meat has, probably, negative value on most American’s lives, due to its contribution to heart disease.
That’s not to say meat isn’t tasty. It is. But from an objective standpoint, the value is ehhh.
Arguably, AI has much more value, and for 1/100th the water cost. Hey, that’s pretty good!
One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water.
It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists.
There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.
If you want to play these stupid games how much water did you think was used to make the concrete for the data centers? Or how much water was used to cool the steel? How much water did all the workers drink while building the data center? How much water did they use to build all those GPUs?
Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the delusional fantasies of the tech elite (all of which hold deeply anti-human + anti-democratic views).
Now when I use an internet search, the top answer is an AI guess/approximation to the result and can be completely inaccurate. I have to ignore that and move onto the traditional results and hope that they aren't A.I. slop websites.
>A BBS chatbot from the 80s (LISA) was almost as good as modern LLMs and that was just based on key words.
Of course, because it's not like whole world went crazy after ChatGPT and hundreds of billions of dollars are being constantly invested into many of technology stacks - software, hardware, semiconductor engineering in order to push this technology even further, lol.
I feel like we need some citations for these figures. Our World In Data [1] disagrees. I've not seen any analysis that puts any plant milk at a higher water use figure than dairy.
It's really weird to me that datacenter fans all have detailed knowledge of almond farming, but never seem to notice that the nutritional value of ChatGPT is not on par with your average box of almond milk.
Because nutritional value is not the only thing of value. We invented this clever way of uniformly valuing things called "money" that abstracts over all of those differences though.
Lots of places in the US have plentiful water. Don't build data centers where there's a lack of water! And it's a dead horse at this point, but we don't need to be growing almonds in CA. If you actually care about water use, focus on that.
Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.
Potable well water should NEVER be used for such purposes. Aquifers recharge at a rate far lower than industry wants to pull from them. At some point potable water for humans will run out.
If you're using water just to evaporate it for cooling then use surface water.
Using water for cooling significantly reduces cooling energy use. The decision of whether to use dry, evaporative, or hybrid cooling approaches should be driven by the specific water availability in the area where the cooling process is to be used.
Many regions do have enough water to support evaporative cooling. When water is available, using it is prudent because it saves so much electricity.
Using surface water is not a practical approach for most cases because the process would need to be built next to a river or lake - there is limited industrial real estate in these areas.
It's weird how all these statistics could end if the owners of these data centers would just simply release the numbers for the public to learn from. Instead they are keeping these figures private and we have people trying to best-estimate the reality. Mostly for reasons we all understand: true figures would cause an even larger public backlash.
Fun fact, citizens of The Dalles, OR had to sue their own government to get them to release numbers on how much Google data centers were consuming (info Google stipulated should be kept "proprietary"):
Is anybody working on using all this waste heat for desalination?
I think cold seawater can be used for the external loop, through a heat exchanger where it would meet the heated pure water from the internal cooling loops. This would cause evaporation of the salt water which could be captured.
Waste heat from data centers is significantly below the temperature that desalination systems typically use. While a desalination system could theoretically use data center waste heat, it would require far higher capital costs than other desalination systems.
Support for data centers jumps a net 31 points after voters are told modern facilities can reuse the same cooling water for up to 10 years, new poll finds. -- https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2092209623583404461
Fluid renewal occurs only every 7–15 years and is performed in a fully contained process that meets state and federal environmental standards. This design ensures zero water withdrawal, zero discharge, and continuous operation — fully aligned with TeraWulf’s commitment to sustainable digital infrastructure. -- https://www.lakemarinerdata.com/closed-loop-cooling
Can, but do they? Feels a bit like Musk's Colossus that "could" use nuclear power but has been running on "temporary" natural-gas turbines for years now.
An acre of alfalfa is typically irrigated at 5.5 AF per year. The standard center pivot field is 130 acres ~ 700 AF of irrigation, to grow alfalfa to ship overseas. Converting to gallons, 210 million gallons, for one field.
80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage.
USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.
The article source for the 17B gallons is a Congressional Research Service report and its source is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. Both are interesting reads. The 17B number is an estimate. Here are some of the inputs:
* reported numbers of server deliveries
* power draw per server
* average utilization based on various workloads, including a Llama 70B 8 node training run
* mix of data center cooling types
* do math to get to 66B liters, which rounds down to 17B galoons
Article title is extremely misleading. These are figures from 2023 - almost three years old now, and since then US datacenter power consumption has doubled.
Again, defensive HN commenters respond to facts about water consumption by citing other sources of water consumption
But fail to consider that "AI" adds to those sources and raises total water consupmtion
Is total water consumption important
Perhaps the comparision that readers will make is not (a) existing non-"AI" water consumption versus "AI" water consumption but (b) total water consumption without the additonal "AI" data centers versus total water consumption with additional "AI" data centers. IOW, "before" versus "after"
Will readers ignore (b) and only think about (a)
It's the same response from HN commenters every time: compare "AI" data centers to some other water consuming activity
The rise in meat consumption in the past year is already double the TOTAL data center consumption of water. Look at that very carefully - the few percentage points rise in meat consumption consumes more water than all data centers in the entire country.
When it comes to the rise of total water consumption like you’re talking about, data centers are a drop in the bucket. Truly negligible.
bell-cot | 15 hours ago
Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert.
The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A.
Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no.
thedougd | 15 hours ago
WarmWash | 15 hours ago
In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.
etiennebausson | 15 hours ago
dgellow | 15 hours ago
shimman | 15 hours ago
myrmidon | 15 hours ago
Even if you use such an extremely conservative ratio (and assume that all water used in datacenters is 100% evaporated away for cooling) the argument stands.
RajT88 | 15 hours ago
zug_zug | 15 hours ago
otterley | 15 hours ago
As far as I know, there's not a single place in the world where someone went without water to cook, drink, or bathe because a data center consumed it.
oklahomasports | 15 hours ago
RajT88 | 15 hours ago
A couple of dozen planned data centers, with an estimated combined use of 160k gallons per day.
Apparently the average household uses 300 gallons a day, which seems insane to me. I guess a lot of people water their lawns. That gets us to a mere 23 households per data center. Even with 100 gallons per day per household or less, the local data centers are not at 1000 households per data center.
And where I live, water is not a concern. They are building a pipe out from Lake Michigan, which has been in the works now for 10 years. That primarily gets the tri-city area off of the aquifers which have been drained at an unsustainable rate for the last 100 years.
If I lived along the Colorado river system, that's a different discussion.
otterley | 14 hours ago
That's nuts. These practices took so much water that native populations could no longer sustain themselves from the river. Complaints about the relatively low use of water by data centers seems pretty weak in comparison, although I still wouldn't locate them in the desert; the desert is a better place to load up with solar and wind farms.
https://coloradoriverscience.org/Water_law_and_policy if you're interested.
RajT88 | 14 hours ago
Totally agree, and that's part of why I was bringing it up. I recently was going down the rabbit hole of the story of the Salton Sea. Absolutely insane.
cma | 15 hours ago
myrmidon | 15 hours ago
If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns.
So don't push it.
dgellow | 15 hours ago
roenxi | 15 hours ago
theultdev | 15 hours ago
If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry.
But I just don't see that happening. Noone is going without water because of datacenters. Noone is going without water other than people in California who get there's stolen from farms. That's a real issue, not a hypothetical.
dgellow | 13 hours ago
Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them
myrmidon | 13 hours ago
This is exactly my problem. I'm not saying you're wrong about this in any way. But your (and many others) core problem with datacenters is not actually the water use. The water argument is just a strawman to increase environmental legitimacy, and thats a really bad and harmful practice (I do realize that this might seem minor given incompetent political leadership that spews uninformed drivel all day, but coherency and correctness still matter!)
The water argument is simply never helpful. If water is scarce locally, then let local administration reject datacenter projects for exactly that reason. If they fail to do that, fix/campaign against the local administration (because that's where the problem is at). But blanket arguing against datacenter buildout because of water usage is just bad-faith campaigning, and it is gonna hurt credibility elsewhere.
whycome | 15 hours ago
ziofill | 15 hours ago
elil17 | 15 hours ago
This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.
zug_zug | 15 hours ago
Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.
dgellow | 15 hours ago
quickthrowman | 15 hours ago
bryanlarsen | 15 hours ago
zug_zug | 14 hours ago
If we want the other 80% (which I don't personally think we care about) 211 billion more.
whycome | 14 hours ago
fridental | 15 hours ago
elil17 | 15 hours ago
[OP] kuuuzya | 15 hours ago
theultdev | 15 hours ago
non-issue, chinese propaganda to get us to slow down.
unfortunately some people parrot it, but most are smart enough to know it's bs.
you'd think they would want to shutdown golf courses first, it's pure leisure and much more water, but it's not about that :)
elil17 | 15 hours ago
theultdev | 14 hours ago
Many designs in-between with air cooling, hybrid, etc.
Still a non-issue, it's going back into the water cycle.
Any water issue would be specific to the municipality, it's not a national issue, nor is it an issue specific to datacenters, it's true for anything being built in the town (golf courses, power plants, etc.)
elil17 | 14 hours ago
If you use a hybrid design, you still evaporate ~80% of your cooling water - you just use less overall cooling water.
The water going back to the water cycle doesn't mean it's potable.
And yes, I do understand that it is a very small fraction of overall water use. I am actually in favor of using water where it will reduce electricity use. But let's not be inaccurate - the water used for cooling is absolutely evaporated or sent to sewage, with the exception of whatever sits inside the system's closed loop (which exists whether or not the system is cooled evap/dry/hybrid).
theultdev | 3 hours ago
yeah... that's the point right?
Hybrid systems keep the primary process fluid in a closed loop, they spray water on pads to cool the coils during the hotter parts. Basically a stop gap when air cooling is not enough.
There's also close loop systems that lose none, it's just more expensive to build. They are already being deployed in areas with scarce water. Microsoft and a quite a few others already built a few.
avalys | 15 hours ago
However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.
dgellow | 15 hours ago
sokoloff | 15 hours ago
elil17 | 15 hours ago
Additionally, the power plants which supply electricity to the data centers have the same cooling problem. They also typically use cooling towers.
It's not dishonest at all. Datacenters and fossil fuel power plants are absolutely evaporating fresh water for cooling. The piece that's missing from that discussion is that it helps them use less electricity.
tyjen | 14 hours ago
Red flags galore. Wouldn't surprise me if it was bankrolled by bad actors and/or a website created/operated by AI agents.
Fricken | 14 hours ago
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057
thevinter | 15 hours ago
Annual withdrawals (2015)
- Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal
- Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal
- Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal
- Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal
- Aquaculture: ~2.76 trillion gal
- Mining: ~1.46 trillion gal
- Livestock: ~730 billion gal
- Total: ~117.5 trillion gal (322 Bgal/day)
Source: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015: U.S. Geological Survey Circular - https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441
paxys | 15 hours ago
shimman | 15 hours ago
dgellow | 15 hours ago
Marha01 | 15 hours ago
letmevoteplease | 15 hours ago
shimman | 14 hours ago
skinfaxi | 14 hours ago
WarmWash | 14 hours ago
shimman | 11 hours ago
Also telling people to simply leave is very anti-human + anti-democratic. Workers should have the right to have a say in the company, they are the ones that do the work after all.
Telling people to simply leave just favors those with money compared to those without. There's also the whole you know... losing access to healthcare when quitting jobs; also IDK if you've been in a coma the last 3 years but the tech winter is still ongoing, LLM induced mania hasn't resulted in downstream companies hiring more.
tester756 | 15 hours ago
spogbiper | 15 hours ago
dgellow | 15 hours ago
mr_roboto | 15 hours ago
zug_zug | 15 hours ago
I haven't seen a single article doing that though (from either side) and I honestly think that nobody would even trust these companies at this point (Meta et al) to give an honest analysis anyways.
dgellow | 13 hours ago
zug_zug | 15 hours ago
KennyBlanken | 15 hours ago
DCs are pumping the water through evaporative cooling towers because the latent heat of vaporizaton means there's a huge amount of heat sucked up in the phase change from liquid to vapor. None of the water is being "put back into the ground" except maybe that used during flushing and other maintenance.
"Dry" cooling exists, where there is a closed coolant or refrigerant loop run through radiators, but those require more power, which increases cost and limits how much power can be used for compute (but they also get the say "it makes us use more power, bad for the environment! We're being Green by using evaporative cooling!")
zug_zug | 15 hours ago
KennyBlanken | 15 hours ago
doikor | 15 hours ago
It isn’t like the water magically disappears. It just gets turned into moisture in the air.
Though that can be very far away depriving the local environment or other industry of the water. Extra bad if that water is pumped up ground water.
jcranmer | 14 hours ago
"17 billion gallons of water a year" sounds like a lot of water, but it's really not.
trentor | 15 hours ago
myrmidon | 15 hours ago
I mean, sure, lets not build datacenters that are 100% evaporation-cooled into each desert-oasis.
But if general water availability is your concern, than datacenters are so far down the priority list that any argument involving them is just laughable. And if you are against datacenters, then find a proper argument instead of making environmentalism look stupid.
trentor | 14 hours ago
I don’t even care about that comparison. They’ll do whatever they’re going to do. But throwing around random numbers about water usage doesn’t make the point you think you’re making. It’s deflection, and nothing more. Not every random datapoint is context just because it uses the same metric.
It’s basically: “Frank is 8 years old and still poops his pants. So if he can do it, I can poop my pants too, Mom.”
wraptile | 15 hours ago
This is a good illustration how cursed the datacenter topic has become when people go out of their minds on computer cooling while continuing to eat meat which lets be perfectly clear - is mostly for entertainment purposes. I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.
zug_zug | 15 hours ago
Datacenters do not need water. It is just slightly cheaper for them than cooling with electricity.
Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption, and ideally in a way where it isn't a ghastly eyesore.
jp191919 | 15 hours ago
zug_zug | 15 hours ago
I'm not giving up my meat so that datacenters can use it for cooling, if that's what you're suggesting.
raincole | 15 hours ago
And there are other kinds of meat that cost less water to produce. I don't think someone who isn't willing to give up beef for chicken is at a higher moral ground than someone who wants cheap tokens.
chneu | 14 hours ago
Meat is and mostly always has been(in euro societies) a luxury item meant mostly for the rich.
Capitalism turned meat into a MUST HAVE item for keeping up with the Joneses.
We consume absolute insane amounts of meat nowadays, and we waste about half of it, just so people can feel good cuz theyre eating a high class excess meal.
Lol most people throughout history didn't eat much meat. It's wild how modern western people refuse to see how we'll destroy the planet trying to feed 8 billion people with the most inefficient method of creating calories(beef). The inefficiency IS THE POINT.
ben_w | 14 hours ago
If I read the USDA stats correctly, US red meat and poultry production went up about 5.6% from Jan-Jun 2025 to Jan-Jun 2026, i.e. the increased production of meat led to an increase in water use that was twice as much as the water use of all the data centres combined.
atmavatar | 14 hours ago
For example, if a person's meat diet is virtually all chicken (reasonable given prices lately), substituting the chicken for almonds is a net neutral change. Almonds use every bit as much water as chickens do.
Granted, that may be an extreme example, as almonds are one of the more water-intensive crops, and chicken is one of the most water-efficient meats. There will likely be decent water savings in many cases, but at the very least, anything a person substitutes for their existing meat diet is going to use some water as well.
lightedman | 14 hours ago
This is why we evolved to be omnivores. Basic biology laughs at your poorly-researched position.
jp191919 | 14 hours ago
ghunio | 14 hours ago
LaSombra | 14 hours ago
Ajedi32 | 15 hours ago
zug_zug | 15 hours ago
Increased demand absolutely DOES increase the cost both in theory and practice.
Ajedi32 | 14 hours ago
skinfaxi | 14 hours ago
Ajedi32 | 13 hours ago
People could then either use the futures contracts to keep the price they pay for water the same as it was, or voluntarily reduce their water usage and sell the contracts to the datacenter for a profit. Same deal for power.
This would of course be a bit complicated for most people to manage, so maybe instead of giving consumers the contracts directly you could have some intermediary manage the contracts for them with approximately the same result.
atmavatar | 14 hours ago
wraptile | 15 hours ago
you don't _need_ a cow though
chneu | 14 hours ago
Most folks have highly distorted views of how animal agriculture works. It's disgusting and insanely inefficient.
LaSombra | 14 hours ago
citrin_ru | 15 hours ago
As long as electricity at least partially produced using fossil fuel I would prefer data-centers to use as little electricity as possible. There are regions which are getting plenty of rainfall on average (which can be collected and stored) or were getting some water from rivers will have negligible ecological impact.
But currently DC operators have little incentives to choose DC location based on outdoor temperature or water availability and there are plenty of DCs in hot and arid regions.
jandrewrogers | 14 hours ago
Differences in air temperature are largely below the noise floor in terms of impact on data center cost. Slightly lower energy prices and other operational or capital costs are more than enough to offset significantly hotter climate. Arid climates improve evaporative cooling efficiency.
ben_w | 14 hours ago
> Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption, and ideally in a way where it isn't a ghastly eyesore.
Fact is, almost nobody "needs" meat in their diet, and even if all meat eaters did actually need it rather than merely want it, there are meats which use less than the average quantity of water.
From the above stats, the mean American's loss of water due to unnecessary use of water for unnecessary meat raised in their territory, is about 43 times the mean American's loss of water due to the unnecessary water use of datacenters that are in their territory.
wraptile | 14 hours ago
I think we can all agree on this one yet this is not what's being argued in most discussions. What hangs up the discussion is the complexity of development e.g.: to build a datacenter it takes 1 year but to build energy infra it takes 5. So this complexity needs equally complex policy and people just don't have time for that when there's free range raging served right to your palm screen.
thawawaycold | 15 hours ago
wraptile | 14 hours ago
thawawaycold | 14 hours ago
Source of that inane statement?
KennyBlanken | 15 hours ago
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
causalmodels | 15 hours ago
everdrive | 15 hours ago
silverquiet | 14 hours ago
everdrive | 14 hours ago
shimman | 11 hours ago
bdangubic | 11 hours ago
theultdev | 14 hours ago
If you think datacenters are a waste of water and you want to do a global campaign to stop building / shutdown golf courses first, then your values don't really make sense.
Golf is pure leisure, and uses 531 gallons compared to 17.4 gallons a year.
Datacenters on the other hand, power the site we're using right now to discuss the "problem". You wouldn't be able to have this conversation without them.
--
Why aren't people screaming constantly about golf courses and pressuring to shut them down?
Why the focus on datacenters if the bigger win is staring you right in the face (if you're that concerned about water usage)?
It's not about the water.
everdrive | 14 hours ago
angiolillo | 13 hours ago
I can imagine raising issues with a specific datacenter in a specific water-constrained location, but I agree that being vocally concerned about the teaspoons of water consumed to produce an AI response while being unconcerned with the thousands of gallons used to produce a cheeseburger seems like innumerate virtue signaling.
eesmith | 12 hours ago
If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environmental impact of meat production, berates you for defending data center water use, would that convince you to change your mind?
What about a vegan, who also stopped flying and doesn't drive, and is organizing a protest to shut down the local golf course?
shimman | 11 hours ago
Are they stupid or something?
everdrive | 15 hours ago
gos9 | 10 hours ago
paroneayea | 14 hours ago
But that's tripled of water use across all sectors due to datacenter buildout. So no "comparison" to other uses is needed.
EDIT: Ah, I did misread it. Sorry!
jcranmer | 14 hours ago
It says that datacenters now use 3× the amount of water they used to use--it's specifically limited to that very, very narrow sector.
naasking | 14 hours ago
You're saying almond farm water use tripled due to data center buildout? What other meaning of "all sectors" could make sense of this claim? The report clearly says 17 billion while all other sectors are in the trillions.
patwolf | 14 hours ago
- A truck holds 5000 gallons
- It would take 3.5 million trips to transport that much
- If each trip was 500 miles roundtrip, that's about 2 billion miles
- Trucks travel 140 billion miles each year in the US. That would add less than 2% to the total miles
- The trucking industry is about $1 trillion in revenue per year. So 2% of that is $20 billion total to transport 17 billion gallons. Or around $1 per gallon.
teeray | 14 hours ago
thevinter | 13 hours ago
Marha01 | 12 hours ago
That's just your opinion, though. I would prefer a purely vegerarian society with advanced AI that can cure cancer or discover new maths to society with meat and no AI.
teeray | 11 hours ago
preg_match | an hour ago
Meat is basically optional, you don’t need meat to be healthy or happy. There are vegetarian body builders. Meat has, probably, negative value on most American’s lives, due to its contribution to heart disease.
That’s not to say meat isn’t tasty. It is. But from an objective standpoint, the value is ehhh.
Arguably, AI has much more value, and for 1/100th the water cost. Hey, that’s pretty good!
simonw | 14 hours ago
zachwill | 15 hours ago
It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists.
There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.
shimman | 15 hours ago
Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the delusional fantasies of the tech elite (all of which hold deeply anti-human + anti-democratic views).
tester756 | 15 hours ago
Let's do not act as if there wasnt other food, a lot of it actually.
Meanwhile LLMs aren't that easy to replace, they're biggest human achievement up to date.
deaton | 15 hours ago
tester756 | 14 hours ago
ndsipa_pomu | 13 hours ago
Now when I use an internet search, the top answer is an AI guess/approximation to the result and can be completely inaccurate. I have to ignore that and move onto the traditional results and hope that they aren't A.I. slop websites.
LLMs have degraded the internet and search.
H4cks0r1337 | 11 hours ago
lightedman | 14 hours ago
A BBS chatbot from the 80s (LISA) was almost as good as modern LLMs and that was just based on key words.
So, uh, yea, chatbots are very, VERY easy to replace.
tester756 | 14 hours ago
Of course, because it's not like whole world went crazy after ChatGPT and hundreds of billions of dollars are being constantly invested into many of technology stacks - software, hardware, semiconductor engineering in order to push this technology even further, lol.
Marha01 | 12 hours ago
Lol. This is what anti-AIs actually believe!
sokoloff | 15 hours ago
j4mie | 15 hours ago
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks
stonogo | 15 hours ago
naasking | 14 hours ago
stonogo | 14 hours ago
WarmWash | 14 hours ago
dtech | 15 hours ago
slibhb | 15 hours ago
Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.
krunck | 15 hours ago
elil17 | 15 hours ago
Many regions do have enough water to support evaporative cooling. When water is available, using it is prudent because it saves so much electricity.
Using surface water is not a practical approach for most cases because the process would need to be built next to a river or lake - there is limited industrial real estate in these areas.
goalieca | 15 hours ago
shimman | 15 hours ago
Fun fact, citizens of The Dalles, OR had to sue their own government to get them to release numbers on how much Google data centers were consuming (info Google stipulated should be kept "proprietary"):
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
imglorp | 15 hours ago
I think cold seawater can be used for the external loop, through a heat exchanger where it would meet the heated pure water from the internal cooling loops. This would cause evaporation of the salt water which could be captured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Multi-stage_flash...
elil17 | 15 hours ago
imglorp | 11 hours ago
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00119...
antisthenes | 14 hours ago
delichon | 15 hours ago
For a closed loop cooling project:
elil17 | 15 hours ago
utopiah | 15 hours ago
Can, but do they? Feels a bit like Musk's Colossus that "could" use nuclear power but has been running on "temporary" natural-gas turbines for years now.
KennyBlanken | 15 hours ago
Vvector | 15 hours ago
80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage.
USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.
adolph | 14 hours ago
1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energ...
KennyBlanken | 14 hours ago
jandrewrogers | 14 hours ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 | 11 hours ago
But fail to consider that "AI" adds to those sources and raises total water consupmtion
Is total water consumption important
Perhaps the comparision that readers will make is not (a) existing non-"AI" water consumption versus "AI" water consumption but (b) total water consumption without the additonal "AI" data centers versus total water consumption with additional "AI" data centers. IOW, "before" versus "after"
Will readers ignore (b) and only think about (a)
It's the same response from HN commenters every time: compare "AI" data centers to some other water consuming activity
1vuio0pswjnm7 | 7 hours ago
preg_match | an hour ago
When it comes to the rise of total water consumption like you’re talking about, data centers are a drop in the bucket. Truly negligible.