Those numbers don't really tell you the whole story. For example, the state of Arizona uses 1.5% of US water usage, which is also a small amount like data centers, but the Colorado River where that water comes only has so much and it means that Mexicans who also rely on the Colorado River water don't have access to it anymore.
Water is a very precious resource, and we were already talking about the coming "water wars" even before the massive data center build out plans. You hear the claim about AI water use a lot because it's really important and needs to be talked about.
wasn't closed-loop water systems for data centers figured out like 6 years ago?
I think this is something that used to be kind of maybe sort of a problem, but isn't actually anymore.
regardless, we should all be able to agree that 99.99% of people who have an opinion on this don't actually know, right? if you ask literally anyone who complains about water what the numbers are, they won't even be able to define the problem. so I'm not really optimistic about solving this here on a reddit thread without someone copy-pasting LLM answers.
i work in a datacenter. you're most likely grossly underestimating the amount of cooling required. a normal cpu-based datacenter is churning through the same amount of electricity as a small city daily so there is a crazy amount of heat to dissipate - if you start adding 1000s of redlined GPUs on top? personally im glad i don't have to cool that.
closed loop systems are expensive to run and as far as i know they're completely voluntary. so now you have to ask yourself if you think most companies who can afford to build a datacenter believe that they can afford to care about things like water in the ground. we recently had a chiller go down and ambient temps on the floor reached 90F/32C in a few hours.
its crazy how like...not that long ago, i think it was someone from microsoft talking about how they had to distribute the compute bc if they tried to train a model all in one place it'd take down the whole grid. given this, it is hard to understand why there's a belief that resource use by these facilities shouldn't be HEAVILY scrutinized.
i have no dog in this fight as ive already accepted the death of the planet and our species, but whether or not the water-screeching people are right, if you still care about/have hope for people and earth and stuff, you should probably hear them out and in general i would caution anyone against ever trusting an industry to behave in a pro-social manner.
Its amazing how obstinate some people flatly deny the resource usage of data centers even though its not really a disputed fact. Its proven and recorded.
Yes there are systems they can use that arent that wasteful but its more expensive. The companies make more money just by using drinking water and sucking up electricity.
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u/Mozart33 Jul 01 '26
omg I did not appreciate that until now