> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions.
Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap.
People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.
Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona. Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can.
Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.
Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect.
It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage.
Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.
This causes major market distortions and worse outcomes than the econ 101 solution.
The problem is that water isn't traded on a normal market at all. Lots of people have historical water rights and pay nearly nothing for their water use. There's byzantine regulation and many have the right to use for some purpose on their land but not to resell, so the market cannot allocate to more efficient use.
If you just let the 101 level solution actually work, water prices will rise until inefficient uses like water-intensive agriculture (not even all crops!) are pushed out. Urban users easily outbid almost all agricultural use, even at what any person would consider dirt cheap prices. For example, desalinated water, which is considered expensive for agriculture, can be 40 cents per cubic meter of water. That's a lot of water! Usually the last mile of urban water delivery costs more than that.
The amount required to satisfy all urban use, including water hungry lawns etc, and datacenters, corresponds to a very minor reduction in agriculture. Perhaps even just changing which crop is grown or switching irrigation techniques.
Charging more to higher users, price discrimination, causes several problems. First, it creates an incentive to cheat. I'm not using all this water myself, its for this whole group of people who "live" here. Don't allow this kind of spreading (somehow...)? Now you actually screw any business or institution that serves a lot of people. A farm produces food for thousands- do they count as one user? A park uses much more water than a garden but serves many more people. Whatever framework you create will require another bureaucracy to run. Lobbyists will find or insert loopholes for their friends.
The heavy users actually improve the system robustness, in both electricity and water. Their higher demand pays for more supply infrastructure, which itself often benefits from economies of scale, and in a shortage they may even be more responsive to price increases due to their high use.
The 101 level solution means that Native Americans who were granted water rights by the Spanish, and guaranteed those rights by US treaties, would have to outbid urban users in order to grow subsistence crops.
The heavy users have more influence over the laws which govern the infrastructure, as the history of water rights in the West clearly shows. We see it now when secretive organizations negotiate with water companies under NDA to get water for new data centers - something a smaller water user couldn't do.
The riparian doctrine of the East, with its high rainfall, don't work so well in the dry West, which is why it generally uses the prior appropriation doctrine. Water management was traditionally under a communal system. Some of these still exist as acequia associations, which include equity and fairness in their decisions, which doesn't follow the prior appropriation doctrine.
If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them. They can choose to use it inefficiently on subsistence farming, or they could sell at the going rate. A normal market itself doesn't imply any particular allocation of water rights, just that they should be as fungible and transferable as possible.
Why are the laws that govern the infrastructure particularly important? It only matters now because its a tangle of regulation. Yes, big users can often get bulk discounts or other special arrangements by committing to use. This happens in many areas.
There's no law governing what products my grocery store must carry. Yet, I can still choose a store with many things I like, at affordable prices. My store may (and frequently does) exclude all products containing some chemical considered harmful even if it isn't banned. Of course, water has more of a natural monopoly problem, but that's more for last mile infrastructure and not broader supply.
I don't understand the details of the riparian vs prior appropriation doctrine. How does this create an issue? If the water rights are defined somehow, in a usage-independent way, only in terms of the net water removal, to account for runoff from local use, and the water from them can be traded, then a market can work regardless of the specific nature of the right.
Any association holding the rights could allocate its water internally as it sees fit. Just like any other asset? Or it could decide to sell it and distribute the money instead- perhaps even better for fairness to it's members!
> If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them.
You've just described the standard practice for taking over Native American lands by economic coercion instead of direct force. Take away land and water using market forces, and a culture based on land and water shatters.
That's precisely why the Native Americans protected their rights by treaty, not market forces.
Econ 101 was created to justify British colonial expansionism. Econ 101 justifies indentured servitude. Econ 101 justifies vote selling. Econ 101 justifies rule by the rich.
We've collectively decided that some part of life are off-limits to Econ 101.
Water is not simply a commodity. Water is life. Water is culture.
> How does this create an issue?
Water rights in the West are at least a Econ 400 level course, if not graduate school.
> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on.
Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.
When hurricanes come to South Florida, the well off migrate North to wait out the storm while the poor suffer the dangerous conditions. Part of this is due to the price spikes of gasoline in the local market as supplies dwindle due to fewer truck shipments and refineries shutting down for the storm.
Water is similar. Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The “markets work” heuristic is frequently wrong if you don’t glaze over the very many counterexamples.
Yeah but that response is stupid, irrational, makes shortages more likely and discourages people from taking action when they need to do something different right now. In an emergency situation, people who can provide more of something that is in desperately short supply should be paid more. People consistently adopt a strategy of trying to not pay them more and it's one of those really annoying cases where people's instincts are primed to make them band together and do something predictably foolish.
Rationing is an inevitable response. But to say that is like saying witch hunts are inevitable - they are. They're still bad ideas. People who can maintain access to their higher reasoning should resist them.
> Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.
Sure, but OP is advocating that we should "systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds." They're not arguing that this is something to be applied only in emergencies.
Similarly in your post, you use the need to ration gas after a hurricane to argue that we should ration water all the time. This does not follow.
> Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The logical extension of your argument here is that the world would be better if we subsidized gasoline for "poor utilities bill payers" and "rural residents".
But why gasoline and water specifically? Why not also healthcare, food, childcare, and other necessities?
Then consider, if we have a budget of $X per family to subsidize necessities, surely the government is not best suited to decide how to split up those dollars between water, gas, healthcare, food, and childcare? There's no right answer universally, some people need food more than they need gas, and vice versa. Surely an individual family would be better equipped to decide for themselves?
We have now invented "giving money to poor people instead of subsidizing demand", which I wholeheartedly support.
200 miles will easily get you out of the path of a hurricane. 200 back home. 400 miles at 20mpg is 20 gallons of gas. Even if gas doubles from $4 to $8, that’s only an extra $80, likely less than the cost of that one night of motel, and certainly less than the economic costs of actually being hit by a hurricane.
As with many things, markets do work, but people don’t make rational choices for their well-being.
No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year.
> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone.
No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible.
Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.
"Someone captures the market" is the thing that happens when the government micromanages them. Laws that charge more per unit to high users aren't anti-trust laws. A farm doesn't have higher market share in food than Google has in a tech market just because it uses more water.
That's a bad argument. There are gasoline trucks with a GVWR of ~20,000 pounds and diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord. If you actually wanted to do that then you'd instead do something like tax based on axle weight and miles traveled, e.g. by reading the odometer during inspections.
The better argument is that diesel is worse for air quality and then it's a pigouvian tax in proportion to how much you burn.
The realpolitik argument is that fewer people have diesel vehicles and democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But taxing commercial trucks is also a pretty sneaky way of taxing ~everything while pretending to not, so it's also the principal/agent problem. Legislators want to spend money while pretending not to take it from you.
> diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord.
It is taxed less than gas in lots of Europe where that is more common. You also need to factor in mpg vs gas, where it is higher, so more road-wear pCO2 was part of the debate in Europe, even though it is longer carbon chain so worse co2 ratio per calorie, the engines are more efficient. Diesel is worse for local air, better for long term co2.
There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one. Farm fuel with no road wear isn't taxed much at all in lots of places and is more often diesel.
In theory diesel hybrids would be even more efficient but diesel engines and hybrid transmissions both add up-front cost and further efficiency improvements have diminishing returns because reducing a $100 fuel cost by 30% isn't as much money as reducing a $70 fuel cost by 30%.
> There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one.
Road wear is the irrelevant one in terms of fuel. Because of the fourth power law, essentially all road wear is from full-size buses and semi trucks. The contribution from passenger cars and even the likes of diesel pickup trucks rounds to zero. Meanwhile the largest vehicles use a minority of the fuel because there are several times more passenger cars than semi trucks.
I am not saying that there should be no regulations on monopolies. We are discussing a very specific market intervention, namely the proposal to
> systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
This is what I'm arguing is a bad idea, by using gasoline as an example.
If you want to argue that imposing this pricing structure systematically is good because it would help prevent a bad monopoly like Standard Oil, you'd need to explain (a) how this market intervention would prevent monopolies and (b) how it's a "better" way (according to however we decide to measure "better") to prevent monopolies than the alternatives. I don't see how this is true, though.
> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
excuse me? leave the markets alone? to do what? continue screwing people over with the cost of living? at some point the government needs to step in when greed outstrips the ability of the consumer to meet the demand. capitalism on it’s own will demand ever increasing profits and that is simply unsustainable for any civilisation
I disagree. A large part of the cost of a utility is fixed per customer. Or any product really. That's how bulk purchasing makes sense. I can get 4x the product at a bulk store for 2x the price. Instead of being prejudicial about the use case, let's just charge what the utility actually costs. Include capital, operation, and decommissioning costs. That way, if you get a sudden spike in demand, you have the cash flow to issue a bond a scale up.
This would be an extremely regressive pricing structure that still has the same punchline: somehow residential users pay more to still not have any water.
1. You're thirsty and need a sip of water? That should be free
2. You're an household and use water? That should cost progressively more the more you use if you use more than typically needed
3. Your business model requires you to evaporate every last drop of water in a desert region? That should be so prohibitively expensive that your business model does not work
This is basically just a low amount threshold and a exponential function. You just need to select the exponent.
My understanding is, that at least in California the Alfalfa itself is often also exported to Gulf countries that are too dry for pasture or growing feed, but they want to raise cattle. Alfalfa really is almost like dehydrated water like aluminum is solid electricity.
Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.
Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
I'm not sure any carbon is absorbed even by this metric. Unless were growing alfalfa and sequestering it below ground.
You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa.
Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?
Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.
I think it’s a good thing when non-americans want to invest in businesses that operate in america. They’ll use that investment to hire americans and produce goods that are sold to americans. I’m sure american capitalists would love to be the only ones allowed to invest here, as they would be able to get more equity for their capital, but it’s not good for anyone else and not really even good for them long term. Smart countries try to attract foreign investment, not scare it away
It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
A big celebrity, I think one of the Kardashians was a couple of years ago fined and forced to update things when the city found that the big fountain in the front of the home had no recycling or such, but was effectively just an open faucet because I guess keeping it algae free was proving a hassle.
Regulation is not necessarily the same as protecting; as other commenters state the specific regulations around agricultural water use in the drier western united states often encourage wasteful agricultural uses of water.
The driest places tend to have the most tightly-regulated water.
And the wettest places tend to have the least-regulated water.
(Nobody talks about it because shortages make bigger headlines than surpluses do, but there's a ton of agricultural areas in the US that have too much water and where providing drainage for farm fields is much more commonplace than irrigating them is.
It doesn't really matter in this context, though, because folks hate datacenters in these water-rich areas just the same as they do everywhere else.)
I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.
They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
> But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
It seems like maybe there is though.
The first problem is the "use it or lose it" provisions where someone has the rights to use water but not sell it, thereby encouraging waste. That one has a solid solution: If they have the right to use it, they get the right to sell it. Make sale inalienable from use. Then you don't have to pay them anything because you're giving them something instead of taking it. But you get higher water availability as now all these people wasting "free" water start selling it because the opportunity cost of not selling it is now worth more than the wasteful use. The only "problem" here is that they get a windfall, but we can solve that in the same way as the second "problem".
Which is the takings clause. The purpose of that is to prevent unequal takings. If the government needs your land to build a railroad, they have to pay you for it, because they're taking yours but not anyone else's. Whereas when they take everyone's property at the same rate it's called property tax, and that's allowed. So if you just got a windfall of water rights in a dry place, congrats, you now have a valuable property right which is subject to property tax. Not using the water and don't want to pay the tax? Then sell the water. Since the buyer values it at more than you do, and the tax is less than 100% of the value, everyone comes out ahead compared to the status quo. The previous inefficient user gets $100 in money instead of $10 worth of inefficient use, the government gets some proportion of that in new tax revenue (variously property tax on the rights and income tax on the sale), the buyer gets water it values at >$100.
Can you explain the issue from a more basic level for people who don’t know? what i’m imagining is that, like, an aquifer might connect over a very large area and every property owner in the area has the right to extract as much water as they want from it? Leading to a tragedy of the commons situation that states are unable to regulate for some reason?
> People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country.
Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.
Yeah, there is ton of good farmland in the Northern US that has essentially free water because it rains enough to not need irrigation, but because desert water is sold for so cheap and can run year around, many more sustainable farms and land are sitting fallow and unused.
This is a really awkward situation because while we'd really want the market to sort of auto-balance the costs between different suppliers it's also really hard to look at PE ratios right now and believe that the market is anywhere near sane. OpenAI could trivially monopolize the water supply in CA[1] with its current warchest and that would, for everyone, be terrible in some fundamentally obvious ways - so we've clearly got a pretty gigantic misalignment in the market which means we're reliant on the government specifically picking winners but ideally doing so in a sensible manner.
How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at.
1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.
Not even industrial, I remember someone asking, what's the heaviest thing you can buy per dollar. And someone ran the math, somewhere it's like $20 for a full swimming pool on the expensive side.
Also just because something is cheap doesn't mean it's not depleting resources and making life worse for a community somewhere. People are constantly trying to build pipelines to the west to deplete the great lakes. There is a societal and ecological limit and these AI companies are not worth it.
While a couple months back an article[1] discussed how Google was keeping the water requirements a secret from locals who wanted transparency, claiming it was proprietary knowledge.
So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.
> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’
> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.
So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?
Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory.
Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.
Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
HN could run on a cellphone with a good connection. The YouTube video I am watching in another window probably burns more electrons than this entire forum.
If we're shipping the alfalfa to China, I assume that means it's supporting some Chinese person's food source, whether they are directly eating the alfalfa, or some animal is eating it that later becomes food.
If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.
Pointing to agriculture as a necessity while also wanting water usage to be "productive" is a little contradictory here. We grow things because there is a demand for those products in similar way that there is a demand for datacenters, the nutrition aspect is secondary and has been for a long time now. Would you say that almond growing is a productive use of our water? How about bananas, or beef, or avocados? All of these products use an abnormally large amount of water compared to other agricultural endeavors and if we compare that to data center water usage data center's are a drop in the bucket. We don't 'need' all of products we produce through agriculture to survive anymore, we grow them because we like them.
Lots of Colorado river water goes to supplying year around lettuce. If we didn't have lettuce they would just eat something else. Given the supply constraints of the region, "but someone is eating it" is a really bizarre argument. It can be grown elsewhere without water problems.
The southwest is basically exporting its water very cheaply in the form of agriculture. Why when its such a constrained resource here?
They are pointing out that some locations are not a good place to grow specific things and that there is a lot of water wastage in doing so. Attempting to grow crops in the desert vs. in a temperate climate probably uses more water for the same amount of crops (unless they are desert plants, I guess). This is what's being pointed out. If I decide to grow tomatoes on the moon and then ship them back to Earth to be consumed, it's fair game for people to point out how much of a waste of resources that is vs. just growing them on Earth.
One difference is that AI data center locations are not constrained by soil quality, length of growing season, climate, availability of cheap seasonal manual laborers, and access to transportation networks able to regularly handle a large physical volume of goods.
Once operational they just need electricity, cooling, internet, and enough local infrastructure to support up to a couple hundred employees. It should be possible to place all of them in locations where electricity and water are so abundant that no one cares about their use.
Heck, people are seriously talking about putting them in space (although I don't see how they will be able to solve the cooling problem).
Another example is pistachio farming in California, where it can take ~1+ gallon of water per nut according to some estimates. Much of the industry is enabled by high U.S. trade barriers on a certain country.
Don't be disingenuous. They already were dividing things out by type of usage, like talking about water park usage vs. the usage of an entire city for all purposes. They are already admitting that "water usage of a city" isn't only about quenching thirst and maintaining hygiene, it's not a stretch to assume that they also realize that they can be water wastage in agriculture as well. They can't split out every instance of wastage that could be eliminated, and it's ridiculous to expect them to.
My wife works with farmers professionally as part of a conservation district and just responded "THIS PERSON KNOWS FARMING" when showing her the discussion. I genuinely have no idea what you guys are talking about but she immediately got heated.
There was massive controversy about that so I don't know how good counterexample it's that. Unless the argument is "we already waste a lot why would you care about wasting more??" Which is not a great argument.
The point of the counterexample is a huge component of US agriculture, massively dwarfing data centers in water use, doesn't serve the core needs proposed by the top comment.
The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.
I'd be on board if for every data center a farm gave up the amount of water to use in that data center. Instead of carbon offsets, we'll let them purchase water offsets. Of course that's not a serious answer.
If our water rights system required farmers to actually pay anything approaching market rates for the water they used, it actually would be a serious answer!
Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert and drain the western US's aquifers and rivers because we have insane water rights doctrines that entitle them to trillions and trillions of gallons of free or almost-free water far in excess of what the watershed regions can bear.
If we don't change that system, data center water usage is a rounding error that is barely noticeable at the scale of the problem. If we do change that system, data center water usage isn't a problem at all.
> The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.
Well, to me, this sounds basically like "Jeff Bezos already exists, this school does not. Increasing the government budget to build a school here is not going to help our finance, so that's where we will push back."
(I don't think Jeff Bezos should lose all his money, but he could definitely pay more tax.)
Private jets already exists. Your new EV still doesn't. Adding more emissions on top of what private jets are using is not going to help. We can prevent the new EVs.
Scale matters, and you're completely ignoring it. A single hamburger takes about 2,500 liters of water to produce. The US eats a lot of them and produces a lot of them.
It's not explicitly a great argument, but it's an excellent premise to set.
Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into.
It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people talking about how terrible this is for the environment deserve to be ignored first, scorned later.
This is 100% true. Every person I know - and I know a lot of them because I'm one of them myself - who already seriously cared about the environment pre-AI, including making personal sacrifices for it, doesn't place outsized importance on AI's environmental impact compared to other sources. Every person who frequently brings up AI's environmental damage are those who honestly never really cared about the environment/climate, at most paying lip service to it for brownie points/to feel better but never took any actions that would inconvenience themselves.
Because we who actually care about this subject go through the effort of educating ourselves and tend to use our energy in ways that actually make a difference, that are effective. Because we care about making an impact, not about brownie points.
People are just embarrassed to admit they're scared they might lose their job. They shouldn't be but they are because they've attached their identity to their career and to the concept of it making them uniquely skilled and creative, in a way that a machine could never replace.
Please don't take this as saying they are replaceable by AI. Maybe it never will. That doesn't matter, what matters is that they're scared that it will, and they're too embarrassed to admit they're scared of it, so they point towards the environmental damage.
There aren't a million better places to put efforts into. This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched, and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.
>This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched
Oh yeah, excellent place to put effort, it's not entrenched, it's just straight up against technological giants in a race that is considered relevant for national security. That should be easy yeah, outstanding target to set.
>and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.
I'll just repeat myself here:
>Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively.
The effects of the tech giants encroachment of society and the stakes and gravity of the situation is so serious that some people think its important not to allow attempts to frame the struggle as Sisyphean to succeed.
Bob: "I hate <company> and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that"
Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as <other company> to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them"
Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.
Why is your hypothetical Tom wrong to claim that Bob primarily cares about hating <company> and is using fluffy creatures as an excuse because it sounds superficially better than the actual reasons Bob has a problem with <company>?
And I'm guessing that I'm supposed to believe here that the reason Bob hates explicitly this one company and is dismissing 99% of the damage done to the cute fluffy animal by corporations that seemingly get paid to exterminate them in brutal ways, the reason many people seem to spouse this extremely bizarre, specific belief is "just because" right? Not an obscene amount of hypocrisy and dishonesty?
Because I don't have anywhere near enough brain damage to do that and I'm not sure I can get there in a medically safe manner.
The point is that we should start by working on the bigger waste. If agriculture represents 1000x the consumption of AI, even cutting the AI water usage by half would have the less impact than reducing agriculture water usage by 0.02%
A pretty easy 'optional' comparison would be golf course watering. I saw a much more detailed write up on this that I can't find now, but a quick google shows 500 billion gallons a year for US golf courses and 180 billion gallons a year for all data centers, not just AI data centers.
The problem with these numbers though is water isn't really lost in those processes and has another dynamic: you can't really bank it. There's tons of ecosystems where the biggest problem is we have to ensure a certain amount of water goes through them to keep them alive.
And so in that context all water usage is not equal: watering a golf course where run off goes back to local estuaries is different to evaporative cooling is different to industrial or residential usage.
> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking
Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.
This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately.
Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.
As the AI/Robotics genie emerges and who gets to feed the AI robot genie resources and for what becomes the central civilizational question, you're going to see the whole economy back its way into central planning.
> anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose.
This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods.
Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.
I think that’s fine, having an extremely small group of subsidized industries because of historical reasons are fine.
Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.
It's better to have everyone pay the fair market price. Price isn't arbitrary, it reflects the real cost to produce the good. It encourages efficient use. If you feel one usage is more worthwhile, you can subsidize it.
In the article it lists a data point that beer production in Arizona used more water than the data centers in Arizona. People may vehemently disagree, but we absolutely do not need beer. Would I trade beer for AI? That's an easy choice, AI every time. If you just keep track of the water to keep a person alive and the bare minimum water required for agriculture (which isn't particularly efficient in most cases), it would be a fraction of a fraction of what we use now.
Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.
This is a hilariously misleading "study" and I would bet "beer" wasn't chosen arbitrarily for comparison:
The important difference WRT beer is that the water used in the process likely in a larger part goes towards... the beer itself. This in turn is going into the person who drinks it. So, the water here is actually hydrating human beings.
This can be argued as one of the 2-3 absolutely necessary uses of water. Hydrating people.
So, spending less than the beer industry is not that great of an achievement.
However, a casual reader may see comparison to "beer" and think "oh yeah, beer, just a random thing out of a million, so yeah AI is totally ordinary".
Beer has been around for like a thousand years and we haven't decided to get rid of it. We're five years into this fever dream and everyone either literally hates AI or has been driven at least a little crazy by it. It's a pretty darn easy choice for me (and most people I imagine).
Beer is a physically addictive mind altering substance, so of course we haven't decided to get rid of it (because it literally drugs you), but people go sober all the time because they know how bad it is.
We absolutely do not need to waste as much water as we do on agriculture. Their is more efficient watering systems, crops that do not feed humans, and inefficient crops that aren't needed. Any one of those improvements would dwarf the water usage by AI.
Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.
Yeah people aren't mad about datacenters because they are "anti growth"
They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.
> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live.
Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage.
Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.
But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?
Basically any discussion of water allocation is stupid. We already have a way to allocate water (or, really, any scarce resource) - markets. Instead of arguing over whether or not a hamburger is worth a car wash's worth of water, bill the person using the water for that amount of water. Let the water user and the price discovery mechanism fight it out. If it is not worth it to them, then they can move to somewhere where water is cheaper.
We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to.
This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it.
Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system.
[0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.
What about golf courses which use up 476 Billion of water every year? Way more than data centers. People complain about Nestle using water in californa for bottled water but it doesn't compare to what single golf course uses in a year.
> Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks.
There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded.
Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)
A lot of agricultural water usage (more water than AI) is for growing corn to turn into ethanol so we can add it to gasoline. It's not a small amount either, 40% of all corn in the US is used for this purpose.
We use about two orders of magnitude more water (each!) on corn and alfalfa than on data centers as of 2023, and while we're ramping data centers up fast, it'll still be an order of magnitude at the 2030 data center estimates (which may heavily overestimate, now that there's so much opposition popping up).
This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory.
If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.
The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.
This is the response to have in mind when confronted with AI-water arguments. It's not about HOW the water is used, it's that, if you're truly concerned about water usage, AI is a non-factor compared to basically everything else you do on a daily basis.
We don't need AI in the same way we don't need washing machines and dryers. Like, sure, we don't need a machine to do our laundry, just like we don't need an AI to do our skilled labor, but it sure saves us a lot of time and energy.
There's not really any NEED to grow almonds. Most agriculture in California is not required to sustain life in CA. However, without AI people wouldn't have jobs that could afford CA rents, so AI is required so people can live. Lets get rid of unnecessary uses like agriculture, unless farmers can justify that the usage is actually required to sustain life.
If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.
> Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?).
A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.
My understanding is that data centers (at least in LA) are using mostly grey/industrial water, not water you can consume or use for agriculture. It feels like we're measuring water as one entity when not all water is equally useful to a human.
one of the biggest health problems in US is obesity.
30 to 40% of the food produced in US goes to waste.
Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans.
Yes and no. We shouldn't compare datacenter water usage to residential water usage. We should compare it to industrial water usage, as that is what it is. The question like "how does datacenter water cooling compares to concrete factory water cooling?" makes some sense from engineering perspective, as you are comparing oranges to oranges to a degree.
Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...
Rice is not a luxury for most people. It’s a staple. It uses ca. 40% of all irrigation water globally. Also cotton is not a luxury, though it also uses quite a bit of irrigation water.
But normally they grow rice where there's abundant water. There's no shortage of water globally, it's just not always where you want it. Like they want water in the middle of the California desert to grow crops.
You can go millions of prompts before you use up as much water as it took to make a single beef burger.
You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.
There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2
Emissions many thousands of times over.
How many gallons of water are you assuming are in that burger patty? Because, while cows do drink water that falls from the sky and lands on fields where it was going to land anyway, they also urinate most of it back out.
Very little water that would have been used for any other purpose, or isn’t naturally returned to the water cycle, ends up being consumed in the production of the burger patty.
To be clear I think your point about AI not consuming all that much water relative to other things is valid, but comparing it to the water consumed by eating meat weakens your point for anyone that hasn’t bought into the bunk “cows are driving climate change” narrative.
That largely depends on where the alfalfa is grown. A lot of the alfalfa grown in deserts is shipped as combination ballast weight for leaving cargo ships and to feed foreign cows and not used for domestic cattle. While nobody around or east of the Great Lakes irrigates alfalfa and is essentially a free product requiring no pesticides and no fertilizer and even adds extra nitrogen fertilizer to the soil. It is just plant, cut, and bail and is otherwise basically a wonder crop for sustainable agriculture anywhere that gets rain once a month or more.
The vast majority of cattle are raised in a pasture and eat grass, even those labeled “grain fed”. Grain fed just means they spend some time (e.g. 30 days) in a feed lot.
I hadn’t heard about cows eating alfalfa though, where is that happening? Wouldn’t it be more valuable to sell it to people instead of using it as feed?
So when there is no rain you let the cattle die? Feed on other people's land? By that logic even server's water can come from rain.
> Around 14 percent of the 3 670 km3 of freshwater withdrawn each year for the irrigation of crops and pasture is allocated to produce feed items for livestock
My guess is that's off by a bit, but sure let's assume that's true.
Now measure the amount of electricity the same prompt will use in 6 years when both algorithmic efficiency and 3-4 generations of silicon lower that by 95% (or more).
Will your microwave become 95% more efficient over the next 6 years? No.
Also how many video prompts will the average person run in a given year? Almost certainly 0. I heavily use AI daily and have probably played with AI video less than 4 times, ever.
Yet certainly the average person will use 20,000-100,000 microwave minutes over their lifetime. I use my microwave for 2-3 minutes every day at lunch for example.
From first principles, the idea that electricity use = bad is wrong. If your electricity comes from burning coal or lignite, then obviously yes using that electricity has bad externalities.
But a french person running their microwave on Nuclear powered grids? This is good. Dirty energy sources is the problem. Not energy use itself.
Obviously no. AI is nowhere near as ubiquitous as the microwave so adoption is still scaling.
But as chips improve and the algorithms improve (eg. a paper just came out about getting the same results with 90% less inference using a few algorithmic techniques...on top of the fact we've already had multiple 90% efficiency jumps in AI already) the energy use per prompt will drop over time.
Meanwhile energy use per microwave minute will not meaningfully improve over time. So to make the comparison is silly.
And to pretend like the efficiency of AI will never improve given it runs on compute which by definition constantly becomes more efficient, is dumb.
Obviously, there's different options and variables and bla bla bla, but considering how consolidated and highly industrialized and standardized meat production is, this data is very likely close enough to true for the wast majority of beef burgers eaten by the people complaining about AI resource consumption: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
The premise of your link is founded on the energy associated to with a single prompt. The source in your link for that energy claim links to a blog post that then links back to an earlier blog post from the original author of the link you provided (it's basically a circular reference).
Basically, there's a lot of words in your initial link, but they all hinge on the readers taken the stated energy assumption for a single (undefined) prompt at face value. If that initial assumption is wrong (at min, it's poorly defined in your link) all further conclusions are invalid.any a scientific publication have done this same trickery =].
They don't define what a query is when they are talking about AI power usage. If we want to get serious, we'd tie usage to tokens since we can actually track token usage.
>The source in your link for that energy claim links to a blog post that then links back to an earlier blog post from the original author of the link you provided (it's basically a circular reference).
Huh? The latter blog post does link to the former's blog, but not as a source for that claim. It cites an Altman blog, an estimate from EpochAI, an article in the MIT Technology Review (albeit one that estimates 3x higher), and a paper put out by Google. It's really surprisingly well cited and I don't know how you came away from it thinking it was a circular reference. The google study is in the subheading!
2) I click the link associated with the 0.3 Wh of energy claim in the section "The full cost of a prompt".
3) The link from 2) takes me to a blog post from Hannah Ritchie. In Hannah's post, I click a link associated with the following excerpt:
"Third, as a result, more recent estimates suggested that the assumptions I relied on (h/t to Andy Masley’s work on this) — that one standard query used 3 watt-hours (Wh) of electricity — were possibly an order of magnitude too high. In this case, I was happy to be conservative and overestimate the energy use."
4) This link takes me to the author of your original post, but earlier.
None of this quantifies cost per token, which is really the much more relevant metric than whatever a "cost per text based query" means => which I think is both quite broad and quite model dependent.
> U.S. specific estimates put beef water use at 317, 441 and 808 gallons per pound of boneless beef when precipitation water is not accounted for in calculations.
So, let's just say around 400 gallons of water per pound of beef if you don't include rainfall use.
one of the main drivers of deforestation of Amazon is turning it into land suitable for crops to feed livestock. Most other places can’t use that as a model for growing crops that need irrigation. Two of the main areas in California and the areas used in Utah and Arizona for crops are either deserts or close to deserts.
Let's look at Almonds which _could be_ produced where water is not scarce, maybe, but instead is grown in central valley CA based on quickly depleting ground water.
Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.
That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.
I think good faith would request that the source used for these kinds of questions is not one of the VC firms at the root of these questions.
Doubly so when they use such innocuous and authoritative titling as "Our World in Data" which implies some collectivist, community-based outlook that this website is indeed not.
To wit, this page is produced in part by the Global Change Data Lab which is a team of economists, and YCombinator.
Ourworldindata basically just uses data from published research papers and makes interactive graphs that are easy to understand. They also cite their source in every graph and every article. Trying to paint them as disingenious is pretty baseless, you would have to take it up with the authors of the source data and not owid.
I have a few cows and rarely ever give them water. In the winter they get enough from snow and when it’s rainy we have a small pond that forms with a stream. They also prefer either of those to drinking well water from a cattle waterer. They are grass fed and rarely get fed stuff like corn.
For for thousands of pounds of beef, I’ve barely used any water at all. Don’t notice the extra consumption on my well at all, and I have a very low producing spring fed well (1 gallon per minute).
“Vegan” crops on the other hand line corn which are irrigated in many parts of the country use a great deal of water and often very inefficiently so.
Well, I've got a small server rack and roof top solar, therefore data centers don't actually use water.
In other words, bringing up some anecdotal, hyper specific (how many meat eaters just "have a few cows"?) information says absolutely nothing about the truth of the matter, but a lot about what you believe constitutes an argument.
A third perspective here, but maybe small ownership of these things allows for best practices (i.e. small farmers are greener and care about passing arable land to the next generation, small server owners care more about total system ownership which necessitates alternative energy production and making use of hardware that would otherwise be trashed). I think you're both onto something, now kiss!
This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0]
Honestly, it's weird to me how fixated both sides are on water.
People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.
Water is pretty scarce in some of the places they want to build these things. I know people in West Texas that own ranches that have been approached by the datacenter people and it’s basically a desert, oil industry consumes a lot of their water, and the public water they get in the city smells toxic, the well water is flammable. So water use is concerning and I don’t think there’s any reliable or trustworthy source for them to use as a gauge for what to expect so they have to ask.
What are the real issues with them in your estimation? Anti-data-center people bring up water use as a reason why the government should legally prevent data centers from being built, and pro-data-center people bring up water use to argue against the anti-data-center position. I agree that the anti-data-center people are overestimating water usage, as well as the degree to which the amount of water data centers do use is a problem; and that they're doing so because they have some other objection to data centers that doesn't sound as convincing. It would be better to talk about those issues.
Because it is an easy concrete way to stir up reactionary sentiment. The real issues are debatable but complex. But the common folk can all visualize a gallon of water.
Not only that they are trying the same playbook as what was done to nuclear. A new technology comes and activists try to instill fear so as to murder the tech in its baby crib.
The world would be better without nuclear technology! Yes, it can be used to generate electricity in a much cleaner way than other technologies, but its potential to kill so many people has shaped geopolitics for generations. If we could get the energy without the destruction, that would be ideal, of course. But there's an unacceptable chance that nuclear weapons will kill everyone I care about.
I think AI is actually similar. It's really useful for all sorts of stuff - I'm running multiple agents writing code as we speak. But it's also going to make the world much more dangerous by giving people the ability to kill and spy like never before.
The other part of this problem is the idea that if you disagree with someone about the facts you're interpreted as disagreeing with them about the thing they're mad about: You disagree that AI somehow destroys fifty billion-trillion gallons of pure water every time someone asks Claude something, therefore you're fully in favor of Grok making nudes of underage girls.
Some people get an Angry. They love their Angry, and nobody will take it from them.
That's populism for ya, and it's sadly extremely effective.
Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1].
Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3].
It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the exact same way.
Edit: can't reply
> AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid
Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on.
Same with nuclear power in Germany and GreenTech in much of the America.
Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats. AI is currently driving yet another extreme wealth inequality inflection point. Founded just five years ago, Anthropic is going to be a trillion dollar private company maybe this year! This is a staggering outcome and will further divide the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.
So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.
The economy is down, and the fad is blame AI so that is what everyone is doing. The last downturn there was a different fad that people blamed it on - but the real root cause was always the economy and not the fad.
It’s understandable that people blame AI for economic issues when so may CEOs are publicly stating that “increased efficiencies due to AI” is the reason for laying off staff.
They blamed the latest fad for layoffs in the last one as well.
Every company and project I know of has a long list of things they want to do that they believe would be good for customers - but they cannot afford the people needed, and the risk is too high to borrow. That is if AI was really increasing efficiency in a good economy they would be keeping everyone and getting more work done with them.
Of course in reality we cannot know if AI has really increased efficiency - we only have short term measures at best which we know from experience are often wrong. (most often because there are many ways you can make a shortcut today that will kill your long term)
What are you referring to here? The latest fad before AI was crypto, or maybe "the metaverse" and I don't think anyone credited those for layoffs. Before that, the latest large round of layoffs was during what, 2008? And the blame for that was correctly laid on the very real economic collapse occurring.
There have been other downturns that didn't hit tech. Not all fads coincide with a downturn and so not all get blamed on for the layoffs. Sometimes the economy is blamed correctly at well.
- Boosting existing small businesses and enabling the creation of new small businesses by making previously expensive resources like market research, accounting/legal advice, etc. available for $20/month.
If Anthropic can allow millions of people from all around the world to access these benefits, why shouldn't it be worth a trillion dollars?
Wealth in the modern world is not a zero sum game. Wealth is created, not allocated. The fact that Anthropic is worth a trillion does not prevent you from making money.
> Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats
This is naive and shows lack of understanding of second order effects. Technology has been so far one of the only things to lift all boats. The last 100 years almost eliminated extreme poverty, hunger and improved material life for everyone. How? Technology - agricultural, industrial.
Of course AI is going to be a rising tide but there will be a blip where people can lose jobs.
Wealth inequality is just a proxy issue or jealousy. Industrial revolution also increased inequality (just in narrow terms).
> Of course AI is going to be a rising tide but there will be a blip where people can lose jobs.
Can you provide any evidence for the supposed rising tide? So far I've seen nothing that indicates that anyone besides the people directly invested in AI companies will benefit from it. Even the best case scenario right now - software developers becoming more productive - doesn't actually benefit anyone not invested in AI companies.
People losing their jobs (and in many cases, their livelihoods/lives as a result) are also not the only negative effects.
The irony I think is that whether the tide rises depends on the technology stabilizing to a point where people can be educated on how to competently use it in the workforce. Anyone expecting general returns on AI now is too caught up in the hype to contribute to this occurring—grifters and detractors alike.
Humans have some repeatable bugs in our wetware, and it can be predictably exploited in a way that is hard to correct. It isn't "some people" - it's all of us, and the moment we think we're immune is the moment that we are most easily affected.
Yes, even the smartest of us are idiots in some very predictable ways.
AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid...
> Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
Sure but we are talking about whether the enormous investment into AI infrastructure is prudent or not. Also I reckon most people on here made a living just fine before everything moved to remote data centers, and many if not most HNers workloads could run on individual machines... But that's another conversation.
I suspect soon young learners of the future may tilt their heads in curiosity when finding that Obama was a "Democrat" in the same way they did in the past when finding that Lincoln was a "Republican".
you're arguing against things that have no material effect. "oh won't you think about adversarial discourse about the most well funded industry in recent history"
> So much of our public discourse on water and other subjects is choked by chatter, untamed by reasoned evidence, data, and quantification. Today, with AI, we have little excuse for not attempting and using honest estimates to inform our discussions and tame our fears and hopes.
Are these things usually convincing? The general pattern is that people take a position on something and then find one paper with a DOI identifier that backs the position. The Elephant and The Rider and so on. Trying to provide someone with evidence of the falsehood of their claims rarely makes them reconsider and often makes them dig their heels in while they search for a new paper with a DOI identifier.
We're in an unprecedented time in the information age when people can rapidly achieve basic competency at many things using Wikipedia, Google, and LLMs critically. If information availability and search were the constraint, one would expect us to reach greater alignment with facts.
The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality. In practice, I think the social psychologists are right. For the most part, we form the model of reality and then we seek information that supports it. So if you increase the total amount of information what you do is increase the ability for someone to select out that which supports their model.
That's not to say I don't appreciate these things. It's just that I don't think facts move public opinion very much.
The interesting thing that more information and better search provides is that it accelerates the divide between truth-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily falsifying information) and confirmation-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily supporting information). In general, one can imagine that the former will be more successful at modeling the world ex humanity at least. But if others believe something is true, often a direct approach at their facts is not the best approach to get the outcome.
> The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality.
You should read Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus. He calls this "the naive view of information," which is ignorant of the existence of what he astutely identifies as "intersubjective" realities (see also Angela Cooper-White's entry on "intersubjectivism" in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion):
[...] its deepest and most complex
usage is related to the postmodern
philosophical concept of
constructivism or, in social
psychology, social constructionism –
the notion that reality is co-
constructed by participants in a
relationship and in society.
This is the endgame of postmodernist and constructivist thinking that exalts narrative and story as the ground source of truth. In some ways what we are seeing is a return to religious and superstitious thinking where sufficient belief in a dogma or a pantheon is enough to reify those narratives into consensus reality.
Historically Jungian psychology and indeed religion (a form of proto-psychology, from which Jung inherits by way of the alchemical tradition; see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) was humanity's collective storehouse of wisdom and techniques for managing intersubjective realities and group "information hygiene." Such techniques are now being lost to antiquity with the late 20th and 21st century focus on only objectively verifiable, quantitative measurements (as opposed to the private subjective, qualitative phenomena experienced as the inner ruminations, contemplations, and dream life of the individual).
White Rose: Do you ever think
that if you imagined or
believed in something, it
could come true... Simply by
will?
Angela: Yes. Actually, I did
believe that. But I'm slowly
having to admit that's just
not the real world... Even if
I want it to be.
White Rose: Well, I guess it
all depends on what your
definition of real is.
> This is the endgame of postmodernist and constructivist thinking that exalts narrative and story as the ground source of truth. In some ways what we are seeing is a return to religious and superstitious thinking where sufficient belief in a dogma or a pantheon is enough to reify those narratives into consensus reality.
I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era. But I think we can add this to the list of our poorly-grounded narratives.
There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
> I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era.
At least from the Newtonian perspective, reality definitely unfolds either one way or the other, and it's not a matter of opinion.
> There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information, which "says that information leads to truth, and knowing the truth helps people to gain both power and wisdom." You miss the point of the root comment.
I don’t really get the water concerns in datacenter cooling. Even if a lot of water was used for cooling with every prompt (which he argues against here, but, even if)… water “used up” by cooling just comes out a little hotter, right? Maybe evaporated. Then it’ll come back in the form of rain. This isn’t an industrial chemistry process that leaves some toxic waste in the water. Or an agricultural one that puts water in plants and then ships it off to some other region. It just becomes another path through the water cycle.
I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?
If only we could do water-intensive activities in areas where water is abundant and then ship the resulting products to where they are needed...
In a far science fiction future, I could e.g. imagine connecting LLM inference data centers to a global data network instead of always having to drive up to them to ask my prompts.
The absolute strongest complaint is that DCs consume treated, potable water, which is less abundant / easily re-created than any old non-potable source. (Of course the easy solution here is DCs just ingest / treat their own non-potable source. Or utilities charge rates sufficient to price in the externality of drawing down more potable water. The economics still work for DCs if they need to treat their own water -- the fundamental problem is that utilities are underpricing their potable water, so DCs prefer it all else being equal.)
Why don’t data centers use gray water more often? Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?
My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out.
But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/industrial users, in a way that pushes them toward non-potable sources wherever possible.
A fun Texas water fact I always bring up: the entire state’s monthly freshwater use is roughly a week of freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay. Texas would be the 8th-largest GDP in the world if it were a country, and its whole monthly freshwater demand is basically a few months of water that the Chesapeake just dumps into the ocean. (Of course, estuaries make use of the water so it's not just wasted but it's illustrative imo)
Another fun comparison point is yearly Texas uses 0.08% the volume of the Great Lakes in freshwater but ~ 30-50% of the volume of all the lakes in Texas.
We've got a lot of water but it's not distributed evenly and we should probably build some sort of water pipeline eventually so water rich states can sell to water poor states.
Again, this is all just speculation by someone who knows not a damn thing about municipal water management.
> Why don’t data centers use gray water more often?
DCs will just use the cheapest source that meets their needs. If they have to treat greywater and that costs more than municipal potable water, they'll use the potable water. (In part this is utilities selling their potable water too cheaply.)
> Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?
No; if it was cheaper for DCs, they'd already be doing it. But it isn't an insurmountable cost -- DCs still pencil with slightly more expensive cooling.
Not all of us. I'm totally fine with water pipelines in exchange for long distance transmission lines for solar power and other such infrastructure like gas pipelines from areas that produce stuff we do not.
Export an abundant resource for a scarcer one seems win/win to me. Kind of the point of interstate commerce.
Why? We have 27 quadrillion gallons in lake michigan alone. You could pump millions of gallons a day out and if it just stopped raining it would take 3 million years to drain it. Stop listening to Charlie Berens.
Sorry but that isn’t your water. Do you own the Great Lakes?
The Great Lakes are part of the United States and Canada. If the United States or Canada would like to repurpose the water within them for some better use then that sucks for you
Grey water would normally get treated and then discharged into a river or lake or other local water body. If you evaporate it at a data center, then you break that local loop. It's really only different from using potable water in that you save a bit on the expense of fully treating it.
Using 1/4th the entire freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay makes it sound enormous. That's multiple major rivers for a bit over 30 million people.
I live near the Potomac and always figured the region was wet enough that water was not a concern. You have me rethinking that somewhat.
Where does your gasoline come from? Most of that usage is for the massive Exxon/etc facilities we have in Houston/Galveston to refine most of the fuel the entire nation uses.
Because they're taking water from already parched regions, often pumping it out of the ground. Even if the water did come back locally as rain (it doesn't), it still makes it impossible for people to live off the same aquifers and water sources sustainably.
To be fair if you are evaporating water you could be losing some of it outside of the Great Lakes water basin, you are increasing the evaporation rate above what is natural for that area of land.
However the place for that to be least likely to be a problem would be Wisconsin with their evaporated water blowing east over top of the Great Lakes 90% of the time and any excess humidity will rain back down or slow down lake evaporation because the air over the lakes is already saturated with humidity most of the time.
But there still can be a problem if all that water is being pumped from deeper underground aquifers instead of surface water, so the source still matters. Those aquifers still should replenish fairly quickly in that area, but draining aquifers can happen in decades if the demand is there, while replenishment from non-surface aquifers can take hundreds of years even in water filled areas. And in certain ground compositions, underground aquifers can collapse and subside if the water is mostly drained, never again being able to hold that much water again and causing changes in surface topology.
The water isn’t gone but if it comes back as rain, it at least has to be cleaned again, since data centers probably don’t use raw rainwater for cooling.
It’s probably still not too bad but there’s at least some work done that’s „used up“ by letting tap water (or probably demineralized water used for cooling) evaporate.
The problem is that data centers use SO MUCH water... sure we humans let water evaporate, but this is a new source of water "waste" to the tune of nearing 2 billion gallons/year, just in Loudon County Virginia & connected water users [0].
When that water source is underground wells, this can take years (on the fast end) or decades (on the moderate end) to get back down. Look at California's water issue -- so many wells extracting water for farming has changed the land topography.
Also, when water 'comes back', it might come back in the ocean and not on land... reducing the available fresh water without desalination.
Data centers need the water to cool... but maybe there's room to find incentives for them to do so while making sure our water bills don't go up like our electric bills are because of the extra load they are putting on utilities.
It doesn't come out a little hotter, it gets evaporated in cooling towers. Same result as any other water usage. Cooling towers can't use seawater either. Most datacenters are in places where fresh water is abundant anyway, but some are not.
Anyway agricultural water usage is way worse in California.
For many places that could be the reality, however many data centers aren't pulling surface water for cooling even if it is available, they are pulling it from underground aquifers that can take hundreds of years or more to refill, but could be drained in just a few decades if enough water is pumped out. This is doubly problematic for desert climates that generally have even lower aquifer replenishment rates, with a few areas being questionable to draw from even using efficient underground irrigation lines growing human edible foods.
The rain doesn’t happen directly above where it evaporates. And “slightly warmer” waste water can have major ecological impacts, destroying native life in the lakes and rivers where the wastewater is ejected. Plus, if the water is taken away from underground aquifers that may not be refilling fast enough, or if it’s taking water from downstream users, that’s something to be concerned with.
I have also wondered this and came to a similar conclusion about the politics.
This whole time I've been wondering how it's possible that people don't realize how common evaporative cooling is for much larger buildings that are far more numerous than these data centers, and especially in dry climates where drought is common.
tldr: chip immersion uses less water but is more expensive. Water evaporation is the opposite. Datacenters will use the cheapest they can get away with. Water is scarse; evaporated water is as unavailable as contaminated water. Read the information sources.
The explanation about chip immersion is wrong though. It's not a water-saving technique, it's for cooling dense racks more rapidly and maybe saving energy. That warm coolant still needs to be cooled before it goes back through the chips, likely the same way, evaporative cooling tower. Air cooling systems also involve a similar fluid loop, just doesn't go into the chips.
"Since the technology uses synthetic fluids, it requires significantly less water than other approaches." This is like saying that a new car radiator uses less water than an old water-based one, like yeah technically it requires water to work but you aren't boiling it away.
It does mention the real ways to use less water too, either chillers (which use way more power) or running in a colder climate.
> tldr: chip immersion uses less water but is more expensive. Water evaporation is the opposite. Datacenters will use the cheapest they can get away wi
This suggests a simple fix: charge more to the datacenters (not people) for the water, to make the other option competitive.
No need to throw baby with the ... erm, bathwater.
By that argument water use is never a bad thing since all water comes back as rain. The problem is that data centers need to use clean water, which has to be treated. On a local scale, a large data center could starve a community of potable water, even if the state-wide water use is very small.
Compare it to alfalfa and you’ll be laughing your ass off at how much water alfalfa consumes.
~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.
That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.
One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.
Feed cows in places without the water and sun to grow this stuff locally. Which is tantamount to exporting water from the American West which will eventually be turned into a desert. We effectively can't be trusted to govern our natural resources more than 5 years out.
I’d recommend you read the following report: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease
Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…
Did you read the paper carefully? It's about pesticide use. (It's not especially plausible as epidemiological studies go, though I'm unsurprised if a better study finds a firmer correlation between pesticides and PD.)
Did you not read that the effect was directly tied to “Individuals living within water service areas” in my original comment? Yeah no shit it’s pesticides. They’re seeping into the water supply from the golf course runoff.
That play works if you are in fact a PhD in a related field, but not if we're both reading the same study as laypersons and disputing its relevance and reliability.
What I suspect happened here is that you found this study by Googling for it, and forgot that it is in fact very easy to get a capsule summary of any published study posted on HN.
The data coming from the University of Calgary about the data centres they're building in Alberta, Canada seems to indicate that they're using evaporative cooling, which is very expensive water wise.
The bigger concern though, is the power requirements. Which are set to double or triple the energy use of the entire Province (analogous to a State in the US).
Air pollution, GHG and water use are concerns, but these projects will not dramatically increase the load on the electric grid.
Natural gas is cheap and abundant in Alberta, and the province (actually the whole country, via transfer payments) benefits financially from resource revenues from extracting the gas. So, these projects are generally an easy sell to the public.
I keep hearing about natural gas and on-site power for these data centres. I'll believe it when I see it.
There are already have a couple in Calgary and they're hooked directly to the grid. The cost of electricity for the city shot up at the same time. Also, there have been a few brownouts caused by them not being ready to handle late night draws from those data centres.
That's at least what I'm seeing. Though, admittedly, it's from older project articles. Maybe something has changed in recent months?
> Alas, despite modern technologies and institutions, our human societies, technology, and understanding ultimately rely on 50,000-year old hardware (our brains!), which evolves slowly and mysteriously. Unavoidably, we work with individual and collective neural hardware limits.
this bit especially tells me the reader needs a pile of salt.
I stopped reading at the crappy ChatGPT comic that shows "water usage" as some pipes pouring water and others pumping it in. How trustworthy is the text going to be after that?
I don't find it weird, it's about what I'd expect from AI sycophants. They don't seem to realize that it comes off as not even being able to defend their own ideas.
A lot of confusion around AI water usage might stem from whether it's an open-loop or a closed-loop cooling system.
e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.
So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
A lot o the confusion around data centers is that these companies purposely hide this information from the public. We already know how damaging normal data centers are:
Oh yeah it's totally normal for neoliberal America to fuck over the public at every opportunity for private corporate gain. Not going to disagree with that at all.
But if you think this is honestly a GOOD thing, you have deep anti-human sentiments.
YES. I should be able to evaluate that, and many supply that. When I buy an iPhone I can see exactly what Apple's recycling and use of recycled materials looks like, for example. Environmental impact doesn't only happen within their walls, it hits us all and they have a responsibility to declare that for anyone to see, not just customers. That you think they should be able to do whatever they want behind closed doors and we all just have to suck it up is one of the reasons I'm glad to be old and not far from escaping this world of children who no longer give a shit about anything except self satisfaction.
> That you think they should be able to do whatever they want behind closed doors
I haven't stated an opinion here at all, nor have I defended anything. I've merely relayed some observations that I understand to be true, and I've asked some questions.
But I shall now allow myself to be opinionated: You doin' ok over there, bud? You seem to be attacking the choir.
To simplify things, "closed loop" shouldn't even be part of the discussion. Usually they just mean a closed-loop cooling system somewhere inside, either to directly cool machines (typically ML) or to cool air for air-cooled machines (standard). That's separate from how you eject the heat from the coolant to the environment. That's either cooling towers (like swamp cooler, uses water), chillers (like A/C, no water but more power), or passive air cooling (like car radiator, no water but only practical if very cold outside).
So you could have a closed-loop water system cooling your machines or chips, but still be consuming water to cool the coolant. And they will advertise this as "closed loop." Better to ask if they have a cooling tower.
Only (mostly) water evaporate, salt and most contamination don't, so you get a brine that you must manage because otherwise it clog your heat exchangers and evaporation towers. Also, it must be returner to a river carefully to not kill all fish and life forms there.
There is ample evidence around the world of data centers causing extreme water crises [1].
Not a water expert but I find the focus on evaporation very confusing. Draining ground water and aquifers causes environmental degradation in itself and waste water from data centers can’t just be fed back into the water cycle?
I’ve seen a tremendous amount of content about AI water usage, mostly from pro AI sources. The most common type is comparing AI to particularly water intensive agriculture.
The result is that now I think water usage should be taken into account when siting data centers. Great Lakes and eastern seaboard fine, maybe not as much in California or Arizona.
He really saves the best bit for last, doesn't he?
> my breathing in making the blog post above might well have evaporated more water than occurred (incrementally) from all four AI estimates.
Clearly his continued breathing is not as much of an "economically effective use of water" as AI. If clean water ever becomes a scarce resource in California, thankfully he's already done the ChatGPT queries needed to justify cutting back on 68-year-old Emeritus Distinguished Professors.
As my friends in Agriculture like to point out, most of the water isn't used at all, it goes right on down the river to the ocean. Ag is second, but less than 50%.
It depends on the river. IIRC the water of the Colorado is stolen 100%, mostly for agriculture. A few years ago I think a small leftover was let, so a tiny part of the river can reach the sea.
The bigger concern is more around the pollution of the gas turbines. Populations around the DC are going to see higher rates of Asthma, Respiratory diseases, Heart problems, and certain cancers.
I would not extrapolate California results to the rest of the country. Other regions like Northern Virginia or Dallas-Forth Worth dominate current and future data center load. They have significantly different water and land use trends. Of course agricultural water usage is higher in California- it's the top agricultural state in the country. And energy prices are much higher, resulting in a smaller data center presence. State regulations also determine water usage efficiency requirements. So it might differ in less regulated states like Texas.
One good way to save water is to use treated wastewater for cooling. xAI is building this kind of system in Memphis.[0] It'll connect to a nearby wastewater treatment plant and they'll need to build an additional treatment plant before the water can be used for cooling. It's a closed-loop system inside the data center, where they use clean water, and it connects to open-loop evaporative cooling towers with heat exchangers.
If data center water use is such a concern, why not require that data centers invest in closed-loop cooling systems? By closed-loop, I'm talking about re-condensing evaporated water and allowing the water to cool. Cooling the water would be more expensive in hotter environments, but still achievable. These data centers seem to have wild amounts of money for investment, why not just mandate conservation requirements?
We should just charge a fair price for water. Something that covers capital, operating, and decommissioning costs. No need to pass specific regulations or add legal complexity. It would solve itself. Imagine any other service saying "Oh no, we have too much demand, we need to make it illegal." Just put out bonds, and build up capacity.
Condensing/cooling the water takes even more electricity though. So you're trading water savings for increased energy use. Maybe OK if it's all renewable, but in most areas it's not.
I often get side tracked into commenting on regular social media like Instagram and I'm somehow surprised over and over how poor critical thinking skills in the greater population. The zeitgeist of US politics is "this doesn't directly benefit me so this must be bad". According to the Instagram demographic, ALL industrial uses of water and electricity are bad because they "compete" with household use. The massive Agricultural industrial complex is actually OK because I like meat, almonds, etc. AI is bad because it doesn't make my job easier.
Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.
What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.
I find it deeply ironic that you accuse the public of lacking critical thinking about the externalities of agriculture but claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever. Demand for compute hardware has skyrocketed, and producing that hardware creates massive pollution from factories and mining. I shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe. To borrow your expression, you’d be more accurate in saying “this doesn’t directly harm me so it must be good”.
> claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever
While running. Incurring a pollution penalty once in fungible location (i.e where mines are approved and "hopefully" managed responsibly) is better than incurring pollution proportional to the output (e.g. plastic and chemical waste).
> shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe.
Is rare earth mining specifically for semiconductor manufacturing actually a significant driver? My intuition is that rare earth and most raw material mining would be driven much more by EV car motors and batteries.
Certainly you can say all energy use is indirectly responsible for the pollution of the oil, solar, wind, etc. I don't disagree at all! I'm say in-addition to the pollution of raw inputs like energy - contemporary industries have additional and unavoidable side products.
> are earth mining harms millions around the globe.
Those mines are going to operate day after day because it's unfortunately the best economic opportunity in those areas. Those areas deserve our support to improve their socioeconomic realities but opposition to data centers in rich countries does not suddenly provide better opportunities to those regions.
> 6. Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below.
Is this what passes for a citation nowadays? I’m sympathetic to the message but this ain’t it.
Just what I think can solve a problem in my hometown after reading this - I live in Kolkata,India - I dont think we will ever have a data centre here - we still have a lot of water issues - but if building data centers somehow equates to economic prosperity and such stats are shown - probably the city of joy will again regain its glory.
While the argument is probably right, the author may notice he's asking AI websites on AI water usage. Perhaps he should consult more neutral sources, at least to introduce the habit of critical thinking.
The water use problem is like maybe the 100th biggest risk due to AI, it's weird that in the minds of the most vocal anti-AI activists (with the exception of the Lighthaven/EA crowd) it's like the #1-#4 issue. Is it because water use is one of those morality sinks which is easy to understand compared to some of the other more subtle issues regarding AI proliferation?
This only considers water for cooling the DC. A LOT of water is needed for power generation.
U.S. power generation is the largest industrial user of water, withdrawing approximately 47.7 trillion gallons in 2021, mostly for cooling thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, natural gas).
1. Tallying the total water consumption impact, embodied water (construction), operational water (cooling), indirect water (electricity generation), supply chain water, etc.
2. Mapping current water intensity onto AI growth forecasts through 2030+
And if you look at those things in combination, there are reasons to be alarmed.
> But AI will bring more important concerns, such as the end of human civilization
Who are these people who think AI will end civilization? Ya'll know it's just autocomplete and deepfakes, right? Maybe they need to read a book about the industrial revolution? It changed the world entirely, but it didn't end it.
My understanding so far is that water use in LLM data centers ranges from not much at all to more than a medium sized city. It always comes down to how one chooses to calculate it, and more fundamentally what story they're wanting to tell.
Ok how about golf courses? This AI is evil look at the water use, is obvious propaganda. It makes no sense to call out data center water use when something that’s purely an optional recreational use consumes 25 times the amount.
If AI used as much water as the public "think"(lets say as much as the hysteria suggests the public thinks) then governments would have raised rates on them and they would have reduced usage...
> Their water use is mostly for cooling needs from the heat produced from their electricity use.
You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:
> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.
I ran 8 internal audits against my agent stack end-to-end, to figure out if I was destroying the planet. Turns out it uses 12x less energy over a 10minute snapshot when compared to youtube, instagram, facebook ect.
What they don’t mention is that the water is being polluted by the datacenters. It’s not as simple as “water go into datacenter, water come out of datacenter”
Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
Upvoted. What makes me sad is that I had to read hundreds of comments on all kinds of arguments until you pointed to the contamination issue. Not that the AI statistics in the AI thread submitted helped critical investigation.
Even people who are against data centers have a misconception around the data center water problem. It leaves us vulnerable to counter arguments like those found in this article and makes the movement look bad.
That being said, I’m not too worried about it. I think it’s okay if your average person has this misconception, because at the end of the day they are correct that datacenters threaten their water supply. They might not have the mechanism right. The resultant skepticism might force hyperscalers to commit to water preservation.
If republicans and centrist dems didn’t run the show right now I would say regulation should be passed forcing datacenters to treat all water prior to expelling it back into the water supply, with a state funded test facility located on premise to make sure they’re doing it right.
And not to mention - and this is for the AI cheerleaders that actually read this far - the air pollution. Musk’s datacenter in Memphis is running on GAS GENERATORS. So in many cases the DCs are actually polluting the air as well as the water. In a poor and predominantly black neighborhood of course. It’s just absolutely disgusting and the backlash against this will be swift and harsh. Honest to God us tech people are no different from those at Dow chemical that dump(ed) metric shit tons of highly carcinogenic PFAS into countless rivers. I work in this industry. But I don’t have the ability to fool myself the way most of HN seems to.
Look over here! Not over there at grid infrastructure and generating capacity, or noise and pollution from on-site generators.
The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.
You can be against lying about water use and for being honest about additional electricity demand at the same time. You can't smear someone for rejecting falsehoods just because you have an unrelated complaint.
Annoying to see slop like this on the front page taking up people's attention. Resource utilization connected to new infrastructure that is planned to be scaled exponentially is clearly important to analyze. Instead of research and insight this post just facilitates ignorance on the topic.
> Jay Lund is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geography at the University of California – Davis. He is also a Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
“His 68-year-old hardware with 50,000-year-old architecture is enjoying and struggling with the promise, threats, and turbulence of the AI revolution.”
This article conflates agricultural use, which is not treated and is drawn directly from groundwater, rainfall, and rivers, with urban use, which is treated and much more expensive. I find it baffling that the person who put their name on this article would fail to make this critical distinction, given their credentials.
So tired of these articles. Yes, it’s possible for them to use very little water. But naive comparisons to non-potable agricultural or other irrigation use or comparisons that don’t take into account growth rates of specific uses or local bottlenecks are useless.
Agriculture feeds people, including people outside of California (California being a huge agricultural exporter to all the other states: find me a grocery store that doesn’t have California agricultural products on the shelves and I’ll Venmo you $5).
Cities are…people. Literally the most important use of water.
So far, AI seems to just put people out of work and enrich a small group of oligarchs who own the technology.
If tech companies want people to change their view away from my above statements above maybe they should spend less time moving to the far right and being hostile to regular people.
Peter Thiel is out there building a military AI surveillance state and basically all the tech billionaires are turning MAGA and anti-democracy.
I don’t really care how much water AI uses, I’m not going to sit back and make excuses for billionaire assholes and their revenue toys. I don’t benefit from AI being embraced by society outside of stuff like cancer research (which was happening before LLMs took over the mainstream).
In reality, the most likely outcome is that I’ll be harmed by AI. I will be replaced by software and the billionaires who replaced me won’t exactly create a utopia, will they?
For perspective, 28 million gallons of water per day is roughly equivalent to what 93,000 households consume per day. There are ~130,000,000 households in the United States.
To be fair to people's objections - agriculture is significantly more important than AI model training when it comes to improving the average standard of living - and to be fair to model training a lot of the water usage in agriculture is used on extremely water inefficient crops.
Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord.
There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.
Marginal agricultural water use is alfalfa / nut farming in the desert and ethanol corn, not products consumers actually care about. Consumers aren't clamoring for E15 fuel over E10.
I’m actually surprised it’s so low. That’s about 7 seconds of the Mississippi River at its exit per day. Maybe a week or two of alfalfa farming per year, or even less?
You could imagine running way more water, but I guess these racks are extremely dense.
I've always found it quite sad and cringeworthy when people talk about AI's water usage. The first thought that comes to my head is whether its even worth trying to talk the person out of their delusion, or just accept that they are lost and can't be helped.
I think people are giving the AI-water-use claims too much credibility. The idea that AI datacenters are heavy water users is trivial to refute, and was trivial to refute when it was first introduced. It should be written about in the same tone as one writes about ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Whether it is or isn't happens to be beside the point. It's water being removed from the system en masse for a non-essential function, i.e. other than sustaining life, while driving up the cost of other utilities.
If we're trying to deny the usage "tier," I'd argue we're being intentionally obtuse at worst and foolish at best.
I appreciate the data driven approach. The article is spot on, it's really hard to distinguish all the discourse with the reality. Things most people grew up with in the 70s had years of propaganda convincing the public they were a net positive to society.
Sidebar, I'm very curious to see where AI goes. Definitely not on the hype train. More curious than anything. This article was a breath of fresh air.
My conspiracy theory is the whole AI datacenter water consumption outrage is a psyop by state actors to worsen public sentiment around AI, so China and others can catch up. Obviously we should lessen the environmental impact of our technology, while considering it's relative impact vs benefit, especially compared to other technology, in this case in particular to other datacenter usage.
But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters.
Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?
Are you saying any industry that brings in net new jobs with above median wages is bad? Or just ones with few employees and high additional property tax revenue?
I'm concerned with the ones that create temporary jobs, few permanent ones, drive up water and electrical rates and then help deskill other industries.
That part was not discussing data center jobs; it was asking cdrnsf if they'd object to other industries bringing in jobs that just happened to be above median wage (which would increase the COL for existing residents).
If we could magically guarantee that our [starry-eyed|gullible|treacherous] political leaders didn't give back most of those property taxes before the DC even broke ground...
What a strange thing to say. This is peak NIMBYism and I urge you to reconsider. Loudoun country as an example generates ~1B USD annually [1] from taxes through data centres. That's equivalent to paying an annual salary of $40,000 to around 30k people. That's a LOT.
Do you really not consider taxes before repeating this tired argument?
> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions.
Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap.
People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.
Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona. Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can.
Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.
Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect.
It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage.
Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.
This causes major market distortions and worse outcomes than the econ 101 solution.
The problem is that water isn't traded on a normal market at all. Lots of people have historical water rights and pay nearly nothing for their water use. There's byzantine regulation and many have the right to use for some purpose on their land but not to resell, so the market cannot allocate to more efficient use.
If you just let the 101 level solution actually work, water prices will rise until inefficient uses like water-intensive agriculture (not even all crops!) are pushed out. Urban users easily outbid almost all agricultural use, even at what any person would consider dirt cheap prices. For example, desalinated water, which is considered expensive for agriculture, can be 40 cents per cubic meter of water. That's a lot of water! Usually the last mile of urban water delivery costs more than that.
The amount required to satisfy all urban use, including water hungry lawns etc, and datacenters, corresponds to a very minor reduction in agriculture. Perhaps even just changing which crop is grown or switching irrigation techniques.
Charging more to higher users, price discrimination, causes several problems. First, it creates an incentive to cheat. I'm not using all this water myself, its for this whole group of people who "live" here. Don't allow this kind of spreading (somehow...)? Now you actually screw any business or institution that serves a lot of people. A farm produces food for thousands- do they count as one user? A park uses much more water than a garden but serves many more people. Whatever framework you create will require another bureaucracy to run. Lobbyists will find or insert loopholes for their friends.
The heavy users actually improve the system robustness, in both electricity and water. Their higher demand pays for more supply infrastructure, which itself often benefits from economies of scale, and in a shortage they may even be more responsive to price increases due to their high use.
The 101 level solution means that Native Americans who were granted water rights by the Spanish, and guaranteed those rights by US treaties, would have to outbid urban users in order to grow subsistence crops.
The heavy users have more influence over the laws which govern the infrastructure, as the history of water rights in the West clearly shows. We see it now when secretive organizations negotiate with water companies under NDA to get water for new data centers - something a smaller water user couldn't do.
The riparian doctrine of the East, with its high rainfall, don't work so well in the dry West, which is why it generally uses the prior appropriation doctrine. Water management was traditionally under a communal system. Some of these still exist as acequia associations, which include equity and fairness in their decisions, which doesn't follow the prior appropriation doctrine.
Econ 101 doesn't handle these issues.
These all seem fine in a normal market?
If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them. They can choose to use it inefficiently on subsistence farming, or they could sell at the going rate. A normal market itself doesn't imply any particular allocation of water rights, just that they should be as fungible and transferable as possible.
Why are the laws that govern the infrastructure particularly important? It only matters now because its a tangle of regulation. Yes, big users can often get bulk discounts or other special arrangements by committing to use. This happens in many areas.
There's no law governing what products my grocery store must carry. Yet, I can still choose a store with many things I like, at affordable prices. My store may (and frequently does) exclude all products containing some chemical considered harmful even if it isn't banned. Of course, water has more of a natural monopoly problem, but that's more for last mile infrastructure and not broader supply.
I don't understand the details of the riparian vs prior appropriation doctrine. How does this create an issue? If the water rights are defined somehow, in a usage-independent way, only in terms of the net water removal, to account for runoff from local use, and the water from them can be traded, then a market can work regardless of the specific nature of the right.
Any association holding the rights could allocate its water internally as it sees fit. Just like any other asset? Or it could decide to sell it and distribute the money instead- perhaps even better for fairness to it's members!
> If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them.
You've just described the standard practice for taking over Native American lands by economic coercion instead of direct force. Take away land and water using market forces, and a culture based on land and water shatters.
That's precisely why the Native Americans protected their rights by treaty, not market forces.
Econ 101 was created to justify British colonial expansionism. Econ 101 justifies indentured servitude. Econ 101 justifies vote selling. Econ 101 justifies rule by the rich.
We've collectively decided that some part of life are off-limits to Econ 101.
Water is not simply a commodity. Water is life. Water is culture.
> How does this create an issue?
Water rights in the West are at least a Econ 400 level course, if not graduate school.
> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on.
Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.
When hurricanes come to South Florida, the well off migrate North to wait out the storm while the poor suffer the dangerous conditions. Part of this is due to the price spikes of gasoline in the local market as supplies dwindle due to fewer truck shipments and refineries shutting down for the storm.
Water is similar. Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The “markets work” heuristic is frequently wrong if you don’t glaze over the very many counterexamples.
Yeah but that response is stupid, irrational, makes shortages more likely and discourages people from taking action when they need to do something different right now. In an emergency situation, people who can provide more of something that is in desperately short supply should be paid more. People consistently adopt a strategy of trying to not pay them more and it's one of those really annoying cases where people's instincts are primed to make them band together and do something predictably foolish.
Rationing is an inevitable response. But to say that is like saying witch hunts are inevitable - they are. They're still bad ideas. People who can maintain access to their higher reasoning should resist them.
> Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.
Sure, but OP is advocating that we should "systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds." They're not arguing that this is something to be applied only in emergencies.
Similarly in your post, you use the need to ration gas after a hurricane to argue that we should ration water all the time. This does not follow.
> Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The logical extension of your argument here is that the world would be better if we subsidized gasoline for "poor utilities bill payers" and "rural residents".
But why gasoline and water specifically? Why not also healthcare, food, childcare, and other necessities?
Then consider, if we have a budget of $X per family to subsidize necessities, surely the government is not best suited to decide how to split up those dollars between water, gas, healthcare, food, and childcare? There's no right answer universally, some people need food more than they need gas, and vice versa. Surely an individual family would be better equipped to decide for themselves?
We have now invented "giving money to poor people instead of subsidizing demand", which I wholeheartedly support.
200 miles will easily get you out of the path of a hurricane. 200 back home. 400 miles at 20mpg is 20 gallons of gas. Even if gas doubles from $4 to $8, that’s only an extra $80, likely less than the cost of that one night of motel, and certainly less than the economic costs of actually being hit by a hurricane.
As with many things, markets do work, but people don’t make rational choices for their well-being.
> We don't do this for gasoline
No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year.
> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone.
No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible.
Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.
"Someone captures the market" is the thing that happens when the government micromanages them. Laws that charge more per unit to high users aren't anti-trust laws. A farm doesn't have higher market share in food than Google has in a tech market just because it uses more water.
> Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free.
OK but the market intervention being discussed here does not create a free(er) market. Its intent and effect is the literal opposite.
Heavier commercial trucks that run on diesel tend to cause more damage. Scales with roughly 4th power of axle load.
That's a bad argument. There are gasoline trucks with a GVWR of ~20,000 pounds and diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord. If you actually wanted to do that then you'd instead do something like tax based on axle weight and miles traveled, e.g. by reading the odometer during inspections.
The better argument is that diesel is worse for air quality and then it's a pigouvian tax in proportion to how much you burn.
The realpolitik argument is that fewer people have diesel vehicles and democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But taxing commercial trucks is also a pretty sneaky way of taxing ~everything while pretending to not, so it's also the principal/agent problem. Legislators want to spend money while pretending not to take it from you.
> diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord.
It is taxed less than gas in lots of Europe where that is more common. You also need to factor in mpg vs gas, where it is higher, so more road-wear pCO2 was part of the debate in Europe, even though it is longer carbon chain so worse co2 ratio per calorie, the engines are more efficient. Diesel is worse for local air, better for long term co2.
There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one. Farm fuel with no road wear isn't taxed much at all in lots of places and is more often diesel.
> It is taxed less than gas in lots of Europe where that is more common.
But then it's even worse at recovering the cost of road maintenance from heavy trucks.
> You also need to factor in mpg vs gas, where it is higher
Passat TDI (diesel), ~3500 pounds, ~45MPG. Toyota Camry Hybrid (gas), ~3500 pounds, ~50MPG.
In theory diesel hybrids would be even more efficient but diesel engines and hybrid transmissions both add up-front cost and further efficiency improvements have diminishing returns because reducing a $100 fuel cost by 30% isn't as much money as reducing a $70 fuel cost by 30%.
> There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one.
Road wear is the irrelevant one in terms of fuel. Because of the fourth power law, essentially all road wear is from full-size buses and semi trucks. The contribution from passenger cars and even the likes of diesel pickup trucks rounds to zero. Meanwhile the largest vehicles use a minority of the fuel because there are several times more passenger cars than semi trucks.
Gasoline is heavily regulated and subsidized. Leaving the oil market alone resulted in Standard Oil, and we obviously don't want that again.
I am not saying that there should be no regulations on monopolies. We are discussing a very specific market intervention, namely the proposal to
> systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
This is what I'm arguing is a bad idea, by using gasoline as an example.
If you want to argue that imposing this pricing structure systematically is good because it would help prevent a bad monopoly like Standard Oil, you'd need to explain (a) how this market intervention would prevent monopolies and (b) how it's a "better" way (according to however we decide to measure "better") to prevent monopolies than the alternatives. I don't see how this is true, though.
Your claim was:
> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
Standard oil not only reduced consumer prices for gasoline, but was already losing its monopoly to competitors during the antitrust trial.
excuse me? leave the markets alone? to do what? continue screwing people over with the cost of living? at some point the government needs to step in when greed outstrips the ability of the consumer to meet the demand. capitalism on it’s own will demand ever increasing profits and that is simply unsustainable for any civilisation
I disagree. A large part of the cost of a utility is fixed per customer. Or any product really. That's how bulk purchasing makes sense. I can get 4x the product at a bulk store for 2x the price. Instead of being prejudicial about the use case, let's just charge what the utility actually costs. Include capital, operation, and decommissioning costs. That way, if you get a sudden spike in demand, you have the cash flow to issue a bond a scale up.
This would be an extremely regressive pricing structure that still has the same punchline: somehow residential users pay more to still not have any water.
I think it makes sense to have a continuum of:
1. You're thirsty and need a sip of water? That should be free
2. You're an household and use water? That should cost progressively more the more you use if you use more than typically needed
3. Your business model requires you to evaporate every last drop of water in a desert region? That should be so prohibitively expensive that your business model does not work
This is basically just a low amount threshold and a exponential function. You just need to select the exponent.
My understanding is, that at least in California the Alfalfa itself is often also exported to Gulf countries that are too dry for pasture or growing feed, but they want to raise cattle. Alfalfa really is almost like dehydrated water like aluminum is solid electricity.
Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.
But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.
Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
> Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes.
Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
I'm not sure any carbon is absorbed even by this metric. Unless were growing alfalfa and sequestering it below ground.
You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa.
Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?
Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.
I think it’s a good thing when non-americans want to invest in businesses that operate in america. They’ll use that investment to hire americans and produce goods that are sold to americans. I’m sure american capitalists would love to be the only ones allowed to invest here, as they would be able to get more equity for their capital, but it’s not good for anyone else and not really even good for them long term. Smart countries try to attract foreign investment, not scare it away
> are often foreign companies
That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.
How is it legal? Shouldn’t water be the most regulated (as in protected) substance of all?
It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
And are often _encouraged_ to be wasteful by "use it or lose it" type provisions.
A big celebrity, I think one of the Kardashians was a couple of years ago fined and forced to update things when the city found that the big fountain in the front of the home had no recycling or such, but was effectively just an open faucet because I guess keeping it algae free was proving a hassle.
Regulation is not necessarily the same as protecting; as other commenters state the specific regulations around agricultural water use in the drier western united states often encourage wasteful agricultural uses of water.
The driest places tend to have the most tightly-regulated water.
And the wettest places tend to have the least-regulated water.
(Nobody talks about it because shortages make bigger headlines than surpluses do, but there's a ton of agricultural areas in the US that have too much water and where providing drainage for farm fields is much more commonplace than irrigating them is.
It doesn't really matter in this context, though, because folks hate datacenters in these water-rich areas just the same as they do everywhere else.)
I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.
> and those are regularly treated as sacred
They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
> But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
It seems like maybe there is though.
The first problem is the "use it or lose it" provisions where someone has the rights to use water but not sell it, thereby encouraging waste. That one has a solid solution: If they have the right to use it, they get the right to sell it. Make sale inalienable from use. Then you don't have to pay them anything because you're giving them something instead of taking it. But you get higher water availability as now all these people wasting "free" water start selling it because the opportunity cost of not selling it is now worth more than the wasteful use. The only "problem" here is that they get a windfall, but we can solve that in the same way as the second "problem".
Which is the takings clause. The purpose of that is to prevent unequal takings. If the government needs your land to build a railroad, they have to pay you for it, because they're taking yours but not anyone else's. Whereas when they take everyone's property at the same rate it's called property tax, and that's allowed. So if you just got a windfall of water rights in a dry place, congrats, you now have a valuable property right which is subject to property tax. Not using the water and don't want to pay the tax? Then sell the water. Since the buyer values it at more than you do, and the tax is less than 100% of the value, everyone comes out ahead compared to the status quo. The previous inefficient user gets $100 in money instead of $10 worth of inefficient use, the government gets some proportion of that in new tax revenue (variously property tax on the rights and income tax on the sale), the buyer gets water it values at >$100.
Can you explain the issue from a more basic level for people who don’t know? what i’m imagining is that, like, an aquifer might connect over a very large area and every property owner in the area has the right to extract as much water as they want from it? Leading to a tragedy of the commons situation that states are unable to regulate for some reason?
Short answer: it's complicated. A somewhat longer answer: "Cadillac Desert". Marc Reisner. 1986.
Those fields still provide more jobs for the locals than data centers.
People need to work and not everyone can be a tech bro keyboard warrior. Hell apparently the end game is to replace IT workers with AI!
> People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country.
Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.
Yeah, there is ton of good farmland in the Northern US that has essentially free water because it rains enough to not need irrigation, but because desert water is sold for so cheap and can run year around, many more sustainable farms and land are sitting fallow and unused.
This is a really awkward situation because while we'd really want the market to sort of auto-balance the costs between different suppliers it's also really hard to look at PE ratios right now and believe that the market is anywhere near sane. OpenAI could trivially monopolize the water supply in CA[1] with its current warchest and that would, for everyone, be terrible in some fundamentally obvious ways - so we've clearly got a pretty gigantic misalignment in the market which means we're reliant on the government specifically picking winners but ideally doing so in a sensible manner.
How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at.
1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.
exactly! LA is peak capitalism over the environment. the amount of ecosystems destroyed by Los Angeles’s insatiable thirst for water is impressive
LA's water usage is dwarfed by the agricultural water usage in the Central Valley: https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
These aren't in LA.
Not even industrial, I remember someone asking, what's the heaviest thing you can buy per dollar. And someone ran the math, somewhere it's like $20 for a full swimming pool on the expensive side.
AI will murder you and your family if you allow it to continue.
Also just because something is cheap doesn't mean it's not depleting resources and making life worse for a community somewhere. People are constantly trying to build pipelines to the west to deplete the great lakes. There is a societal and ecological limit and these AI companies are not worth it.
While a couple months back an article[1] discussed how Google was keeping the water requirements a secret from locals who wanted transparency, claiming it was proprietary knowledge.
So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.
> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’
> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.
So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-dat...
[2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-cente...
author of Pivot to AI here. The impacts are local, but real bad for those localities.
Also, the fact that the AI hyperscalers will sue to keep the usage secret isn't something they're doing 'cos the usage looks good.
Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory.
Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.
> have to eat to live
Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
Yes, and now please cut the non-essential philosophical discussion, the server hosting this site doesn't run on thought experiments alone either.
This comment could have been someone's hamburger!
This site, if not overly wasteful, fits onto a single 1U server. A single car is more damaging than such a server.
HN does untold societal damage.
In other words it's not the car and its energy use, but rather its occupants.
A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.
HN could run on a cellphone with a good connection. The YouTube video I am watching in another window probably burns more electrons than this entire forum.
If we're shipping the alfalfa to China, I assume that means it's supporting some Chinese person's food source, whether they are directly eating the alfalfa, or some animal is eating it that later becomes food.
If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.
Pointing to agriculture as a necessity while also wanting water usage to be "productive" is a little contradictory here. We grow things because there is a demand for those products in similar way that there is a demand for datacenters, the nutrition aspect is secondary and has been for a long time now. Would you say that almond growing is a productive use of our water? How about bananas, or beef, or avocados? All of these products use an abnormally large amount of water compared to other agricultural endeavors and if we compare that to data center water usage data center's are a drop in the bucket. We don't 'need' all of products we produce through agriculture to survive anymore, we grow them because we like them.
Lots of Colorado river water goes to supplying year around lettuce. If we didn't have lettuce they would just eat something else. Given the supply constraints of the region, "but someone is eating it" is a really bizarre argument. It can be grown elsewhere without water problems.
The southwest is basically exporting its water very cheaply in the form of agriculture. Why when its such a constrained resource here?
They are pointing out that some locations are not a good place to grow specific things and that there is a lot of water wastage in doing so. Attempting to grow crops in the desert vs. in a temperate climate probably uses more water for the same amount of crops (unless they are desert plants, I guess). This is what's being pointed out. If I decide to grow tomatoes on the moon and then ship them back to Earth to be consumed, it's fair game for people to point out how much of a waste of resources that is vs. just growing them on Earth.
What makes AI use "illegitimate", and any food use automatically "legitimate"?
People have all kinds of needs in addition to those for food and water.
One difference is that AI data center locations are not constrained by soil quality, length of growing season, climate, availability of cheap seasonal manual laborers, and access to transportation networks able to regularly handle a large physical volume of goods.
Once operational they just need electricity, cooling, internet, and enough local infrastructure to support up to a couple hundred employees. It should be possible to place all of them in locations where electricity and water are so abundant that no one cares about their use.
Heck, people are seriously talking about putting them in space (although I don't see how they will be able to solve the cooling problem).
Another example is pistachio farming in California, where it can take ~1+ gallon of water per nut according to some estimates. Much of the industry is enabled by high U.S. trade barriers on a certain country.
Don't be disingenuous. They already were dividing things out by type of usage, like talking about water park usage vs. the usage of an entire city for all purposes. They are already admitting that "water usage of a city" isn't only about quenching thirst and maintaining hygiene, it's not a stretch to assume that they also realize that they can be water wastage in agriculture as well. They can't split out every instance of wastage that could be eliminated, and it's ridiculous to expect them to.
My wife works with farmers professionally as part of a conservation district and just responded "THIS PERSON KNOWS FARMING" when showing her the discussion. I genuinely have no idea what you guys are talking about but she immediately got heated.
Based in Colorado.
There was massive controversy about that so I don't know how good counterexample it's that. Unless the argument is "we already waste a lot why would you care about wasting more??" Which is not a great argument.
The point of the counterexample is a huge component of US agriculture, massively dwarfing data centers in water use, doesn't serve the core needs proposed by the top comment.
The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.
I'd be on board if for every data center a farm gave up the amount of water to use in that data center. Instead of carbon offsets, we'll let them purchase water offsets. Of course that's not a serious answer.
If our water rights system required farmers to actually pay anything approaching market rates for the water they used, it actually would be a serious answer!
Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert and drain the western US's aquifers and rivers because we have insane water rights doctrines that entitle them to trillions and trillions of gallons of free or almost-free water far in excess of what the watershed regions can bear.
If we don't change that system, data center water usage is a rounding error that is barely noticeable at the scale of the problem. If we do change that system, data center water usage isn't a problem at all.
> The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.
Well, to me, this sounds basically like "Jeff Bezos already exists, this school does not. Increasing the government budget to build a school here is not going to help our finance, so that's where we will push back."
(I don't think Jeff Bezos should lose all his money, but he could definitely pay more tax.)
How does building a data center, which benefits a single company, compare to building a school, which benefits the general public?
Private jets already exists. Your new EV still doesn't. Adding more emissions on top of what private jets are using is not going to help. We can prevent the new EVs.
Scale matters, and you're completely ignoring it. A single hamburger takes about 2,500 liters of water to produce. The US eats a lot of them and produces a lot of them.
It's not explicitly a great argument, but it's an excellent premise to set.
Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into.
It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people talking about how terrible this is for the environment deserve to be ignored first, scorned later.
This is 100% true. Every person I know - and I know a lot of them because I'm one of them myself - who already seriously cared about the environment pre-AI, including making personal sacrifices for it, doesn't place outsized importance on AI's environmental impact compared to other sources. Every person who frequently brings up AI's environmental damage are those who honestly never really cared about the environment/climate, at most paying lip service to it for brownie points/to feel better but never took any actions that would inconvenience themselves.
Because we who actually care about this subject go through the effort of educating ourselves and tend to use our energy in ways that actually make a difference, that are effective. Because we care about making an impact, not about brownie points.
People are just embarrassed to admit they're scared they might lose their job. They shouldn't be but they are because they've attached their identity to their career and to the concept of it making them uniquely skilled and creative, in a way that a machine could never replace.
Please don't take this as saying they are replaceable by AI. Maybe it never will. That doesn't matter, what matters is that they're scared that it will, and they're too embarrassed to admit they're scared of it, so they point towards the environmental damage.
There aren't a million better places to put efforts into. This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched, and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.
>This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched
Oh yeah, excellent place to put effort, it's not entrenched, it's just straight up against technological giants in a race that is considered relevant for national security. That should be easy yeah, outstanding target to set.
>and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.
I'll just repeat myself here:
>Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively.
You are a deeply unserious person :'D
You are insinuating that a fight against tech giants is the preferable option regarding pollution and I'm unserious??
The effects of the tech giants encroachment of society and the stakes and gravity of the situation is so serious that some people think its important not to allow attempts to frame the struggle as Sisyphean to succeed.
>The effects of the tech giants encroachment of society and the stakes and gravity of the situation is so serious
Regarding pollution??? Completely preposterous.
Bob: "I hate <company> and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that"
Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as <other company> to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them"
Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.
I'm pretty sure most people would see Toms point as valid?
If Bob made a huge deal about company's abuse of fluffy animal and never otherwise talked about fluffy animal, that would seen as inauthentic
Why is your hypothetical Tom wrong to claim that Bob primarily cares about hating <company> and is using fluffy creatures as an excuse because it sounds superficially better than the actual reasons Bob has a problem with <company>?
And I'm guessing that I'm supposed to believe here that the reason Bob hates explicitly this one company and is dismissing 99% of the damage done to the cute fluffy animal by corporations that seemingly get paid to exterminate them in brutal ways, the reason many people seem to spouse this extremely bizarre, specific belief is "just because" right? Not an obscene amount of hypocrisy and dishonesty?
Because I don't have anywhere near enough brain damage to do that and I'm not sure I can get there in a medically safe manner.
The point is that we should start by working on the bigger waste. If agriculture represents 1000x the consumption of AI, even cutting the AI water usage by half would have the less impact than reducing agriculture water usage by 0.02%
A pretty easy 'optional' comparison would be golf course watering. I saw a much more detailed write up on this that I can't find now, but a quick google shows 500 billion gallons a year for US golf courses and 180 billion gallons a year for all data centers, not just AI data centers.
Possibly one of these, shared to HN in the past year:
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
The problem with these numbers though is water isn't really lost in those processes and has another dynamic: you can't really bank it. There's tons of ecosystems where the biggest problem is we have to ensure a certain amount of water goes through them to keep them alive.
And so in that context all water usage is not equal: watering a golf course where run off goes back to local estuaries is different to evaporative cooling is different to industrial or residential usage.
I mean, I know a lot of people who are also against golf courses for very similar reasons
> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking
Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.
This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately.
Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.
As the AI/Robotics genie emerges and who gets to feed the AI robot genie resources and for what becomes the central civilizational question, you're going to see the whole economy back its way into central planning.
> anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose.
This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods.
Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.
I think that’s fine, having an extremely small group of subsidized industries because of historical reasons are fine.
Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.
let's have the tool we created as a society called "the government" regulate it instead of waiting for "the market" to price things accurately.
Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen
It's better to have everyone pay the fair market price. Price isn't arbitrary, it reflects the real cost to produce the good. It encourages efficient use. If you feel one usage is more worthwhile, you can subsidize it.
The government is the entity that enforces the existing water rights system.
In the article it lists a data point that beer production in Arizona used more water than the data centers in Arizona. People may vehemently disagree, but we absolutely do not need beer. Would I trade beer for AI? That's an easy choice, AI every time. If you just keep track of the water to keep a person alive and the bare minimum water required for agriculture (which isn't particularly efficient in most cases), it would be a fraction of a fraction of what we use now.
Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.
This is a hilariously misleading "study" and I would bet "beer" wasn't chosen arbitrarily for comparison:
The important difference WRT beer is that the water used in the process likely in a larger part goes towards... the beer itself. This in turn is going into the person who drinks it. So, the water here is actually hydrating human beings.
This can be argued as one of the 2-3 absolutely necessary uses of water. Hydrating people.
So, spending less than the beer industry is not that great of an achievement.
However, a casual reader may see comparison to "beer" and think "oh yeah, beer, just a random thing out of a million, so yeah AI is totally ordinary".
Which is a very incorrect conclusion to reach.
LLMs make my job easier on balance and I hardly drink beer any more, but I would choose beer over data centres every single time.
Beer has been around for like a thousand years and we haven't decided to get rid of it. We're five years into this fever dream and everyone either literally hates AI or has been driven at least a little crazy by it. It's a pretty darn easy choice for me (and most people I imagine).
Beer is a physically addictive mind altering substance, so of course we haven't decided to get rid of it (because it literally drugs you), but people go sober all the time because they know how bad it is.
The entire United States banned beer in the 1920s, and then un-banned it in the 30s, using a process that is unthinkable today.
"either literally hates AI or has been driven at least a little crazy by it. It's a pretty darn easy choice for me (and most people I imagine)."
Careful, your bias is showing.
Great news, you are free to stop using AI and to drink beer, and so are we all.
thanks
We absolutely do not need to waste as much water as we do on agriculture. Their is more efficient watering systems, crops that do not feed humans, and inefficient crops that aren't needed. Any one of those improvements would dwarf the water usage by AI.
Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.
Yeah people aren't mad about datacenters because they are "anti growth"
They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.
Don't expect them to do anything for the greater good. Regulate and require that to happen, don't ban.
> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live.
Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage.
Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.
It seems strange to draw the line at car washes.
But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?
Basically any discussion of water allocation is stupid. We already have a way to allocate water (or, really, any scarce resource) - markets. Instead of arguing over whether or not a hamburger is worth a car wash's worth of water, bill the person using the water for that amount of water. Let the water user and the price discovery mechanism fight it out. If it is not worth it to them, then they can move to somewhere where water is cheaper.
We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to.
This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it.
Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system.
[0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.
> we have to eat to live
You don't have to eat a burger.
Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).
What about golf courses which use up 476 Billion of water every year? Way more than data centers. People complain about Nestle using water in californa for bottled water but it doesn't compare to what single golf course uses in a year.
yes I think these datacenters AND golf courses are a waste. crazy
> Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks.
There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded.
Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)
A lot of agricultural water usage (more water than AI) is for growing corn to turn into ethanol so we can add it to gasoline. It's not a small amount either, 40% of all corn in the US is used for this purpose.
We use about two orders of magnitude more water (each!) on corn and alfalfa than on data centers as of 2023, and while we're ramping data centers up fast, it'll still be an order of magnitude at the 2030 data center estimates (which may heavily overestimate, now that there's so much opposition popping up).
This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory.
If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.
The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.
This is the response to have in mind when confronted with AI-water arguments. It's not about HOW the water is used, it's that, if you're truly concerned about water usage, AI is a non-factor compared to basically everything else you do on a daily basis.
> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking.
Nothing but costs! All of those people have been replaced by AI. What's the point of keeping all those economically useless people alive?
This is our future if we don't achieve the fabled post-scarcity society soon.
We don't need AI in the same way we don't need washing machines and dryers. Like, sure, we don't need a machine to do our laundry, just like we don't need an AI to do our skilled labor, but it sure saves us a lot of time and energy.
There's not really any NEED to grow almonds. Most agriculture in California is not required to sustain life in CA. However, without AI people wouldn't have jobs that could afford CA rents, so AI is required so people can live. Lets get rid of unnecessary uses like agriculture, unless farmers can justify that the usage is actually required to sustain life.
If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.
> Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?).
A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.
My understanding is that data centers (at least in LA) are using mostly grey/industrial water, not water you can consume or use for agriculture. It feels like we're measuring water as one entity when not all water is equally useful to a human.
> Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading
Kind of reminds me of things like "low fat" labels on foods that have little fat anyway, but tons of sugar.
In this case, electricity is the elephant in the room.
one of the biggest health problems in US is obesity. 30 to 40% of the food produced in US goes to waste.
Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans.
It's a strawman.
Yeah, but data centers allow for jobs which gives people money to buy food.
Yes and no. We shouldn't compare datacenter water usage to residential water usage. We should compare it to industrial water usage, as that is what it is. The question like "how does datacenter water cooling compares to concrete factory water cooling?" makes some sense from engineering perspective, as you are comparing oranges to oranges to a degree.
Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...
Loads of agricultural water usage in the western states is on totally optional stuff like beef and almonds
And corn for putting in gas tanks
Where's the beef?!
Meat is optional.
Agricultural water usage distribution prioritizes luxury consumption and drought areas are subsidized
Rice is not a luxury for most people. It’s a staple. It uses ca. 40% of all irrigation water globally. Also cotton is not a luxury, though it also uses quite a bit of irrigation water.
But normally they grow rice where there's abundant water. There's no shortage of water globally, it's just not always where you want it. Like they want water in the middle of the California desert to grow crops.
Rice in Pakistan, northern India, Mali, Calif., US irrigate their rice because rainfall is insufficient. Cotton grows in semi arid regions as well.
You can go millions of prompts before you use up as much water as it took to make a single beef burger.
You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.
There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.
How many gallons of water are you assuming are in that burger patty? Because, while cows do drink water that falls from the sky and lands on fields where it was going to land anyway, they also urinate most of it back out.
Very little water that would have been used for any other purpose, or isn’t naturally returned to the water cycle, ends up being consumed in the production of the burger patty.
To be clear I think your point about AI not consuming all that much water relative to other things is valid, but comparing it to the water consumed by eating meat weakens your point for anyone that hasn’t bought into the bunk “cows are driving climate change” narrative.
Cows drinking isn't the major pie anyways. Cow feeding on Alfalfa which has been grown and irrigated with huge amount of water is the problem.
That largely depends on where the alfalfa is grown. A lot of the alfalfa grown in deserts is shipped as combination ballast weight for leaving cargo ships and to feed foreign cows and not used for domestic cattle. While nobody around or east of the Great Lakes irrigates alfalfa and is essentially a free product requiring no pesticides and no fertilizer and even adds extra nitrogen fertilizer to the soil. It is just plant, cut, and bail and is otherwise basically a wonder crop for sustainable agriculture anywhere that gets rain once a month or more.
The vast majority of cattle are raised in a pasture and eat grass, even those labeled “grain fed”. Grain fed just means they spend some time (e.g. 30 days) in a feed lot.
I hadn’t heard about cows eating alfalfa though, where is that happening? Wouldn’t it be more valuable to sell it to people instead of using it as feed?
Grass takes lots of water to grow.
That water is free. It’s called rain.
Sort of. It has the opportunity cost of the forests we cleared for it.
So when there is no rain you let the cattle die? Feed on other people's land? By that logic even server's water can come from rain.
> Around 14 percent of the 3 670 km3 of freshwater withdrawn each year for the irrigation of crops and pasture is allocated to produce feed items for livestock
[1]: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/a7f...
Yes, drought often results in the death of livestock.
Depends on the prompt. Do a video prompt and one 30 second video will use as much electricity as running your microwave on high for 15 minutes.
source?
My guess is that's off by a bit, but sure let's assume that's true.
Now measure the amount of electricity the same prompt will use in 6 years when both algorithmic efficiency and 3-4 generations of silicon lower that by 95% (or more).
Will your microwave become 95% more efficient over the next 6 years? No.
Also how many video prompts will the average person run in a given year? Almost certainly 0. I heavily use AI daily and have probably played with AI video less than 4 times, ever.
Yet certainly the average person will use 20,000-100,000 microwave minutes over their lifetime. I use my microwave for 2-3 minutes every day at lunch for example.
From first principles, the idea that electricity use = bad is wrong. If your electricity comes from burning coal or lignite, then obviously yes using that electricity has bad externalities.
But a french person running their microwave on Nuclear powered grids? This is good. Dirty energy sources is the problem. Not energy use itself.
Are these companies going toss a $500b+ infrastructure investment away in next 6 years? Whats the average lifespan of a AI compute node?
Obviously no. AI is nowhere near as ubiquitous as the microwave so adoption is still scaling.
But as chips improve and the algorithms improve (eg. a paper just came out about getting the same results with 90% less inference using a few algorithmic techniques...on top of the fact we've already had multiple 90% efficiency jumps in AI already) the energy use per prompt will drop over time.
Meanwhile energy use per microwave minute will not meaningfully improve over time. So to make the comparison is silly.
And to pretend like the efficiency of AI will never improve given it runs on compute which by definition constantly becomes more efficient, is dumb.
Water I agree. C02 (which is really a tangential metric if energy consumption which will vary by energy mix) I'd want some citations.
Also agree there are other ways we should pursue in parallel regarding emissions.
Obviously, there's different options and variables and bla bla bla, but considering how consolidated and highly industrialized and standardized meat production is, this data is very likely close enough to true for the wast majority of beef burgers eaten by the people complaining about AI resource consumption: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I was moreso asking you about your data on how much AI is tied to CO2...
Andy Masley does some plausible estimates here based on the data we have that puts 50 prompts per day at around 5kg CO2e/year: https://www.andymasley.com/writing/whats-the-full-hidden-cli...
The difference between an average diet and a vegan diet via Scarborough et al. 2023/Poore & Nemecek 2018 is in the realm of 1450kg CO2e/year.
Assuming those numbers, that difference is around 14,500 prompts per day, or ~5.3M prompts per year.
So unless the prompt estimates are off by more than two orders of magnitude...
The premise of your link is founded on the energy associated to with a single prompt. The source in your link for that energy claim links to a blog post that then links back to an earlier blog post from the original author of the link you provided (it's basically a circular reference).
Basically, there's a lot of words in your initial link, but they all hinge on the readers taken the stated energy assumption for a single (undefined) prompt at face value. If that initial assumption is wrong (at min, it's poorly defined in your link) all further conclusions are invalid.any a scientific publication have done this same trickery =].
They don't define what a query is when they are talking about AI power usage. If we want to get serious, we'd tie usage to tokens since we can actually track token usage.
>The source in your link for that energy claim links to a blog post that then links back to an earlier blog post from the original author of the link you provided (it's basically a circular reference).
Huh? The latter blog post does link to the former's blog, but not as a source for that claim. It cites an Altman blog, an estimate from EpochAI, an article in the MIT Technology Review (albeit one that estimates 3x higher), and a paper put out by Google. It's really surprisingly well cited and I don't know how you came away from it thinking it was a circular reference. The google study is in the subheading!
Order of operations:
1) I click your link
2) I click the link associated with the 0.3 Wh of energy claim in the section "The full cost of a prompt".
3) The link from 2) takes me to a blog post from Hannah Ritchie. In Hannah's post, I click a link associated with the following excerpt:
"Third, as a result, more recent estimates suggested that the assumptions I relied on (h/t to Andy Masley’s work on this) — that one standard query used 3 watt-hours (Wh) of electricity — were possibly an order of magnitude too high. In this case, I was happy to be conservative and overestimate the energy use."
4) This link takes me to the author of your original post, but earlier.
None of this quantifies cost per token, which is really the much more relevant metric than whatever a "cost per text based query" means => which I think is both quite broad and quite model dependent.
Ok great let's get rid of non-renewable powered AI _and_ stop eating animals.
Source? Meat can be "produced" in a location where water is not as scarce. Rural areas. Datacenters "like" to grow in urban areas.
This source says that a 100 prompt spends half a liter of water https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
I remember this year google reported one google search spend a drop of water (or 5 drops, around that)
Your source cites https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-... which in turn claims to be based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 but uses 0.14 kWh as the energy consumption for a 100-token request to GPT-4, which is an order of magnitude larger than any figure in that paper. Based on a speed of 18 tokens/s https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-4/performance the implied power draw is ≈91 kW, about two thirds of a 72-GPU rack https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet_SuperCluster_... I somewhat doubt that the model is large enough to require an entire rack's worth of GPU memory, but even if that were the case, a single request is going to get batched with hundreds or thousands of others at the same time, so the true energy consumption should be much smaller than that.
This beef industry organization cites 3 studies: https://www.beefresearch.org/resources/beef-sustainability/f...
> U.S. specific estimates put beef water use at 317, 441 and 808 gallons per pound of boneless beef when precipitation water is not accounted for in calculations.
So, let's just say around 400 gallons of water per pound of beef if you don't include rainfall use.
It's kinda crazy not accounting for precipitation. In fact in my country (Argentina) irrigation for livestock farming is basically non existent.
one of the main drivers of deforestation of Amazon is turning it into land suitable for crops to feed livestock. Most other places can’t use that as a model for growing crops that need irrigation. Two of the main areas in California and the areas used in Utah and Arizona for crops are either deserts or close to deserts.
I don't understand the relation of the Amazon, are you implying the Amazon is in Argentina?
Let's look at Almonds which _could be_ produced where water is not scarce, maybe, but instead is grown in central valley CA based on quickly depleting ground water.
Each almond takes about a gallon of water to grow: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
A "drop" is not well defined, but some math says there's about 75,000 drops in a gallon: https://www.quora.com/How-many-drops-of-water-can-fit-into-o...
Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.
That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I think good faith would request that the source used for these kinds of questions is not one of the VC firms at the root of these questions.
Doubly so when they use such innocuous and authoritative titling as "Our World in Data" which implies some collectivist, community-based outlook that this website is indeed not.
To wit, this page is produced in part by the Global Change Data Lab which is a team of economists, and YCombinator.
Ourworldindata basically just uses data from published research papers and makes interactive graphs that are easy to understand. They also cite their source in every graph and every article. Trying to paint them as disingenious is pretty baseless, you would have to take it up with the authors of the source data and not owid.
I have a few cows and rarely ever give them water. In the winter they get enough from snow and when it’s rainy we have a small pond that forms with a stream. They also prefer either of those to drinking well water from a cattle waterer. They are grass fed and rarely get fed stuff like corn.
For for thousands of pounds of beef, I’ve barely used any water at all. Don’t notice the extra consumption on my well at all, and I have a very low producing spring fed well (1 gallon per minute).
“Vegan” crops on the other hand line corn which are irrigated in many parts of the country use a great deal of water and often very inefficiently so.
Well, I've got a small server rack and roof top solar, therefore data centers don't actually use water.
In other words, bringing up some anecdotal, hyper specific (how many meat eaters just "have a few cows"?) information says absolutely nothing about the truth of the matter, but a lot about what you believe constitutes an argument.
A third perspective here, but maybe small ownership of these things allows for best practices (i.e. small farmers are greener and care about passing arable land to the next generation, small server owners care more about total system ownership which necessitates alternative energy production and making use of hardware that would otherwise be trashed). I think you're both onto something, now kiss!
This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0]
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s
Honestly, it's weird to me how fixated both sides are on water.
People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.
Water is pretty scarce in some of the places they want to build these things. I know people in West Texas that own ranches that have been approached by the datacenter people and it’s basically a desert, oil industry consumes a lot of their water, and the public water they get in the city smells toxic, the well water is flammable. So water use is concerning and I don’t think there’s any reliable or trustworthy source for them to use as a gauge for what to expect so they have to ask.
What are the real issues with them in your estimation? Anti-data-center people bring up water use as a reason why the government should legally prevent data centers from being built, and pro-data-center people bring up water use to argue against the anti-data-center position. I agree that the anti-data-center people are overestimating water usage, as well as the degree to which the amount of water data centers do use is a problem; and that they're doing so because they have some other objection to data centers that doesn't sound as convincing. It would be better to talk about those issues.
Because it is an easy concrete way to stir up reactionary sentiment. The real issues are debatable but complex. But the common folk can all visualize a gallon of water.
Not only that they are trying the same playbook as what was done to nuclear. A new technology comes and activists try to instill fear so as to murder the tech in its baby crib.
What a strange sentiment.
The world would be better without nuclear technology! Yes, it can be used to generate electricity in a much cleaner way than other technologies, but its potential to kill so many people has shaped geopolitics for generations. If we could get the energy without the destruction, that would be ideal, of course. But there's an unacceptable chance that nuclear weapons will kill everyone I care about.
I think AI is actually similar. It's really useful for all sorts of stuff - I'm running multiple agents writing code as we speak. But it's also going to make the world much more dangerous by giving people the ability to kill and spy like never before.
There are better arguments than the water thing.
The other part of this problem is the idea that if you disagree with someone about the facts you're interpreted as disagreeing with them about the thing they're mad about: You disagree that AI somehow destroys fifty billion-trillion gallons of pure water every time someone asks Claude something, therefore you're fully in favor of Grok making nudes of underage girls.
Some people get an Angry. They love their Angry, and nobody will take it from them.
That's populism for ya, and it's sadly extremely effective.
Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1].
Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3].
It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the exact same way.
Edit: can't reply
> AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid
Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on.
Same with nuclear power in Germany and GreenTech in much of the America.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-tech...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-gives-20-year-tax-...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afr...
[3] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...
Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats. AI is currently driving yet another extreme wealth inequality inflection point. Founded just five years ago, Anthropic is going to be a trillion dollar private company maybe this year! This is a staggering outcome and will further divide the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.
So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.
The economy is down, and the fad is blame AI so that is what everyone is doing. The last downturn there was a different fad that people blamed it on - but the real root cause was always the economy and not the fad.
It’s understandable that people blame AI for economic issues when so may CEOs are publicly stating that “increased efficiencies due to AI” is the reason for laying off staff.
They blamed the latest fad for layoffs in the last one as well.
Every company and project I know of has a long list of things they want to do that they believe would be good for customers - but they cannot afford the people needed, and the risk is too high to borrow. That is if AI was really increasing efficiency in a good economy they would be keeping everyone and getting more work done with them.
Of course in reality we cannot know if AI has really increased efficiency - we only have short term measures at best which we know from experience are often wrong. (most often because there are many ways you can make a shortcut today that will kill your long term)
> " latest fad for layoffs"
What are you referring to here? The latest fad before AI was crypto, or maybe "the metaverse" and I don't think anyone credited those for layoffs. Before that, the latest large round of layoffs was during what, 2008? And the blame for that was correctly laid on the very real economic collapse occurring.
There have been other downturns that didn't hit tech. Not all fads coincide with a downturn and so not all get blamed on for the layoffs. Sometimes the economy is blamed correctly at well.
This is a bit reductionist.
AI is also:
- Boosting existing small businesses and enabling the creation of new small businesses by making previously expensive resources like market research, accounting/legal advice, etc. available for $20/month.
- Helping the world progress towards cheaper healthcare: https://www.vox.com/health/487425/open-ai-chatgpt-diagnosis-...
- Allowing lower income communities to access legal advice that would previously have been prohibitively expensive: https://www.probonoinst.org/2026/02/06/ai-and-technology-hel...
If Anthropic can allow millions of people from all around the world to access these benefits, why shouldn't it be worth a trillion dollars?
Wealth in the modern world is not a zero sum game. Wealth is created, not allocated. The fact that Anthropic is worth a trillion does not prevent you from making money.
> Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats
This is naive and shows lack of understanding of second order effects. Technology has been so far one of the only things to lift all boats. The last 100 years almost eliminated extreme poverty, hunger and improved material life for everyone. How? Technology - agricultural, industrial.
Of course AI is going to be a rising tide but there will be a blip where people can lose jobs.
Wealth inequality is just a proxy issue or jealousy. Industrial revolution also increased inequality (just in narrow terms).
> Of course AI is going to be a rising tide but there will be a blip where people can lose jobs.
Can you provide any evidence for the supposed rising tide? So far I've seen nothing that indicates that anyone besides the people directly invested in AI companies will benefit from it. Even the best case scenario right now - software developers becoming more productive - doesn't actually benefit anyone not invested in AI companies.
People losing their jobs (and in many cases, their livelihoods/lives as a result) are also not the only negative effects.
The irony I think is that whether the tide rises depends on the technology stabilizing to a point where people can be educated on how to competently use it in the workforce. Anyone expecting general returns on AI now is too caught up in the hype to contribute to this occurring—grifters and detractors alike.
Slopulism is effective because people are idiots and happy to eat up lies that align with their priors. Nothing to do with material conditions.
Can I rephrase it slightly?
Humans have some repeatable bugs in our wetware, and it can be predictably exploited in a way that is hard to correct. It isn't "some people" - it's all of us, and the moment we think we're immune is the moment that we are most easily affected.
Yes, even the smartest of us are idiots in some very predictable ways.
AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid...
> Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
Sure but we are talking about whether the enormous investment into AI infrastructure is prudent or not. Also I reckon most people on here made a living just fine before everything moved to remote data centers, and many if not most HNers workloads could run on individual machines... But that's another conversation.
I suspect soon young learners of the future may tilt their heads in curiosity when finding that Obama was a "Democrat" in the same way they did in the past when finding that Lincoln was a "Republican".
you're arguing against things that have no material effect. "oh won't you think about adversarial discourse about the most well funded industry in recent history"
> So much of our public discourse on water and other subjects is choked by chatter, untamed by reasoned evidence, data, and quantification. Today, with AI, we have little excuse for not attempting and using honest estimates to inform our discussions and tame our fears and hopes.
Are these things usually convincing? The general pattern is that people take a position on something and then find one paper with a DOI identifier that backs the position. The Elephant and The Rider and so on. Trying to provide someone with evidence of the falsehood of their claims rarely makes them reconsider and often makes them dig their heels in while they search for a new paper with a DOI identifier.
We're in an unprecedented time in the information age when people can rapidly achieve basic competency at many things using Wikipedia, Google, and LLMs critically. If information availability and search were the constraint, one would expect us to reach greater alignment with facts.
The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality. In practice, I think the social psychologists are right. For the most part, we form the model of reality and then we seek information that supports it. So if you increase the total amount of information what you do is increase the ability for someone to select out that which supports their model.
That's not to say I don't appreciate these things. It's just that I don't think facts move public opinion very much.
The interesting thing that more information and better search provides is that it accelerates the divide between truth-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily falsifying information) and confirmation-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily supporting information). In general, one can imagine that the former will be more successful at modeling the world ex humanity at least. But if others believe something is true, often a direct approach at their facts is not the best approach to get the outcome.
> The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality.
You should read Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus. He calls this "the naive view of information," which is ignorant of the existence of what he astutely identifies as "intersubjective" realities (see also Angela Cooper-White's entry on "intersubjectivism" in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion):
This is the endgame of postmodernist and constructivist thinking that exalts narrative and story as the ground source of truth. In some ways what we are seeing is a return to religious and superstitious thinking where sufficient belief in a dogma or a pantheon is enough to reify those narratives into consensus reality.Historically Jungian psychology and indeed religion (a form of proto-psychology, from which Jung inherits by way of the alchemical tradition; see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) was humanity's collective storehouse of wisdom and techniques for managing intersubjective realities and group "information hygiene." Such techniques are now being lost to antiquity with the late 20th and 21st century focus on only objectively verifiable, quantitative measurements (as opposed to the private subjective, qualitative phenomena experienced as the inner ruminations, contemplations, and dream life of the individual).
https://vimeo.com/387207936> This is the endgame of postmodernist and constructivist thinking that exalts narrative and story as the ground source of truth. In some ways what we are seeing is a return to religious and superstitious thinking where sufficient belief in a dogma or a pantheon is enough to reify those narratives into consensus reality.
I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era. But I think we can add this to the list of our poorly-grounded narratives.
There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
> I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era.
At least from the Newtonian perspective, reality definitely unfolds either one way or the other, and it's not a matter of opinion.
> There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information, which "says that information leads to truth, and knowing the truth helps people to gain both power and wisdom." You miss the point of the root comment.
> from the Newtonian perspective, reality definitely unfolds either one way or the other, and it's not a matter of opinion.
You won't hear me claim otherwise.
> This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information
That seems unlikely to me as I didn't say anything about "power" or "wisdom".
I don’t really get the water concerns in datacenter cooling. Even if a lot of water was used for cooling with every prompt (which he argues against here, but, even if)… water “used up” by cooling just comes out a little hotter, right? Maybe evaporated. Then it’ll come back in the form of rain. This isn’t an industrial chemistry process that leaves some toxic waste in the water. Or an agricultural one that puts water in plants and then ships it off to some other region. It just becomes another path through the water cycle.
I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?
Just 30 mins from where I live data centers are having an impact on water used for farming.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/25/m...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo
If only we could do water-intensive activities in areas where water is abundant and then ship the resulting products to where they are needed...
In a far science fiction future, I could e.g. imagine connecting LLM inference data centers to a global data network instead of always having to drive up to them to ask my prompts.
The absolute strongest complaint is that DCs consume treated, potable water, which is less abundant / easily re-created than any old non-potable source. (Of course the easy solution here is DCs just ingest / treat their own non-potable source. Or utilities charge rates sufficient to price in the externality of drawing down more potable water. The economics still work for DCs if they need to treat their own water -- the fundamental problem is that utilities are underpricing their potable water, so DCs prefer it all else being equal.)
Why don’t data centers use gray water more often? Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?
My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out.
But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/industrial users, in a way that pushes them toward non-potable sources wherever possible.
A fun Texas water fact I always bring up: the entire state’s monthly freshwater use is roughly a week of freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay. Texas would be the 8th-largest GDP in the world if it were a country, and its whole monthly freshwater demand is basically a few months of water that the Chesapeake just dumps into the ocean. (Of course, estuaries make use of the water so it's not just wasted but it's illustrative imo)
Another fun comparison point is yearly Texas uses 0.08% the volume of the Great Lakes in freshwater but ~ 30-50% of the volume of all the lakes in Texas.
We've got a lot of water but it's not distributed evenly and we should probably build some sort of water pipeline eventually so water rich states can sell to water poor states.
Again, this is all just speculation by someone who knows not a damn thing about municipal water management.
> Why don’t data centers use gray water more often?
DCs will just use the cheapest source that meets their needs. If they have to treat greywater and that costs more than municipal potable water, they'll use the potable water. (In part this is utilities selling their potable water too cheaply.)
> Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?
No; if it was cheaper for DCs, they'd already be doing it. But it isn't an insurmountable cost -- DCs still pencil with slightly more expensive cooling.
Why do they even need to treat the water? Surely all they care about is that it’s a cold liquid?
They need it to not clog up their cooling loop, corrode fixtures if the pH is off neutral, etc. It doesn't need to be potable.
Those of us by the Great Lakes would prefer that our water not get sold to other places, thanks.
Not all of us. I'm totally fine with water pipelines in exchange for long distance transmission lines for solar power and other such infrastructure like gas pipelines from areas that produce stuff we do not.
Export an abundant resource for a scarcer one seems win/win to me. Kind of the point of interstate commerce.
Long term, fresh water as a resource is in decline [0].
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/global-fres...
DCs could desal all of their cooling water from saltwater and it would still pencil. (So could residential water, for that matter.)
Thankfully the Great Lakes Compact prohibits water from being diverted outside the great lakes drainage basin, with very limited exceptions.
https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/program-areas/water-diver...
Why? We have 27 quadrillion gallons in lake michigan alone. You could pump millions of gallons a day out and if it just stopped raining it would take 3 million years to drain it. Stop listening to Charlie Berens.
Sorry but that isn’t your water. Do you own the Great Lakes?
The Great Lakes are part of the United States and Canada. If the United States or Canada would like to repurpose the water within them for some better use then that sucks for you
You’d have to convince a majority of the members of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact. Good luck with that.
Grey water would normally get treated and then discharged into a river or lake or other local water body. If you evaporate it at a data center, then you break that local loop. It's really only different from using potable water in that you save a bit on the expense of fully treating it.
Grey water from where?
Using 1/4th the entire freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay makes it sound enormous. That's multiple major rivers for a bit over 30 million people.
I live near the Potomac and always figured the region was wet enough that water was not a concern. You have me rethinking that somewhat.
Where does your gasoline come from? Most of that usage is for the massive Exxon/etc facilities we have in Houston/Galveston to refine most of the fuel the entire nation uses.
Interesting! What do refineries use so much water for? I had no idea.
By and large cooling, just like a data center.
Because they're taking water from already parched regions, often pumping it out of the ground. Even if the water did come back locally as rain (it doesn't), it still makes it impossible for people to live off the same aquifers and water sources sustainably.
People are losing their minds in Wisconsin saying proposed data centers will drain lake michigan. I'm not kidding.
To be fair if you are evaporating water you could be losing some of it outside of the Great Lakes water basin, you are increasing the evaporation rate above what is natural for that area of land.
However the place for that to be least likely to be a problem would be Wisconsin with their evaporated water blowing east over top of the Great Lakes 90% of the time and any excess humidity will rain back down or slow down lake evaporation because the air over the lakes is already saturated with humidity most of the time.
But there still can be a problem if all that water is being pumped from deeper underground aquifers instead of surface water, so the source still matters. Those aquifers still should replenish fairly quickly in that area, but draining aquifers can happen in decades if the demand is there, while replenishment from non-surface aquifers can take hundreds of years even in water filled areas. And in certain ground compositions, underground aquifers can collapse and subside if the water is mostly drained, never again being able to hold that much water again and causing changes in surface topology.
The plans are for Lake Michigan adjacent cities. It's a complete non issue and probably the best place in the country to build them.
Hope they don't find out how much is lost naturally to evaporation each year..
The water isn’t gone but if it comes back as rain, it at least has to be cleaned again, since data centers probably don’t use raw rainwater for cooling.
It’s probably still not too bad but there’s at least some work done that’s „used up“ by letting tap water (or probably demineralized water used for cooling) evaporate.
The problem is that data centers use SO MUCH water... sure we humans let water evaporate, but this is a new source of water "waste" to the tune of nearing 2 billion gallons/year, just in Loudon County Virginia & connected water users [0].
When that water source is underground wells, this can take years (on the fast end) or decades (on the moderate end) to get back down. Look at California's water issue -- so many wells extracting water for farming has changed the land topography.
Also, when water 'comes back', it might come back in the ocean and not on land... reducing the available fresh water without desalination.
Data centers need the water to cool... but maybe there's room to find incentives for them to do so while making sure our water bills don't go up like our electric bills are because of the extra load they are putting on utilities.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/virginia_datacenter_w...
It doesn't come out a little hotter, it gets evaporated in cooling towers. Same result as any other water usage. Cooling towers can't use seawater either. Most datacenters are in places where fresh water is abundant anyway, but some are not.
Anyway agricultural water usage is way worse in California.
Agriculture is used to grow _food_.
Some of it, but then some AI is used to cure cancer.
But it doesn't have to happen in California.
For many places that could be the reality, however many data centers aren't pulling surface water for cooling even if it is available, they are pulling it from underground aquifers that can take hundreds of years or more to refill, but could be drained in just a few decades if enough water is pumped out. This is doubly problematic for desert climates that generally have even lower aquifer replenishment rates, with a few areas being questionable to draw from even using efficient underground irrigation lines growing human edible foods.
The rain doesn’t happen directly above where it evaporates. And “slightly warmer” waste water can have major ecological impacts, destroying native life in the lakes and rivers where the wastewater is ejected. Plus, if the water is taken away from underground aquifers that may not be refilling fast enough, or if it’s taking water from downstream users, that’s something to be concerned with.
I have also wondered this and came to a similar conclusion about the politics.
This whole time I've been wondering how it's possible that people don't realize how common evaporative cooling is for much larger buildings that are far more numerous than these data centers, and especially in dry climates where drought is common.
> Or an agricultural one that puts water in plants and then ships it off to some other region
Just like an agriculture, data center puts water to cool chips and ships token to some other reason?
I honestly don't know if you are an AI atroturfing bot. No, I am not being sarcastic. Given this is the top comment and there is no reply, here you go
For a pre-chewed eli5 overview, check this: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
A responsible human must always verify information. I DW as "secondary l" information source. For instance https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-ai-need-so-much-energy/video-...
tldr: chip immersion uses less water but is more expensive. Water evaporation is the opposite. Datacenters will use the cheapest they can get away with. Water is scarse; evaporated water is as unavailable as contaminated water. Read the information sources.
The explanation about chip immersion is wrong though. It's not a water-saving technique, it's for cooling dense racks more rapidly and maybe saving energy. That warm coolant still needs to be cooled before it goes back through the chips, likely the same way, evaporative cooling tower. Air cooling systems also involve a similar fluid loop, just doesn't go into the chips.
"Since the technology uses synthetic fluids, it requires significantly less water than other approaches." This is like saying that a new car radiator uses less water than an old water-based one, like yeah technically it requires water to work but you aren't boiling it away.
It does mention the real ways to use less water too, either chillers (which use way more power) or running in a colder climate.
I’m not a bot, but maybe I was too quick to not inspect my gut response. I guess I’ll look into it more, maybe this can be a learning experience.
FWIW the comment is just at +2 at the moment, I think it is just at the top of the thread because it is recent and has discussion.
> tldr: chip immersion uses less water but is more expensive. Water evaporation is the opposite. Datacenters will use the cheapest they can get away wi
This suggests a simple fix: charge more to the datacenters (not people) for the water, to make the other option competitive.
No need to throw baby with the ... erm, bathwater.
By that argument water use is never a bad thing since all water comes back as rain. The problem is that data centers need to use clean water, which has to be treated. On a local scale, a large data center could starve a community of potable water, even if the state-wide water use is very small.
Usually when people compare data center water usage to golf course water usage I feel a lot better about the whole thing.
Would it surprise you to find out that there are many people who are opposed to golf courses for the same reasons?
Compare it to alfalfa and you’ll be laughing your ass off at how much water alfalfa consumes.
~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.
That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.
One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.
Feed cows in places without the water and sun to grow this stuff locally. Which is tantamount to exporting water from the American West which will eventually be turned into a desert. We effectively can't be trusted to govern our natural resources more than 5 years out.
California’s alfalfa is primarily for export.
I’d recommend you read the following report: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease
Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Did you read the paper carefully? It's about pesticide use. (It's not especially plausible as epidemiological studies go, though I'm unsurprised if a better study finds a firmer correlation between pesticides and PD.)
Did you not read that the effect was directly tied to “Individuals living within water service areas” in my original comment? Yeah no shit it’s pesticides. They’re seeping into the water supply from the golf course runoff.
Datacenters expel water filled with all kinds of heavy metals and other kinds of toxic sludge. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
It should be pretty obvious the parallel I’m drawing here. Where’d you get your epidemiology PhD?
It is in fact not obvious what parallel you're drawing here. What parts of this study do you find especially credible, methodologically?
Where did you get your PHD?
That play works if you are in fact a PhD in a related field, but not if we're both reading the same study as laypersons and disputing its relevance and reliability.
What I suspect happened here is that you found this study by Googling for it, and forgot that it is in fact very easy to get a capsule summary of any published study posted on HN.
The data coming from the University of Calgary about the data centres they're building in Alberta, Canada seems to indicate that they're using evaporative cooling, which is very expensive water wise.
The bigger concern though, is the power requirements. Which are set to double or triple the energy use of the entire Province (analogous to a State in the US).
https://ucalgary.ca/sustainability/mobilizing-alberta/climat...
There are data centre projects underway that use their own natural gas generators: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/olds-mihta-askiy-data...
Air pollution, GHG and water use are concerns, but these projects will not dramatically increase the load on the electric grid.
Natural gas is cheap and abundant in Alberta, and the province (actually the whole country, via transfer payments) benefits financially from resource revenues from extracting the gas. So, these projects are generally an easy sell to the public.
I keep hearing about natural gas and on-site power for these data centres. I'll believe it when I see it.
There are already have a couple in Calgary and they're hooked directly to the grid. The cost of electricity for the city shot up at the same time. Also, there have been a few brownouts caused by them not being ready to handle late night draws from those data centres.
That's at least what I'm seeing. Though, admittedly, it's from older project articles. Maybe something has changed in recent months?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ai-data-centre-albert...
Did anyone find it weird that the author uses AI itself to perform the calculations? Seems like a very poor quality piece
For a more informed deep dive into data center water usage (albeit many months old): https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
> Alas, despite modern technologies and institutions, our human societies, technology, and understanding ultimately rely on 50,000-year old hardware (our brains!), which evolves slowly and mysteriously. Unavoidably, we work with individual and collective neural hardware limits.
this bit especially tells me the reader needs a pile of salt.
I stopped reading at the crappy ChatGPT comic that shows "water usage" as some pipes pouring water and others pumping it in. How trustworthy is the text going to be after that?
I don't find it weird, it's about what I'd expect from AI sycophants. They don't seem to realize that it comes off as not even being able to defend their own ideas.
A lot of confusion around AI water usage might stem from whether it's an open-loop or a closed-loop cooling system.
e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.
So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
A lot o the confusion around data centers is that these companies purposely hide this information from the public. We already know how damaging normal data centers are:
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
Citizens had to sue their town to force them to give up water usage, something Google was adamant about hiding from the public.
When there is no accountability, trust plummets. There is no reason to trust anything from these corpos or their pro-corpo rags.
A lot of us work for and do business with companies that purposefully hide information from the public.
That doesn't seem to be an unusual state of affairs at all; it instead seems like a very normal way of doing things.
Oh yeah it's totally normal for neoliberal America to fuck over the public at every opportunity for private corporate gain. Not going to disagree with that at all.
But if you think this is honestly a GOOD thing, you have deep anti-human sentiments.
No. That's not what I said, and you're quite clearly being disingenuously hyperbolic.
Let's calm down a bit and bring this back down to earth, shall we?
Suppose you buy your groceries from a company.
Do you have a right to inspect that company's books to evaluate things like their energy use and their water consumption?
Yes? No?
Should you have that right?
YES. I should be able to evaluate that, and many supply that. When I buy an iPhone I can see exactly what Apple's recycling and use of recycled materials looks like, for example. Environmental impact doesn't only happen within their walls, it hits us all and they have a responsibility to declare that for anyone to see, not just customers. That you think they should be able to do whatever they want behind closed doors and we all just have to suck it up is one of the reasons I'm glad to be old and not far from escaping this world of children who no longer give a shit about anything except self satisfaction.
> That you think they should be able to do whatever they want behind closed doors
I haven't stated an opinion here at all, nor have I defended anything. I've merely relayed some observations that I understand to be true, and I've asked some questions.
But I shall now allow myself to be opinionated: You doin' ok over there, bud? You seem to be attacking the choir.
To simplify things, "closed loop" shouldn't even be part of the discussion. Usually they just mean a closed-loop cooling system somewhere inside, either to directly cool machines (typically ML) or to cool air for air-cooled machines (standard). That's separate from how you eject the heat from the coolant to the environment. That's either cooling towers (like swamp cooler, uses water), chillers (like A/C, no water but more power), or passive air cooling (like car radiator, no water but only practical if very cold outside).
So you could have a closed-loop water system cooling your machines or chips, but still be consuming water to cool the coolant. And they will advertise this as "closed loop." Better to ask if they have a cooling tower.
Open loop cooling can work fine if they use greywater. The water isn’t potable anymore, but it goes into the sky and becomes clean again.
It’s all just a lack of imagination.
Only (mostly) water evaporate, salt and most contamination don't, so you get a brine that you must manage because otherwise it clog your heat exchangers and evaporation towers. Also, it must be returner to a river carefully to not kill all fish and life forms there.
Most of the confusion just stems from anti-DC advocates lying about water usage, not any specific technical details.
This image really helped me put it into perspective. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2032858292184117748
> AI concerns are speculative
There is ample evidence around the world of data centers causing extreme water crises [1].
Not a water expert but I find the focus on evaporation very confusing. Draining ground water and aquifers causes environmental degradation in itself and waste water from data centers can’t just be fed back into the water cycle?
1) https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-08-17/ais-backyar...
This is an AI generated article, with AI generated images, claiming that AI isn't a resource problem.
I’ve seen a tremendous amount of content about AI water usage, mostly from pro AI sources. The most common type is comparing AI to particularly water intensive agriculture.
The result is that now I think water usage should be taken into account when siting data centers. Great Lakes and eastern seaboard fine, maybe not as much in California or Arizona.
He really saves the best bit for last, doesn't he?
> my breathing in making the blog post above might well have evaporated more water than occurred (incrementally) from all four AI estimates.
Clearly his continued breathing is not as much of an "economically effective use of water" as AI. If clean water ever becomes a scarce resource in California, thankfully he's already done the ChatGPT queries needed to justify cutting back on 68-year-old Emeritus Distinguished Professors.
As my friends in Agriculture like to point out, most of the water isn't used at all, it goes right on down the river to the ocean. Ag is second, but less than 50%.
It depends on the river. IIRC the water of the Colorado is stolen 100%, mostly for agriculture. A few years ago I think a small leftover was let, so a tiny part of the river can reach the sea.
The bigger concern is more around the pollution of the gas turbines. Populations around the DC are going to see higher rates of Asthma, Respiratory diseases, Heart problems, and certain cancers.
A much more comprehensive article on this subject is here:
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
Discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45946966
I was really into Andy's blog when it first came out, but he might be doing the same motivated reasoning he complains about everyone else doing.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-n...
> The one remaining question: why the clean step change?
In the middle of this piece, he runs into a critical flaw in his reasoning and just shrugs it off.
I would not extrapolate California results to the rest of the country. Other regions like Northern Virginia or Dallas-Forth Worth dominate current and future data center load. They have significantly different water and land use trends. Of course agricultural water usage is higher in California- it's the top agricultural state in the country. And energy prices are much higher, resulting in a smaller data center presence. State regulations also determine water usage efficiency requirements. So it might differ in less regulated states like Texas.
One good way to save water is to use treated wastewater for cooling. xAI is building this kind of system in Memphis.[0] It'll connect to a nearby wastewater treatment plant and they'll need to build an additional treatment plant before the water can be used for cooling. It's a closed-loop system inside the data center, where they use clean water, and it connects to open-loop evaporative cooling towers with heat exchangers.
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-mem...
If data center water use is such a concern, why not require that data centers invest in closed-loop cooling systems? By closed-loop, I'm talking about re-condensing evaporated water and allowing the water to cool. Cooling the water would be more expensive in hotter environments, but still achievable. These data centers seem to have wild amounts of money for investment, why not just mandate conservation requirements?
> These data centers seem to have wild amounts of money for investment, why not just mandate conservation requirements
This IS the complaint.
We should just charge a fair price for water. Something that covers capital, operating, and decommissioning costs. No need to pass specific regulations or add legal complexity. It would solve itself. Imagine any other service saying "Oh no, we have too much demand, we need to make it illegal." Just put out bonds, and build up capacity.
For places with plenty of water, that makes sense. Capacity can be increased.
For places that don't have plenty of water, that becomes trickier: Capacity is finite.
Data center water use is in fact not a valid concern.
Condensing/cooling the water takes even more electricity though. So you're trading water savings for increased energy use. Maybe OK if it's all renewable, but in most areas it's not.
imo this is a pricing problem more than a cooling-design problem. datacenters get cheap clean water while locals pay for the pipes and grid upgrades.
Regulating AI? America would never!
The tradeoff is power vs water. Water is currently cheaper.
I often get side tracked into commenting on regular social media like Instagram and I'm somehow surprised over and over how poor critical thinking skills in the greater population. The zeitgeist of US politics is "this doesn't directly benefit me so this must be bad". According to the Instagram demographic, ALL industrial uses of water and electricity are bad because they "compete" with household use. The massive Agricultural industrial complex is actually OK because I like meat, almonds, etc. AI is bad because it doesn't make my job easier.
Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.
What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.
I find it deeply ironic that you accuse the public of lacking critical thinking about the externalities of agriculture but claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever. Demand for compute hardware has skyrocketed, and producing that hardware creates massive pollution from factories and mining. I shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe. To borrow your expression, you’d be more accurate in saying “this doesn’t directly harm me so it must be good”.
> claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever While running. Incurring a pollution penalty once in fungible location (i.e where mines are approved and "hopefully" managed responsibly) is better than incurring pollution proportional to the output (e.g. plastic and chemical waste).
> shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe.
Is rare earth mining specifically for semiconductor manufacturing actually a significant driver? My intuition is that rare earth and most raw material mining would be driven much more by EV car motors and batteries.
Certainly you can say all energy use is indirectly responsible for the pollution of the oil, solar, wind, etc. I don't disagree at all! I'm say in-addition to the pollution of raw inputs like energy - contemporary industries have additional and unavoidable side products.
> are earth mining harms millions around the globe.
Those mines are going to operate day after day because it's unfortunately the best economic opportunity in those areas. Those areas deserve our support to improve their socioeconomic realities but opposition to data centers in rich countries does not suddenly provide better opportunities to those regions.
Is it too much work to look-up some real numbers and enter them into a calculator?
Just what I think can solve a problem in my hometown after reading this - I live in Kolkata,India - I dont think we will ever have a data centre here - we still have a lot of water issues - but if building data centers somehow equates to economic prosperity and such stats are shown - probably the city of joy will again regain its glory.
I "like" how in their graphic agriculture and cities are both putting water into the lake, and only data centers are removing water from the lake.
The prompter should have redone this image a couple of times until they had all three actually draining the lake.
While the argument is probably right, the author may notice he's asking AI websites on AI water usage. Perhaps he should consult more neutral sources, at least to introduce the habit of critical thinking.
This blog post raises an interesting follow-up question: Why does it matter what the public thinks about "AI" water consumption
The water use problem is like maybe the 100th biggest risk due to AI, it's weird that in the minds of the most vocal anti-AI activists (with the exception of the Lighthaven/EA crowd) it's like the #1-#4 issue. Is it because water use is one of those morality sinks which is easy to understand compared to some of the other more subtle issues regarding AI proliferation?
This only considers water for cooling the DC. A LOT of water is needed for power generation.
U.S. power generation is the largest industrial user of water, withdrawing approximately 47.7 trillion gallons in 2021, mostly for cooling thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, natural gas).
From what I understand water usage critics are:
1. Tallying the total water consumption impact, embodied water (construction), operational water (cooling), indirect water (electricity generation), supply chain water, etc.
2. Mapping current water intensity onto AI growth forecasts through 2030+
And if you look at those things in combination, there are reasons to be alarmed.
> But AI will bring more important concerns, such as the end of human civilization
Who are these people who think AI will end civilization? Ya'll know it's just autocomplete and deepfakes, right? Maybe they need to read a book about the industrial revolution? It changed the world entirely, but it didn't end it.
My understanding so far is that water use in LLM data centers ranges from not much at all to more than a medium sized city. It always comes down to how one chooses to calculate it, and more fundamentally what story they're wanting to tell.
Gotta love statistics.
What about all the water used to generate electricity? You know human still boils water for electricity.
Ok how about golf courses? This AI is evil look at the water use, is obvious propaganda. It makes no sense to call out data center water use when something that’s purely an optional recreational use consumes 25 times the amount.
>Machines that Drink How has no one titled their article this? Baffled.
If AI used as much water as the public "think"(lets say as much as the hysteria suggests the public thinks) then governments would have raised rates on them and they would have reduced usage...
> Their water use is mostly for cooling needs from the heat produced from their electricity use.
You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:
> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-...
I ran 8 internal audits against my agent stack end-to-end, to figure out if I was destroying the planet. Turns out it uses 12x less energy over a 10minute snapshot when compared to youtube, instagram, facebook ect.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-int...
Asking chatbots for estimates of water usage and then taking their average is a great way to alienate your audience. It's embarrassing, as well.
What they don’t mention is that the water is being polluted by the datacenters. It’s not as simple as “water go into datacenter, water come out of datacenter”
Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
Upvoted. What makes me sad is that I had to read hundreds of comments on all kinds of arguments until you pointed to the contamination issue. Not that the AI statistics in the AI thread submitted helped critical investigation.
Even people who are against data centers have a misconception around the data center water problem. It leaves us vulnerable to counter arguments like those found in this article and makes the movement look bad.
That being said, I’m not too worried about it. I think it’s okay if your average person has this misconception, because at the end of the day they are correct that datacenters threaten their water supply. They might not have the mechanism right. The resultant skepticism might force hyperscalers to commit to water preservation.
If republicans and centrist dems didn’t run the show right now I would say regulation should be passed forcing datacenters to treat all water prior to expelling it back into the water supply, with a state funded test facility located on premise to make sure they’re doing it right.
And not to mention - and this is for the AI cheerleaders that actually read this far - the air pollution. Musk’s datacenter in Memphis is running on GAS GENERATORS. So in many cases the DCs are actually polluting the air as well as the water. In a poor and predominantly black neighborhood of course. It’s just absolutely disgusting and the backlash against this will be swift and harsh. Honest to God us tech people are no different from those at Dow chemical that dump(ed) metric shit tons of highly carcinogenic PFAS into countless rivers. I work in this industry. But I don’t have the ability to fool myself the way most of HN seems to.
Look over here! Not over there at grid infrastructure and generating capacity, or noise and pollution from on-site generators.
The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.
wouldn't it be great if we hadn't actively sabotaged grid capacity and development at every turn
Wouldn't it be great if residential rate payers didn't end up holding the bag for botched nuclear plant construction and cost over runs.
You can be against lying about water use and for being honest about additional electricity demand at the same time. You can't smear someone for rejecting falsehoods just because you have an unrelated complaint.
The Empire of AI book seriously did permanent damage on this talking point.
Annoying to see slop like this on the front page taking up people's attention. Resource utilization connected to new infrastructure that is planned to be scaled exponentially is clearly important to analyze. Instead of research and insight this post just facilitates ignorance on the topic.
c/o Jay Lund, Vice Director, Center for Watershed Engineering Distinguished Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Most people don't know AI uses water.
i believe it was like amount of water gold uses in the USA alone is 10x more than water used by AI globally
What does the public actually think?
> Jay Lund is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geography at the University of California – Davis. He is also a Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
I really love how he ends his bio:
“His 68-year-old hardware with 50,000-year-old architecture is enjoying and struggling with the promise, threats, and turbulence of the AI revolution.”
This article conflates agricultural use, which is not treated and is drawn directly from groundwater, rainfall, and rivers, with urban use, which is treated and much more expensive. I find it baffling that the person who put their name on this article would fail to make this critical distinction, given their credentials.
As a more complete title...
AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.
Both sides have dishonest reporting
This sounds like being concerned about the adverse health effects of a steak due to sugar.
Fantastic news!
Very insightful bullet points, ordered lists and grok tables! Articles like this are certainly a net benefit to society
what an incredible slop political cartoon around the first paragraph
This whole meme never made sense. Data centres are cooled with AC. Where the fuck is water supposed to be going?
So tired of these articles. Yes, it’s possible for them to use very little water. But naive comparisons to non-potable agricultural or other irrigation use or comparisons that don’t take into account growth rates of specific uses or local bottlenecks are useless.
Cool. Except. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas.
Agriculture feeds people, including people outside of California (California being a huge agricultural exporter to all the other states: find me a grocery store that doesn’t have California agricultural products on the shelves and I’ll Venmo you $5).
Cities are…people. Literally the most important use of water.
So far, AI seems to just put people out of work and enrich a small group of oligarchs who own the technology.
If tech companies want people to change their view away from my above statements above maybe they should spend less time moving to the far right and being hostile to regular people.
We already see that the public perceptions of AI is collapsing: https://www.highereddive.com/news/gen-z-ai-gallup-poll-negat...
Peter Thiel is out there building a military AI surveillance state and basically all the tech billionaires are turning MAGA and anti-democracy.
I don’t really care how much water AI uses, I’m not going to sit back and make excuses for billionaire assholes and their revenue toys. I don’t benefit from AI being embraced by society outside of stuff like cancer research (which was happening before LLMs took over the mainstream).
In reality, the most likely outcome is that I’ll be harmed by AI. I will be replaced by software and the billionaires who replaced me won’t exactly create a utopia, will they?
The author uses a measurement I'm not familiar with so I used AI to translate it.
>Using the broader initial AI water use estimate of 32,000 acre-ft/year to 290,000 acre-ft/year
Note : 1 acre-foot is approximately equal to 325,851 gallons.
AI : That estimate converts to approximately 10.4 billion to 94.5 billion gallons per year.
Ya 10 billion gallons of water (low estimate) is totally nothing. Thx for this informative blog post.
28.6 million gallons per day.
For perspective, 28 million gallons of water per day is roughly equivalent to what 93,000 households consume per day. There are ~130,000,000 households in the United States.
Everything is relative, 28.6m gallons per day is nothing.
Golf courses use nearly 100x more water per day than datacenters, nearly 2b gallons per day. [1]
Residential lawn water usage is ~9b gallons per day. [0]
0 - https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/docs/f...
1 - https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...
To be fair to people's objections - agriculture is significantly more important than AI model training when it comes to improving the average standard of living - and to be fair to model training a lot of the water usage in agriculture is used on extremely water inefficient crops.
Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord.
There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.
Marginal agricultural water use is alfalfa / nut farming in the desert and ethanol corn, not products consumers actually care about. Consumers aren't clamoring for E15 fuel over E10.
Consumers care greatly about the products that alfalfa is used to make.
I’m actually surprised it’s so low. That’s about 7 seconds of the Mississippi River at its exit per day. Maybe a week or two of alfalfa farming per year, or even less?
You could imagine running way more water, but I guess these racks are extremely dense.
Does it use more than zero? Then I hate it. Maybe we should try to calculate how much water online advertisements take.
one environmental concern down, hundreds to go! keep up guys!
I've always found it quite sad and cringeworthy when people talk about AI's water usage. The first thought that comes to my head is whether its even worth trying to talk the person out of their delusion, or just accept that they are lost and can't be helped.
I think people are giving the AI-water-use claims too much credibility. The idea that AI datacenters are heavy water users is trivial to refute, and was trivial to refute when it was first introduced. It should be written about in the same tone as one writes about ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Whether it is or isn't happens to be beside the point. It's water being removed from the system en masse for a non-essential function, i.e. other than sustaining life, while driving up the cost of other utilities.
If we're trying to deny the usage "tier," I'd argue we're being intentionally obtuse at worst and foolish at best.
I appreciate the data driven approach. The article is spot on, it's really hard to distinguish all the discourse with the reality. Things most people grew up with in the 70s had years of propaganda convincing the public they were a net positive to society.
Sidebar, I'm very curious to see where AI goes. Definitely not on the hype train. More curious than anything. This article was a breath of fresh air.
My conspiracy theory is the whole AI datacenter water consumption outrage is a psyop by state actors to worsen public sentiment around AI, so China and others can catch up. Obviously we should lessen the environmental impact of our technology, while considering it's relative impact vs benefit, especially compared to other technology, in this case in particular to other datacenter usage.
But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters.
Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?
Greater than $0 in cost of living increases for people living near these things is too much.
Are you saying any industry that brings in net new jobs with above median wages is bad? Or just ones with few employees and high additional property tax revenue?
When the new jobs number increases to four (or even three) digits people will take that more seriously.
Loudoun county generates ~1B USD from taxes annually from data centers. That's equivalent to 30k jobs paying 40k usd annually. Is that enough?
I'm concerned with the ones that create temporary jobs, few permanent ones, drive up water and electrical rates and then help deskill other industries.
How many jobs are created? And how many jobs were also lost because of AI? A few jobs created vs thousands or more lost isn't a positive.
> that brings in net new jobs
Ah yes, those invaluable tens of jobs created by DCs....
The economy is not a jobs program. Stop thinking about it that way. Think in terms of taxes generated instead.
But it was not my argument, was ot?
It wasn't mine. You sort of created it in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978872 .
Really, wasn't yours? I mean you literally used "net jobs created" as an argument ?
That part was not discussing data center jobs; it was asking cdrnsf if they'd object to other industries bringing in jobs that just happened to be above median wage (which would increase the COL for existing residents).
Well then, why would you ask them that in this context? Just out of interest and out of the topic context?
If we could magically guarantee that our [starry-eyed|gullible|treacherous] political leaders didn't give back most of those property taxes before the DC even broke ground...
What a strange thing to say. This is peak NIMBYism and I urge you to reconsider. Loudoun country as an example generates ~1B USD annually [1] from taxes through data centres. That's equivalent to paying an annual salary of $40,000 to around 30k people. That's a LOT.
Do you really not consider taxes before repeating this tired argument?
[1] https://www.loudoun.gov/DocumentCenter/View/219184/General-F...