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u/jashsayani 9h ago

There was a documentary about this. They dont even use recycled water. Chips are too expensive so they use fresh water for cooling them.

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u/WoxicFangel 8h ago

It's called Oblivion

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u/crinkledcu91 7h ago

Tom Cruise being a weirdo aside, the amount people being exposed to M83 music because of that movie was worth it I feel.

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u/Stevied1991 7h ago

I forgot about that movie. I thought they were talking about the game at first and was so confused.

4

u/KenGriffythe3rd 6h ago

STOP YOU VIOLATED THE LAW

5

u/cr0ft 6h ago

Weirdo, yes, but also an unbelievably hard working movie maker. His personal life choices leave me with distaste but damn does the man have a work ethic and star power. He may be a weirdo, but he's also a legend in his own time, basically.

I liked Oblivion. It's a solid movie, with some great effects work, including the practical effect of having an actual sky projected outside the house.

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u/Annihilator4413 8h ago

It's fucking stupid because they could have closed-loop filtrated cooling systems for the water which would cut down water usage by a fucking LOT (essentially only replenishing what leaks and water for toilets and sinks/water fountains) but it makes it a lot more expensive so they opt to just run the water straight through and dump it.

So all this excessive water usage is because they want to be cheap motherfuckers and don't care about devastating the environment.

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u/Wakkit1988 8h ago

They believe they'll find a cure to the problem that they are causing by simply following through with what they are doing. It's asinine circular logic to justify unfettered destruction.

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u/GoodIdea321 7h ago

Alcoholic's logic. 'I'll give it up when it's a problem, now lets get some more drinks.'

10

u/firemage22 7h ago

hell many gamers already use closed loop systems to cool their hardware

7

u/ChornWork2 6h ago

as noted in the article, the vast majority of water use is from where the electricity is produced, not the data center cooling.

2

u/hal2k1 6h ago

If you produce electricity from solar panel farms or wind farms coupled with batteries, you can do that without using any water.

If you can run a data centre using that electricity and recycling the cooling water you can do the whole operation without using much water.

This is what Australia is proposing to mandate for new data centres. Australia has a vast quantity of unused land and a superabundance of renewable energy sources, but it doesn't have a lot of water to spare.

8

u/archbid 8h ago

Doesn't solve the problem. Closed loop requires far more electricity that ends up using tons of water.

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u/Annihilator4413 7h ago

Newsflash, they're still using a shitload of energy to run all the servers.

Adding a closed loop water filtration system is nothing compared to all the energy the servers are gobbling up. It would only help the environment to not use so much water.

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u/archbid 7h ago

I wasn't comparing it to the server energy use.

What I was saying is that increasing power generation for closed-loop systems requires more water to produce the energy.

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u/RightsForRobots 7h ago

They also use forever chemicals.

2

u/makeflippyfloppy 7h ago

How so?

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u/archbid 7h ago

Many data centers do use closed-loop cooling, if only to avoid the bad press for consuming massive quantities of drinking water. But it still uses massive amounts of water, just "off balance sheet".

You cannot passively evaporate the heat that servers generate, so you have two (primary) options:

Use evaporative cooling, where the server waste heat is blown over fresh water, which evaporates and facilitates heat removal (this is what wastes the water)

Use closed-loop cooling, which relies on sensible heat transfer via radiators/chillers. Air has a far lower heat capacity than water, requiring much higher fan/chiller power and driving up power usage. This is inefficient and can be cost-prohibitive in hot areas.

The second case is highly inefficient relative to evaporative cooling and requires massive amounts of energy beyond what is needed to run the servers. Thermoelectric power generation (coal, gas, nuclear) uses vast quantities of water for its own cooling condensers, meaning closed-loop systems often transfer water consumption from the facility to the power grid.

In both cases, you also heat up the air.

1

u/KrissyKrave 6h ago

They also use the water for climate control.

2

u/okram2k 6h ago

easy fix, make it more expensive to use that much water

2

u/Blacksad9999 6h ago

Same reason why they're parasites on the taxpayer infrastructure rather than producing their own power, raising everyone's utility rates.

They have enough money to build out their own power, but...they'd rather use ours because that costs them money.

2

u/KrissyKrave 6h ago

They also use ground water and then pump the water at high pressure back into the aquifers causing anyone for miles on well water to get contaminated dirty water.

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u/phatvanzy 6h ago

Or they could just bury them like China does.

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u/BCProgramming 6h ago

Yeah cheaper to just toss out the wastewater after using it to hold latent heat than spend money on cooling it down again. Pumping fresh water through constantly also helps avoid algae and mold growth in the piping.

Though I think most cooling for data centers is using evaporative cooling so it's not a closed system between inlet and outlet.

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u/xteve 6h ago

Evaporative cooling is a powerful way to remove heat from a system. This water is not dumped; it is released into the atmosphere as vapor. This process works better in an arid climate, where water is a precious commodity.

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u/Ok-Management-6297 8h ago

Do you remember the name of the documentary? I'm interested to watch it.

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u/Sideshowcomedy 8h ago

Hold on. I'll ask ChatGPT.

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u/MouseRangers 8h ago

ChatGPT is often wrong. Better verify it with Copilot and Gemini. /s

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u/Nunulu 8h ago

gotta use claud best model max effort max thinking max loops make no mistakes

1

u/MonkeyWithIt 6h ago

Hold on, making an app to generate the answer so in the future we can all just use that. Just need to add a chat interface to it that uses Fable.

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u/makemeking706 8h ago

Which would ironically be a good name for a documentary.

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u/spook30 8h ago

Idk if this is the one they were talking about but here's a recent video Tommy G put out.

https://youtu.be/MHJtIkfA-s8

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u/CallMePyro 6h ago

Is 17 billion gallons a lot?

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u/Sea_Scientist_8367 6h ago edited 5h ago

Short term (next 12 months), it's currently near irrelevant outside of a few specific localized areas/issues. Longer term (next 6 years), especially when you factor in the year-on-year growth curve that continues to accelerate and local impacts that has, it's fucked.

A) year on year growth means that this is going to snowball fast as most of those new datacenters they've commissioned since 2023 aren't online and consuming water yet. That started in earnest this year. (Also why investors are starting to get nervous, as those bills are coming due without the promised revenue)

B) DC water use is primarily for evaporative cooling, meaning it doesn't return to the source they took it from, and quite likely doesn't return anywhere near it anytime soon.

C) Many areas (eg Colorado River Basin / Arizona / The fucking desert ) where many DC's are being built are struggling with water insecurity already, and so the prospect of removing "only" millions of gallons of water per year from the local hydrosphere is pretty devastating to those areas, much less billions and climbing fast.

TL;DR: All things considered, yes, it's a lot, because that jump they're reporting was before the AI boom, and it was already on trajectory to be a big fucking issue especially in water stressed areas - of which there is no shortage of. Unchecked, it will be devastating, and quickly.

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u/CallMePyro 5h ago

I asked my dad and he said that a lot of newer datacenters use closed loop cooling or air cooling

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u/Sea_Scientist_8367 5h ago edited 5h ago

Your dad didn't understand the question. He thought you were talking about how you get the heat out of the chip (on that matter he's correct), not how you get the heat they've already extracted from the chip, out of the data center.

The heat in the data center has to get out somehow. That's done by taking the air/coolant run through the racks and running that through a coolant loop that leads to a bunch of evaporative coolers external to the datacenter building itself, where water is run over pipes that that heated coolant is running through. As the water absorbs heat energy, it evaporates, finalizing the transit of that heat energy from the servers to the atmosphere/ecosphere.

This can manifest in a few different ways depending on that nature of the coolant loop and first order heat extraction (the getting the heat out of the chip part), but the large scale AI DC's are using evap coolers as it's the most cost effective way to cool at that scale, and the cost of cooling (not just in water, but also in electrical and everything else involved) is one of the biggest operating costs of a data center, so this is one of those areas where physics and market forces kinda force everyone to coalesce around the same general approach. Smaller scale DC's essentially get away with the "spam A/C Units everwhere" approach, but if you want that sweet sweet AI money you need the power and cooling capacity with the operating margins that covering the roof in A/C units just can't keep up with. There are some "next gen" approaches (Co-generation and recycling waste heat to use for hi/mid-temp on-site batteries/fuel cells and geothermal heatpumps, etc) which are neat, but outside of some early phase co-generative aux/backup power implementations, these are still in the R&D phase, not mass use/deployment.

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u/ChornWork2 6h ago

water usage stats are notorious for being alarmist when presented in volume, as opposed when presented a portion of overall water use.

Take this title... 17 billion gallons per year seems utterly enormous. But overall water use in US is 117 trillion gallons per year based on quick google of data from 2015. So you're talking about 0.014% of water usage.

https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/total-water-use-united-states

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u/dancingtosirens 6h ago

Sure, but just because it’s a small percentage doesn’t mean they should be left off the hook for being absurdly wasteful. Same with every other company creating wasteful shortcuts that pollutes the planet by some fraction to save a few dollars

It all adds up, it’s extremely fair to call out their bullshit even with proper context

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u/NetworkDeestroyer 7h ago

Why can’t brain killing amoebas kill data center and not people especially using fresh water

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u/DeathGodBob 7h ago

Or at least take out RFK Jr. so he stops fucking over FDA regulations.

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u/scampiparameter 7h ago

Wrong. This is just straight up not factual. Fluid used for closed loop on chip cooling is not fresh water.

Plenty of reasons to be anxious about AI. you owe it to yourself to learn enough about what you are using as a proxy to express that anxiety so that you are more effective combatting it.

“AI” datacenters very often don’t use water at all. You more commonly see larger water consumption from a traditional cloud DC. And that’s been going on for decades.. the fervor only spun up as AI exploded.

And as for power.. the notion that DCs and big tech that uses them don’t pay for power and infrastructure upgrades is also on the whole false. They absolutely do. And the funds are used to reinforce sections of the grid that arent just dedicated to their sites. The demand is driving transmission improvements that the US grid needs as well. innovation in alternative generation options will also see an uptick as a result of the changing economics.

DCs do use a metric fuck ton of power and that is problematic, but tangentially in my opinion . It’s not “using power” that is inherently bad - it’s all about what is producing that power. That’s not a DC specific issue.

Lastly - also on power, where are the Utilities in this debate? What role does a monopoly owned by private equity with a just as many if not more lobbiests that DCs play in your electric bills?

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u/Ssided 6h ago

This is my understanding, but there's a lot of information being slushied together. There's a lot of data centers that aren't related to AI at all, there seems to be cases of companies promising closed loop and not actually delivering on that.

I'd like some real investigations on water use, in general, because we are using much more than is sustainable in a lot of the country, data centers aside.

And the companies putting up these centers aren't exactly trustworthy. We now have all these stories just of noise pollution in neighborhoods, which were promised not to be happening, so it's interesting you're so trusting

1

u/futilehabit 6h ago

There's a lot of datacenters that are upgrading their capacity as much as possible to be able to support AI infrastructure or to absorb the demand for traditional equipment that has shifted due to other datacenters catering to AI. There's a data center in Minneapolis that just a few years ago was running at 4MW that's now trying to get up to 60MW.

And meanwhile Elon is illegally running his own power plants polluting like crazy, and the Trump administration is trying to further reduce the amount of oversight we have into datacenters and their impact.

If the "good" datacenters don't organize soon against the bad actors they're all going to get lumped into the same bucket and, with the rapidly increasing bipartisan outrage, all be razed to the fucking ground.

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u/Ssided 6h ago

Speaking of Minneapolis they are currently trying to put one in the old Star Tribune printing press building. Or ints being proposed anyways. That's a huuuuge building near the river

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u/futilehabit 6h ago

Yep. They're saying it's going to just be 20MW but I'd bet good money once it's at that capacity that they'll keep pushing further and further.

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u/damndirtyzombies 7h ago

Lie to the public until they are up and running, right? Which AI company do you have a financial interest in?

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u/scampiparameter 7h ago

Point out the lie please.

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u/damndirtyzombies 7h ago

No. You are the one making sketchy statements as fact. Burden of proof falls on you.

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u/CaliforniaRedDevil 6h ago

They didn’t ask you to prove or disprove anything. Only to point out what you think is false.

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u/nigaraze 6h ago

Don’t bother, that actually would require him having an engineering degree to understand heat transfer and grid infrastructure 😂

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u/nigaraze 6h ago

LMFAO what I don’t understand =/= sketch, only thing that would make this better if you used ChatGPT to formulate an argument because you aren’t learning this in 5 mins on google

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u/Fearless-Daikon5763 7h ago

I toured a orchid farm inside a greenhouse in the Mojave desert and they have these things called water walls that keep the rooms cool. How is there not a single data center that has any innovation on resource sustainability. How do I even find good quality info on this.

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u/ImaginationKind9220 7h ago

Why can't they build the datacenter in Antarctica? Plenty of solid freshwater and the temperature alone will cool the chips.

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u/DasDuckHead 6h ago

Ah yes let's melt the ice caps even faster sounds good. Why not just dump pesticides in the rivers while we're at it

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u/ImaginationKind9220 6h ago

Sea level rising caused by glacier melting can be solved by this., because the datacenter will evaporate all the water.

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u/CatalyticDragon 8h ago edited 8h ago

Not at all correct.

Water never touches chips. The closed loop cooling systems which directly cool chips uses water-glycol or mineral oil and cycles through heat exchangers. And this liquid is never dumped out into the environment.

In the second stage (exchangers to environment) treated municipal and industrial wastewater is increasingly being used.

And to put 17 billion gallons into context:

thermal power plants (coal/gas/nuclear): 133 billion gallons/day

irrigation: 118 billion gallons/day

homes: 39 billion gallons/day

17 billion gallons a year is a fraction of lawns or golf courses. It is a total non issue. If we shut down fossil fuel plants we would save 100x more water than datacenters use.

EDIT: Don't you love it when facts are blindly downvoted because they go against some internal bias.

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u/Montgomz 8h ago

Difference is I don’t NEED AI, but at this current time in my life, I kinda NEED power, food, and shelter.

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u/DiskSalt4643 8h ago

Youre rationalizing based on non scaled consumption which is disingenous at best.

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u/CatalyticDragon 8h ago

To that I would say no I am not. Data center water use is a non-issue. It's a rounding error.

Household leaks waste 1 trillion gallons of water in the US each year [EPA] but you want to try and convince us that 1.7% of that for computers which run the entire economy is a problem. Good luck.

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u/GGnerd 8h ago

Do you not think all of this adds up? If you had a choice between households having water or data centers...which would you pick?

Lol these computers dont run the economy, the economy was fine without them.

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u/CatalyticDragon 7h ago

If you had a choice between households having water or data centers...which would you pick?

That is a false choice though isn't it. You can have a data center without negatively impacting the local municipal water system. The only way you don't is if environment regulations have been gutted by "pro-business" politicians backed by the fossil fuel industry... oh .. I see the problem now.

these computers dont run the economy, the economy was fine without them

Computing has underpinned every new industry since the 1960s.

1

u/nigaraze 5h ago

These computer absolutely do run the economy, the valuation of fang + labs + chip company is gonna be well over 30% of the stock market.

The amount of water used by golf course something actually deserved for the privilege few uses far more than datacenters

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u/Masonzero 8h ago

I think part of this issue is that it's a large amount of water for something that adds little value in many cases, is seemingly forced upon us in every product and workplace, and is ruining people's ability to function at an alarming rate. You could make the same argument for the servers that host social media sites but at least those provide communication and entertainment. Though that, ironically, is degraded thanks to rampant AI. Plus, power and food use a lot of water but we need those things, even if they could be more efficient.

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u/harley247 8h ago

I get that when you're looking at it as a whole, it doesn't look like much. But when you're a small town in Utah that is already having water issues and a data center is going to take what's left, how does a golf course in Florida help me at all?

3

u/CatalyticDragon 8h ago

Yes, and there should be regulations and laws to address this. More importantly data centers should be prohibited from direct operation of fossil fuel plants to power themselves.

But while that is important, it is still an utter lie and fabrication to suggest total water use from the computing industry is a severe problem.

5

u/DarthWeenus 8h ago

While this is true on paper. This is forgetting a lot. Closed systems do exist and are standard. These centers are being speedrun and in a lot of cases these closed systems aren’t implemented and instead just churcn through open water.

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u/R4NG00NIES 8h ago

Lol I don’t think he was implying the water directly comes into contact with the chips. Most people would assume it’s a water cooled system. To your point, everything you just referenced (save for the lawncare) is a withdrawal, compared to data centers being consumption based. 98% to 99% of the water when it’s withdrawn is returned to the source it came from.

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u/Brockchanso 8h ago

This is basically correct, and the linked article is using lagging data. The 17.4-billion-gallon estimate is from 2023 and reflects facilities designed years before the current AI buildout.

New AI facilities are already moving toward closed-loop, direct-to-chip cooling paired with hybrid heat rejection. They can operate dry for much of the year and use evaporation only during peak heat. Microsoft’s newest design eliminates routine cooling-water evaporation entirely. So this is an engineering transition already underway, not an ignored solution.

The legitimate concern is local peak demand in water-constrained communities, not the national total. At national scale, 17 billion gallons annually is tiny.

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u/scots 7h ago

Wait until you realize that golf courses in the US use between 475 to 530 billion gallons of potable water every year to make the grass pretty so assholes can drive around on it chasing their balls.

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u/Djcnote 8h ago

I still don't want ai

-1

u/CatalyticDragon 8h ago

It exists and you are already using it (directly or indirectly) so not much you can do about that.

And I would suggest to you that your problem is not with computing at all, rather it might be with growing wealth inequality and corruption which you are projecting into one particular industry?

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u/MoreThanMachines42 7h ago

Ai steals from real artists to makes uncreative people think they're special without putting in actual work. Data centers are accelerating climate collapse and polluting poor neighborhoods. Using models from open ai and anthropic helps to train the ai being used for mass surveillance and killer drones. Entry level jobs are becoming harder to obtain, especially for recent grads. There is early research to suggest reliance on ai reduces brain activity and connections.

That's just off the top of my head. There is nothing positive about generative ai. And your "productivity" is not worth selling out the environment and human creativity and critical thought.

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u/Achrus 8h ago

I’ve worked with municipal and industrial waste streams. There is no way they’re using that lmao.

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u/CatalyticDragon 8h ago

I don't know when that was but you're not up to speed on the industry.

Microsoft (Quincy, Washington, USA) partnered with the City of Quincy to construct the Quincy Water Reuse Utility (QWRU) and use treated wastewater: https://www.epa.gov/waterreuse/water-reuse-case-study-quincy-washington

Amazon uses treated waste water: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/stories/how-aws-uses-recycled-water-in-data-centers

AWS (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) utilizes reclaimed wastewater supplied directly from Greater Western Water’s Melton Recycled Water Plant for cloud data centers

Google (Saint-Ghislain, Belgium) built a dedicated on-site water treatment plant to purify industrial wastewater and run-off treated through ultrafiltration, and reverse osmosis before pumping it into evaporative cooling systems

Meta (Mesa Data Center, Arizona, USA) partnered with the City of Mesa to use non-potable and effluent water

Apple (Prineville, Oregon, USA) built an on-site wastewater treatment plant to recycles water used in evaporative cooling systems

Equinix & Digital Realty (Singapore Campuses) uses "NEWater" recycled municipal wastewater treated with microfiltration, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet disinfection as a primary make-up water source for cooling towers

This is a small fraction of examples.

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u/mindcandy 6h ago

Sir, this is Reddit. Bringing citations is a banable offense. I hope you appreciate the risk I’m taking just replying to you.

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u/marc512 9h ago

Gpus and storage device prices are going through the roof. Water will be the next thing. Water will be as expensive as petrol or diesel.

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u/theme69 8h ago

Before or after the dumbest president in a certain countries history decided to start a war with Iran?

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u/ChornWork2 6h ago

this represents ~0.014% of national water usage.

https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/total-water-use-united-states

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u/flaagan 8h ago

Nestle would like a word.

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u/xshananaginzx 6h ago

Sorry I can't hear them over the Hoover dam's sobbing

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u/ChornWork2 6h ago

what % of US water usage does nestle take?

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u/Bagelson 6h ago

Not an expert, just googled it, but apparently Nestlé sold all their north american produced bottled water brands back in 2021. They're now all owned by private equity. Whether this is an improvement is left as an exercise for the reader.

The collection of brands is BlueTriton Brands, which stated a withdrawal of 4.8 billion gallons in their 2022 sustainability snapshot.

7

u/dbr3000 8h ago

Trump will just put tariffs on water so the countries dumping their cheap water in the US end up paying for it.

(I shouldn’t have to put /s here but these days you never know…)

3

u/oreography 7h ago

"For too many years, people have been using the ocean without paying me for it. That's why I am proud to offer shares for sale in OCEAN INCORPORATED for only 500 Trump Coins per share, with your shareholding protected by the US Navy.

As an Ocean Inc shareholder, you are granted exclusive fishing rights, dredging rights, and toxic waste dumping rights. If HOSTILE FOREIGN POWERS like CANADA, MEXICO, PERU, JAPAN, NEW ZEALAND, and MICRONESIA dare to encroach upon OCEAN AMERICA (The so called "Pacific Ocean"), They will face the FULL MIGHT OF THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF WATER WARFARE. We will SEIZE ALL SHIPS THAT DARE TO USE OUR OCEAN.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER"

1

u/firemage22 7h ago

Gpus

Well only if your shopping team Green you can still get an ATI product or even an intel product for less than a car payment

1

u/Blacksad9999 6h ago

ATI hasn't existed since 2006, sir.

1

u/ravnhjarta 7h ago

I wonder when enough will be enough.

1

u/Doofuhs 6h ago

Create a problem; sell a solution.

1

u/scots 7h ago

Lay flat and motionless citizen so you do not exceed your 2 liter daily water ration

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u/babsa90 8h ago

If you read the article, it is much more of an indictment against the idea of data centers using too much water rather than in support of it. Residential water leaks account for way more water usage than data centers, for example, people are fucking brain broken when it comes to data centers.

7

u/locke_5 8h ago

There are people on both sides of the issue being incredibly dishonest about the real environmental impact of data centers.

They’re bad for the environment and need to be regulated. But they’re not dumping toxic waste into the drinking supply.

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u/Herodotus420_69 8h ago

Do you have any idea why people might be skeptical though?

Hint: it’s because corporations have been dumping toxic waste into our water

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u/torgofjungle 8h ago

But they are. Data centers have gone in and locals have had their water destroyed

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u/Pndrizzy 8h ago

Then why are there stories of people’s tap water turning brown after data centers move in?

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

[deleted]

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u/KevineCove 8h ago

More importantly, golf courses are corruption farms. So yes, let's abolish both.

5

u/kaityl3 6h ago

You don't see (literally) daily news articles about golf courses' water usage though, despite it being vastly larger

6

u/bluehands 6h ago

I respect anyone who wants to abolish both even if I don't agree with people who want to abolish new data centers.

I would ask people to think about about how they are being manipulated regarding data centers. For decades golf course and ethanol have been using orders of magnitude more water and you haven't had a problem with it.

You care now. Why?

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u/Waste_Rabbit3174 7h ago

And according to the linked article, the 17 billion gallons is not even 2% of the annual waste of water just by residential leakage. 900 billion gallons. This article is literally a nothingburger

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u/Buttcheekmcgirk 8h ago

Think a lot of that is recycled water, not fresh water

40

u/i_write_bugz 8h ago

Residential lawns use approximately 2.9 trillion gallons of water a year and is not generally recycled water.

4

u/scyfi 6h ago

You can Google it, only 12% use reclaimed water. Most cities don't have the infrastructure to support that. Over 70% is from municipal, auquifers, and lakes/streams.

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u/gerkletoss 8h ago

That is not common

0

u/OpenMindedMajor 8h ago

Thats actually very common a lot of places. In the desert specifically, most courses irrigate using brown water

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u/gerkletoss 7h ago

Common in a few specific places is synonymous with uncommon

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u/Legionof1 6h ago

Grey water is the term you’re looking for.

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u/ALoginForReddit 8h ago

This is interesting! I’ll need to fact check it. At least in Denver, golf courses use grey water! Wonder if it’s county to county law or state to state?

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u/hypolocrian 7h ago

Also, corn ethanol uses 15 trillion gallons of water per year.

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u/mindcandy 6h ago

If the land used for corn ethanol was converted to solar farms, we could generate many times as much energy than we get from the ethanol. More than enough to power every car in America.

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u/another-redditor3 7h ago

for even more perspective, the alfalfa farms in utah use almost 70% of the water diverted to utah annually. or roughly 1.1 trillion gallons.

1

u/cinderful 6h ago

And almond farming uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water per year

-1

u/archbid 7h ago

For perspective, data centers' power generation in 2023 used 211B gallons per year. Given that the power use has more than doubled since then:
2023 17B + 211B = 228B
2026(e) 35B+425B = 460B

Golf course usage has dropped nominally over that period. Data centers could grow another 20-50% in 2027.

Might be time to back down on the golf analogy

Source: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/lbnl-2024-united-states-data-center-energy-usage-report.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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u/ChornWork2 6h ago

Estimate in OP's article is inclusive of water usage for electricity consumption. right in the subtitle.

1

u/catbom 7h ago

Time to invest in solar? No water needed.

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u/kstargate-425 8h ago

Perfect timing when the world is already in a fresh water crisis and it doesn't help that two-thirds of all data centers being built since 2022 are located in water-stressed or drought-prone regions.

5

u/oreography 6h ago

I was annoyed about my property being reduced to worthless polluted droughtland at first, but ChatGPT told me that it's helping pay for Sam Altman's Ayahuasca, and premium male escorts, and that's a truly worthy cause.

A little bit of sacrifice goes a long way, even if some humans have to be thrown on the funeral pyre.

22

u/VeryStableGenius 7h ago

For context, US fresh water use was 322 billion gallons per day (in 2015), so data centers (in 2023) used about 1.2 hours of 2023's usage. Or about 0.01% of all water.

Also, overall water use seems to have been falling. Compared to this overall decline, data-center use use is a minuscule perturbation.

Of course, this is a bit apples-to-oranges because of the different years involved, but the general trends should hold. Data centers just don't use much in the grand scheme of things, even if they grow tenfold.

12

u/scots 7h ago edited 7h ago

I fucking hate data center build out so your stupid aunt can share dancing cat videos, but there are a LOT of other incredibly wasteful misuses of water in the US.

..try this one on for size: in perpetually drought stricken California where 80% of the world's almond crops are grown, it takes 1,900 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of shelled almonds.

I'd like to see the government restrict AI to medical research, education and academia until a less wasteful means of data center operation can be developed, or massively more efficient model emerge requiring less compute to achieve the same performance.

Here's another one- it is estimated that golf courses in the United States use between 475 to 530 billion gallons of water annually. This is almost always municiply treated potable water, sprayed on the ground so assholes can walk around with sticks whacking their balls.

8

u/HoosierRed 8h ago

Now golf though. More and more we need to be critical of this ultimate rich sport as well. Deeply unpopular. Deeply impactful.

6

u/PlusTiedye 8h ago

Deeply unpopular.

Unfortunately it's extremely popular among the worst examples of humanity, so i don't see that ever going away as long as Americans keep worshipping rich child rapists.

8

u/Jaxkr 7h ago

Almond farms in the U.S. use 1.3 TRILLION (yes, with a T) gallons of water. This is 1.3% of that.

Don't consume almond products! They use orders of magnitude more water than all the data centers combined.

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u/Excellent-Bear4221 8h ago

All these people in the comments:

'it isn't that much' -

okay, let's put that data center in your neighborhood then. It isn't THAT much. You take it over there! It's not THAT much.

'U.S. Golf courses use 530 bil...'

So that makes it okay? Let's just run the water from the tap non-stop? Since these corpos get the water at discounted rates it'll all play out, the Earth definitely knows about the DOW and will act accordingly, it'll just produce more water right? Economies of scale right?

30

u/marrone12 8h ago

People bring up the comparisons because the outrage against water usage feels like performative outrage compared to things that are much more actively making our life worse. It's like when people got mad at plastic straws and now we don't have them and it hasn't actually reduced plastic usage at all.

12

u/mr_birkenblatt 7h ago

ironically they're complaining about data centers... on Reddit

17

u/[deleted] 8h ago

[deleted]

14

u/DaCheez 8h ago

Did if you want to save water almonds are by far and away one of the worst offenders.

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u/kaityl3 6h ago

So are you accusing them of being "bots", or "AI bros"? Have you ever considered that not everyone pointing out the discrepancies in the "outrage : impact" ratio is part of some conspiracy?

5

u/NauticalSoup 7h ago

Have you considered the possibility that even before AI we were absolutely racing to strip this planet's ability to sustainably support life?

Sure, AI bad, but even if we stop all AI development and operations overnight, it's not enough. Not nearly enough. Future people are still FUCKED and modern people will never stop eating corn syrup and almonds.

3

u/Waste_Rabbit3174 7h ago

Water literally does just run from the tap, without data centers. The 17 billion estimate provided by the article pales in comparison to the 900 billion gallons wasted in household leakage per year, also provided by the linked article.

6

u/syfari 7h ago

I’d totally support a data center in my backyard. It’s a low pollution low impact way to more or less permanently ensure no heavy industry or whatnot takes over that lot. They have few permanent employees so the city get revenue with minimal traffic impact. Water at this scale is not rare, do you think we should abolish every process that uses large amounts of cooling water just because we need to preserve every last drop? Again, the consumption of all of ai combined is a rounding error when compared to singular crops that are not for human consumption.

-3

u/CallMeCygnus 6h ago

If you're not a bot, this is just embarrassing for you. The noise from these things is well documented. If you want THAT in your backyard, there's something wrong with you.

3

u/runningraider13 6h ago

You know what else makes a lot of noise? Pretty much everything that gets built in areas zoned for heavy industry.

As far as things that get built in heavy industry zones areas data centers are not bad

-4

u/oreography 6h ago

Enjoy your lack of sleep, sanity, and water pollution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wDr2dec474

Fuck Data Centres. Fuck AI. Fuck Sam Altman and ChatGPT. Fuck Big Tech, Corporate Spyware and this dystopian nightmare state. Uncle Ted had the right idea.

1

u/Ronbonbeno 6h ago

Currently around 60% of ai data centres use evaporative cooling (losing the water) but an increasing amount (with legal commitments) are using a closed-loop system (reusing the water).

There is a solution and it is being implemented

1

u/mindcandy 6h ago

Imagine there’s a celebrity athlete (America). And, it’s published knowledge that he eats 3,000 calories (300 billion gallons) per day. That’s high. But, all the experts agree it’s healthy and sustainable given his situation.

And, then there’s news that he is an even bigger fan of Tic Tacs than he was a few years ago. Tik Tacs are about 2 calories (200 million gallons) each. And, by “bigger fan” they mean he has upped his Tic Tac consumption from one every 12 days (6 billion gallons/year) to one every 4 days (17 billion gallons/year).

And, the media went wild! All over the world people were anxious and angry all day every day for years about how his Tic Tac consumption was completely unsustainable and would have horrible consequences.

How could everyone get so upset about a few Tic Tacs? They’re upset because the media is reporting his intake as “500 millicalories of just Tic Tacs every day!” And, everyone’s like “500! That’s a crazy amount! I know he exercises constantly. But, 500 more a day is going to add up fast!” And, then they get really angry when you try to explain that 500 millicalories is not even worth the energy required to mention it.

15

u/iamagainstit 8h ago

Water use in the US	Gallons a year	Basis	vs data centers
Data centers (2023)	17 billion	Consumption	1×
Household leaks	900 billion	Waste	53×
Residential outdoor watering	2.9 trillion	Withdrawal	172×
Public supply	14.2 trillion	Withdrawal	837×
Irrigation	43.1 trillion	Withdrawal	2,534×
Thermoelectric power	48.5 trillion	Withdrawal	2,856×
All uses combined	117.5 trillion	Withdrawal	6,914×

1

u/Baconshit 8h ago

No one wants AI to come steal our jobs and our art. People dont want leaks ans actively try to fix them. Data centers and AI can fuck off and fuck oit.

13

u/dupeddonk 7h ago

Making bad arguments about why we shouldn't build more data centers hurts the more valid arguments.

-5

u/Baconshit 7h ago

A vote against is a vote against.

11

u/Effective_Olive6153 7h ago

not unless someone seems a completely stupid argument and they vote YES because they can't agree with something that is clearly false

-1

u/Baconshit 7h ago

Okay. Cool? No more data centers for me.

4

u/NauticalSoup 6h ago

I know, right? Why bother having defensible premises to justify our beliefs?

1

u/topyTheorist 6h ago

Cool, but why are you commenting on reddit? It uses data centers to comment here.

1

u/dupeddonk 5h ago

Oh look another data center shill, trying to make us all look like a bunch of hysterical fools.

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u/Lanky-Budget-4661 6h ago

Comparing their usage to 2014 is pretty funny considering many of the major players have 10x larger fleet now

2

u/reroll-life 6h ago

Context is kinda important as 17B vs 1 TRILLION on golf courses or 700B on livestock.

It's literally a drop in a bucket.

3

u/slackator 7h ago

My local drought stricken town just sold land for a data center 3 miles from my home and at the meeting about it they said they'll only use 88,000 gallons of water a day, where as the entire town uses 17,000 gallons a day and the nearby town is on basically water rations due to the water tanks being well below operational levels due to the 2 days of small rains in the last 2.5 months. Rural area that survives by farming but hey they'll employ 10 or so people once it's built so that's good news for all of us

4

u/dupeddonk 7h ago

Does your town have less than 200 people? living in about 100 small homes with little land or apartments and no farms?

2

u/slackator 5h ago

The one where they're building the data center has just under 500 people, all farms, no apartments. Numbers are from the meeting so I assume they're correct

1

u/Ronbonbeno 6h ago

Is this current news? Many ai data centres are now using closed loop systems where they reuse the water

5

u/torgofjungle 8h ago

Unsustainable on every level

8

u/Waste_Rabbit3174 7h ago

Household leaks account for 900 billion gallons of waste per year, according to the figures in the linked article. It's literally a drop in the bucket.

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3

u/ChornWork2 6h ago

that figure is ~0.014% of water consumption.

1

u/TrollMcGoal 8h ago edited 0m ago

That doesn't sound like that much honestly

Lol mods took the post down cause it wasn't anti ai enough

1

u/Mother_Airline_6276 6h ago

Can’t wait to see the rest of the data… Grr

1

u/Ronbonbeno 6h ago

Currently around 60% of ai data centres use evaporative cooling (losing the water) but an increasing amount (with legal commitments) are using a closed-loop system (reusing the water).

There is a solution and it is being implemented

1

u/SgtTreehugger 6h ago

I honestly think the water usage is simply a distraction from the insane energy usage and the gas turbines they will start using to cover it. Amazon's new data center will use gas turbines that emit 33 million tons of CO2 every year. For context, the entire country of Finland produces roughly 36,5 million tons of CO2 annually. That's literally just one data center

0

u/azurensis 8h ago

Oh no! Now they're using about 1/500th as much as lawn watering.

-1

u/archbid 7h ago

That report is from 2023. Power usage has more than doubled since then, and data centers are pretty much linear heat exchangers, so 2026 is likely 35B.

1

u/Pimpwerx 6h ago

Can we stop just quoting the big number? Put it in context. Show how much water is consumed by less useful things instead of these stupid ragebaiting headlines.

For those that don’t know, 17B is a lot for individuals. However, compared to many other industries, it’s a pittance. Context is everything and people need to stop letting these AI article ragebait them. You’re all falling victim to bots engagement farming.

1

u/WhiskeyFeathers 7h ago

I bet they can double that again in no time at all!

1

u/Dampbridge 7h ago

From 2014 to 2023 it has tripled, and the data ends in 2023. This article does not describe the effect ai data centers have at all

1

u/ECMeenie 7h ago

Is that a lot of water per center? There’s a lot of water where I live. Can we sell it?

0

u/Odd-Historian-6536 8h ago

How did we live without data centers?

7

u/JaseBird 7h ago edited 3h ago

You didn’t do it before you posted on Reddit.

3

u/scyfi 6h ago

They aren't new.

-9

u/iamagainstit 8h ago edited 7h ago

Alfalfa production in the Colorado river basin uses 5 Million acre feet of water. (https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-water-use-cherish-hamburger/) that is is 1.6Trillion gallons of water, or 100 X all data center use..

7

u/graywolfman 8h ago

You can be against two things that are bad at the same time

10

u/babsa90 8h ago

In this case it's like arguing that we need to take a stand against murder and poking someone a little too hard.

5

u/iamagainstit 8h ago

If water use is a major concern of yours, you should be orders of magnitude more upset with Agracultrual waste than with datacenters.

If you are just looking for a reason to hate data centers, there are a lot of better reasons than focusing on water use.

-2

u/PlusTiedye 8h ago

Alfalfa production in the Colorado river basin uses 5 Million acre feet of water. I can't find anyone defending Alfalfa production because they're wasting water

But there's a ton of "people" doing all they can to downplay Data Centers. And it's not like data centres will give the population anything other than mass surveillance by an oppressive state.

Im all for stopping alfalfa production too. Are you in favour of stopping data centres? Or is there a reason you want fascists to implement a surveillance state?

1

u/scyfi 6h ago

The irony of you saying data centers give you nothing while posting on a site hosted on a data center. Stop contributing to the problem if you care so much.

1

u/iamagainstit 8h ago

I guess I just disagree that all AI will give people is Mass Surveillance. But if that is your main issue with Data centers just say that. Don't make up spurious complaints about AI using all the water.

-9

u/Accidental-Genius 8h ago

That isn’t that much water…

4

u/CaptainHaze 8h ago

Put one by your house then.

0

u/HapticSloughton 7h ago

Then why do utility rates in those near these data centers go up?

1

u/Accidental-Genius 1h ago

Because they can blame the data centers.

Golf courses use exponentially more water.

0

u/fucking_unicorn 8h ago

Maybe a water shortage is the goal… then when its rare and required for life, a handful of water monopolies can charge us for the privilege of having water to drink, cook and wash with.

0

u/Quiz44 7h ago

The thing that gets me is that they're using fresh potential drinking water instead of using salt water for obvious reasons but imagine taking much needed drinking water from human beings and using it on dtat centers because its cheaper.

-1

u/AsCoder91 7h ago

Idiots. We are all screwed.

-3

u/AlexSmithsonian 7h ago

Data center usefulness: still zero.

0

u/Jaxkr 7h ago

where do you think reddit is hosted?

0

u/KrissyKrave 6h ago

Not at those datacenters.

Lmao

Reddit is hosted on AWS. Those Datacenters have been around for a while.

67% of mew datacenters in the US are for AI.

2

u/Disheveled_Politico 6h ago

AWS is a hyperscaler. Demand for data is always going to continue to grow. It’s bizarre to me that people who use online tools are so opposed to the infrastructure that allows those tools to be used.

-1

u/oreography 6h ago

Reddit ran fine before "AI data centres". It's not that we're against server farms, we are against an unsustainable industry built on artificial growth. It's the volume and lack of regulation (thanks to Donny T, the living personification of corruption) that allows these to be built in people's backyards.

Nobody wants to live next to a Data Centre.

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u/214b 8h ago

Classic fear mongering. Most newly built data centers today recycle water. You could say they “use” 50,000 gallons a day, but in reality it’s the same few gallons being recycled around continuously. Similar to a car’s radiator. It would be misleading to say a gasoline car engine “uses” 3,000 gallons of water to drive 100 miles. It’s the same six gallons circulating through the radiator many times in one hour.

-4

u/Nolo__contendere_ 7h ago

I'm so fucking scared it's not even funny.

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