Haha, “future historians” is a good one.
Future archeologists, maybe.
“future”
That archaeologist:
It’s their turn
Them or the polydactyl kitties.
I’m not sure why people are focused on water for the data centers when that’s their smallest issue. The electricity usage is the concerning environmental factor
Water usage by comparison is dominated by agriculture, particularly animal agriculture. Even in water scarce areas, growing cattle feed is a leading source of drought
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
Part of it I think is that we can technically live without electricity. We cannot do the same with water.
That is missing my point that they are not major contributors to water overuse. The other uses wildly dwarf them, especially animal agriculture
On electricity, they are delaying fossil fuel plant closures and run backup generators that emit themselves. They’re projected to go from 5 to 15% of electricity use in the US
electricity can be converted to clean water, and it’s at a slightly better rate than some of the non evaporatively cooled datacenters get
Historians will know it wasn’t about anything the general public uses AI for
I think explaining all the Lord of The Ring stuff is going to be another weirder piece. Can we jointly add overuse of Bottle Water & Golf Courses to this pushback of useless water excesses?
According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025. That amounts to roughly 264 billion gallons for the year , or the annual water usage of 1.8 million Americans. AI data centers are currently consuming 550 million gallons of water per day. That’s roughly the same rate of water consumption as the entirety of the world’s bottled water industry .
Wait until you learn how much water animal agriculture uses
we need to eat
eat a plant
I eat plenty of plants
You’re replaceable
Hopefully not eating Alfalfa from arid dry climate.
I value the outputs of animal agriculture
and I value cheap cloud compute
That’s the problem
We lethally dumb.
Easy to explain actually, greed and stupidity. The late capitalist endgame.
I’m as anti-ai as it comes, but this headline kinda flagged my bullshit meter. “Consuming” water is not as simple an equation as consuming things like oil is. The water isn’t destroyed in the process, it’s just heated. So then it depends on where the water was drawn from, whether the water was evaporated, etc. If they’re doing evaporative cooling (which should be banned in my opinion) then it’s essentially “consumed”, but if it’s open loop cooling, sending the heated water back into the body of water it was drawn from, then it’s not the same as being “consumed”
The water isn’t destroyed in the process, it’s just heated.
I keep telling this to my local water utility but they keep billing me for drawing water from the municipal supply, regardless.
if it’s open loop cooling, sending the heated water back into the body of water it was drawn from
Dumping superheated water into the reservoir won’t have any second order consequences, right?
I keep telling this to my local water utility but they keep billing me for drawing water from the municipal supply, regardless.
You’re paying for the filtration and delivery of it. Feel free to stop paying and go collect and clean your own water.
Dumping superheated water into the reservoir won’t have any second order consequences, right?
If the water is superheated, something has gone drastically wrong. The effects of that style open loop cooling do exist, and are well understood already from the power generation industry.
go collect and clean your own water.
Read your own article. Wasn’t in trouble for collecting rainwater; he got in trouble for damming natural waterways. Massive difference.
Have you tried saying your house is a data center?
I mean, I’ve got a homelab with a water-cooled CPU. So… a very, very small one, yes.
Can I tell my water utility this to get some kind of discount?
Most of these new hyperscaler centers have been doing evaporative because it’s cheaper to install and easier to run so as you said it is effectively gone.
They’re also being placed in numerous dry areas, such as Phoenix, Arizona, where the water crisis is so bad that even if 90% of the water makes it back immediately into the local water supply, that added draw is large enough to tip things too far.
Datacenters don’t draw water from rivers. They take it from our drinking water supply through the supply network, and then dump it.
That water is as consumed as water flushed down the toilet. It’s gone from the community, even if obviously it still exists somewhere.
The heated water is released back into the waterways and by extensions kills everything living there. This collapses the ecosystem and changes the water chemistry. This can result in contamination, invasive species taking over, etc… Do that on major water ways like the Great Lakes/Saint Lawrence and you fuck with people’s drink water supply.
Only closed loop data centers are remotely feasible.
The great lakes are already using lake water for cooling nuclear plants. That’s what I was referring to when I said we already know the effects. It definitely effects the local ecosystem, but what that effect is depends on the body of water we are talking about. It’s definitely nowhere near as simple as “kills everything living there”.
Ideally we would just quit building useless data centers all together, and this cooling question would be a moot point.
Yes, and nuclear power plants are built with the strictest oversight and environmental planning. Data centers are just built in industrial zones with minimal supervision.
Do you think people live close enough to them for the noise to be a problem?
