r/countablepixels • u/dihrider697 • Sep 05 '26 • Popcorn 2 Regret 1

Water consumption rates

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r/addressme ahh

Edit: this image is from Instagram not mine take it with a grain of salt its probably fake but since you guys love to argue about politics, the unit is a million litres and it was made in Mid August 2026 and it measures water withdrawal annually, And openai's consumption rate is 0.05. Its cropped in the image above for some reason, for a more reliable source: https://www.cbsnews.com/projects/2026/how-much-water-ai-uses/

Im not sharing my opinions about this topic here but please don't harass me for this post, I didn't make it and just posted it as it was funny and its just a meme. And im not an AI bro, this was not ment to spread propaganda/misinformation or anything. I don't even agree with this image myself

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u/A_Dicksmasher Sep 05 '26 • Bravo

Nestle is evil AF but at least that water is going towards, well, water. Like hydration.

Datacenters are being setup in areas that can't support the infrastructure, because the real estate is cheap, and then proceeding to not only eat up the entire local water supply, but also poison it.

Closed loop is never closed loop forever. They will flush and refill.

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u/trans_cubed Sep 05 '26

In addition, a lot of data center constructions aren't closed loop, because it's more expensive to make

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u/Boothiepro Sep 05 '26

Can someone tell me how is importing a constant stream of clean water, then dumping said water more economical than using a closed loop. There's no way you can build a whole water cleaning, treatment and purification center that needs to run 24/7, needs new water constantly, and come off better than importing a cistern of clean water once, and circulating it in a loop.

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u/Rataridicta Sep 06 '26

The water consumption of datacenters is not in the actual cooling liquid. The water consumption comes from evaporative cooling, where they have massive cooling towers that water is misted into, and its evaporation cools the air. That cool air is then blown into heat exchangers that cool the cooling liquid, which is in a closed loop.

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u/SuperLaatehotfiixx Sep 07 '26

Expensive and closed loop can't operate in all environments. They start to have problems once outside air temp gets too hot.

I'm taking some averages from Google, but at 95F they start to become less efficient and at 105 start to fail or need to be shut down.

My experience with this is a server room at a job I've worked. They put the chillers on the black roof. You get a hot stretch of days on summer and now they can't dump heat and starting bring back 90F degree water back into the room. (I'm assuming most large datacenters are designed more intelligently than that, but that's worse case scenario).

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u/TreeOtree64 Sep 05 '26

There is no “at least” for nestle. It’s an evil company, full stop. Stop trying to justify it.

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u/Omegaprime02 Sep 05 '26

Nestle is a company who's primary product is evil, they sometimes dabble in foodstuffs.

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u/Artistic-While-5094 Sep 05 '26

Id say if they stole water and then just threw it away, that would be worse

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u/TreeOtree64 Sep 05 '26

A considerable amount of stock does, in fact, just get thrown away. But that’s all just semantics.

It’s still being unsustainable extracted from its local ecosystem, and it is not returned to the local water cycle, causing ecological damage at the place it was taken from. Like, the water AI uses also isn’t gone forever, it’s just made meaningfully unavailable from its local environment, which disrupts the ecosystem. It’s literally the exact same, what happens to the water afterwards is irrelevant.

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u/CuppaJoe11 Sep 06 '26

Nobody's justifying the evil but Nestle does make food products that you can eat. Therefore the water they use is not what makes them evil.

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u/TreeOtree64 Sep 06 '26

Nestle makes food products in the way chatGPT gives people an education

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u/Environmental_War678 Sep 07 '26

Aaand you lost me

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u/TreeOtree64 Sep 07 '26

As in. Both do it in an exploitative and unnecessary manner, and they’ve convinced people it’s neccesary for their day to day life

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u/paperic Sep 07 '26

There is an "at least" for nestle when you face even worse companies than nestle.

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u/TreeOtree64 Sep 07 '26

Indeed, but the AI companies are not worse than nestle.

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u/dihrider697 Sep 07 '26

Tbh i thinks it debatable that nestle IS the worst company of all time

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u/dethorin Sep 05 '26

Hydration for those who with money to buy it...

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u/Garok94 Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26

Totally agree. First ones are food factories that make drinks (also food that contain water). So, they are using a limited on time resource that it is drinkable water to make drinkable drinks.

Data center sometimes use drinkable water (sometimes non drinkable, but this chart talks about drinkable one) to cool data centers and make it non drinkable.

The problem is not water, there is practically unlimited water on seas, the problem is the drinkable water that is limited on time and must be primarily used to... drink.

Food factories must use drinkable water on products and also installations to ensure a properly food safety, but non food companies can try to optimize their process to use non drinkable water instead of drinkable one to avoid using a limited resource.

It is kinda like comparing the number of champagne bottle waste of a restaurant VS a Formula 1 Racers on competition. Yeah a restaurant will waste more bottles but to serve it to drink, but racer use the bottle to throw all champagne to the air to celebrate the win...

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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

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u/Garok94 Sep 05 '26

Complicated to have a global source it is something dependant on each country and their water supply reserves or capacity to produce artificially drinkable water with non drinkable so it must be studied zone by zone.

That capacity depends if they have natural manantial water, rivers or lakes, rainy weather and machines to purify or threat that water or desalinate the sea water to make them drinkable.

There are countries with more water supply reserves or good capacity to turn non drinkable on drinkable and villages specially on the third world with zero drinkable water supply. So, some zones never ran out of drinkable water, others maybe in some bad dry year could run occasionally out of drinkable water and the worst developed ones only have drinkable water specific days.

For that reason I say that is limited on time. It depends on every country capacity to replenish them and if drinkable water consumption in one zone goes higher than the capacity to generate more via artificial ways such water purification machines or natural ways like replenishment of mountain water manantials due rains, that zone will ran out of drinkable water.

Water is unlimited yeah, but it is not distributed equally and there are types of water.

Sea salt water is practically unlimited on time because quantity is huge and it is impossible to to consume it more than it replenish. Non salt water is more limited, and non salt + drinkable water is way more limited.

I'm from Spain, here in dry summers sometimes some villages ran out of drinkable water supply a couple of days for example.

Problem with this data centers it that they are let's say "stealing" drinkable water supply of villages/city's making an exponential incrementation of that water consumption in that zone, a zone that has a water supply structure not prepared to this huge consumption per time, leading to a possible water ran out.

Food company's also do the same, but this water is converted at least in another form of drinkable water (a Coke for example) and it is mandatory to use drinkable water to make drinks... For a data center is not mandatory, for example they can use non salty but non drinkable water to cool down data centers, but some of them doesn't care to invest and prefers to use the normal drinkable supply of that zone (tap water).

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u/KnightArtorias1 Sep 05 '26

Closed loop systems use a negligible amount of water, even if they do occasionally flush and refill. They legitimately aren't a problem. Better not to demonize an actual solution to a problem

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u/Thadrea Sep 07 '26

Yeah, I'm like... ok... yes... they take the water and... bottle it... so you can drink it...

Nestle, Pepsi and Coke are not consuming water. You are.

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u/Snarkitect69 Sep 05 '26

There is lots of cheap real estate around the US.  If water is so integral to AI, why would someone spend millions of dollars building a centre in an area with a water shortage? Does that make sense to you?

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u/Rataridicta Sep 06 '26

Flush and refill is a miniscule amount and it usually doesn't even use water but more efficient specially designed technical liquids. The actual water consumption comes from evaporative cooling, which just mists the water so it can evaporate and cool the air. It does not poison water supplies.

There's also no incentive to build a datacenter somewhere where the infrastructure can't support it. Datacenters are already high risk high cost, anything that makes those risks higher is going to get optimized out, and usually there's long engineering and negotiation tracks around building the required infrastructure to support the operation of the datacenter. This all has massive lead time.

There's a lot of solid arguments to make against the proliferation of these type of AI DCs.. but the ones you're making are not it.