16 ms·

US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

70 points by kuuuzya 23d ago

dtech 23d ago
So this isn't really a problem? That's like a small city.
bell-cot 23d ago
Context: 1 acre-foot, a usual unit of measure for agricultural water, is a bit under 1/3 of a million gallons. 17B gallons is about 52k acre-feet. Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert. The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A. Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no.
- thedougd 23d ago
  I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?
  - WarmWash 23d ago
    Well in agriculture the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of chemical runoff. In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.
    - etiennebausson 23d ago
      heat, too.
    - dgellow 23d ago
      The question is how much is returned to the original source. Given that the water is ~100% evaporated in the case of DCs it’s a genuine and reasonable question to ask
    - shimman 23d ago
      No, the water is extremely hot. It takes a massive amount of infrastructure before this water can be "released." Unless you are one of those massive polluters that think discharging extremely hot water into the ground is safe and not something that immediately kills the life it's dumped into.
  - myrmidon 23d ago
    At least ~30% of water is evaporated when you use it in agriculture (that is the whole point; plants typically don't go the the trouble of absorbing water just to pump it back into the ground). Even if you use such an extremely conservative ratio (and assume that all water used in datacenters is 100% evaporated away for cooling) the argument stands.
- RajT88 23d ago
  Most of those partisans have no idea what other sources of water consumption are by magnitude. They seem to quote any number as if it is a lot. A billion gallons is a lot. 500000 gallons is not a lot.
  - zug_zug 23d ago
    Each datacenter uses as much water as 1,000 homes. You're welcome to put such resource constraints in your own local community if you don't care about the increased demand.
    - otterley 23d ago
      On the other hand, many homes could mothballing a misplaced farm provide water for? As far as I know, there's not a single place in the world where someone went without water to cook, drink, or bathe because a data center consumed it.
    - oklahomasports 23d ago
      Completely non responsive
    - RajT88 23d ago
      That is a number that gets quoted, but I just ran the latest numbers for my local city. A couple of dozen planned data centers, with an estimated combined use of 160k gallons per day. Apparently the average household uses 300 gallons a day, which seems insane to me. I guess a lot of people water their lawns. That gets us to a mere 23 households per data center. Even with 100 gallons per day per household or less, the local data centers are not at 1000 households per data center. And where I live, water is not a concern. They are building a pipe out from Lake Michigan, which has been in the works now for 10 years. That primarily gets the tri-city area off of the aquifers which have been drained at an unsustainable rate for the last 100 years. If I lived along the Colorado river system, that's a different discussion.
      - otterley 23d ago
- cma 23d ago
  Golf courses use about 1.63 million acre feet, about 32X more, some of that probably reenters watersheds and aquifers, not necessarily great with fertilizer runoff. But they pose lower risk of human extinction, so have that going for them.
- myrmidon 23d ago
  Completely agree. Specifically: If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns. So don't push it.
  - dgellow 23d ago
    It’s more nuanced, the water consumption can be a real local problem. The evaporated water doesn’t necessarily come back to the original source, and if the water supply was already stressed you’re adding even more pressure to it. You have to look about the actual details, like all arguments about resource consumption
    - roenxi 23d ago
      Yeah, but the anti-datacentre people won't care about that. That is an issue for local people and specific cases. Myrmidon isn't addressing the comment at people who have actual local issues with water issues; it was advice for the partisans.
    - theultdev 23d ago
      You'd have to look locally at individual datacenter projects then and not be against all of them. If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry. But I just don't see that happening. Noone is going without water because of datacenters. Noone is going without water other than people in California who get there's stolen from farms. That's a real issue, not a hypothetical.
      - dgellow 23d ago
        Correct, yes, aggregate numbers aren’t too meaningful. I mentioned it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434170 Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them
whycome 23d ago
What does it mean to be consumed in this context? After used for cooling isn’t it clean enough for drink and other uses? Can’t it go back into other systems? Can’t it be used for agriculture?
- ziofill 23d ago
  Exactly. Is that figure about the water 'flowing' through the datacenter? I want to believe they would not just dump it after use.
- elil17 23d ago
  This refers to water that is evaporated for cooling of both the datacenters themselves and the power plants that give them electricity. The remaining water after evaporation is so full of minerals that it has to be discharged as sewage. This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.
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- zug_zug 23d ago
  "consumed" means it was used for evaporated cooling and let off into the atmosphere. It's obviously a resource that replenishes, but wells replenish at a limited rate [and can run dry] so it's not a negligible issue. Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.
  - dgellow 23d ago
    There is also the issue that evaporated water doesn’t necessarily go back to the original water source
  - quickthrowman 23d ago
fridental 23d ago
What happens with the water in the DC after it has been consumed?
- elil17 23d ago
  Well it is primarily evaporated into the air. It rains down somewhere, often over the ocean.
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- kuuuzya 23d ago
  It could be infinite, but yes, in the end - vaporating
- theultdev 23d ago
  a little evaps, goes back into the water cycle. non-issue, chinese propaganda to get us to slow down. unfortunately some people parrot it, but most are smart enough to know it's bs. you'd think they would want to shutdown golf courses first, it's pure leisure and much more water, but it's not about that :)
  - elil17 23d ago
    A little evaps? It's like 80%
    - theultdev 23d ago
      The worst designs evap up to 80%. New designs use closed-loop system where very none to little evaps (0-6%) depending on the system. Many designs in-between with air cooling, hybrid, etc. Still a non-issue, it's going back into the water cycle. Any water issue would be specific to the municipality, it's not a national issue, nor is it an issue specific to datacenters, it's true for anything being built in the town (golf courses, power plants, etc.)
avalys 23d ago
This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people. However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.
- deleted 23d ago
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- dgellow 23d ago
  They use closed loop systems. That reduces the water consumption on-site, but you still need to move the energy out of the DC, which requires a lot of energy. That extra energy itself is likely produced by upstream power plants evaporating water. In practice you mostly move the consumption upstream.
- sokoloff 23d ago
  With regards to evaporative cooled DCs (either primarily cooled that way or assisted some of the time): Imagine an air conditioner that instead of requiring energy to drive the compressor to make the phase change work, all the phase change was provided by taking in liquid water and evaporating it off as vapor, taking the latent heat of vaporization (2257 kJ/kg or 970 BTU/lb) with it.
- elil17 23d ago
  People have always used a closed loop to move heat in and out of the data hall - but something has to keep that closed loop cool. That's often a cooling tower which uses evaporating water to reject heat into the air in a way that's very energy efficient. Additionally, the power plants which supply electricity to the data centers have the same cooling problem. They also typically use cooling towers. It's not dishonest at all. Datacenters and fossil fuel power plants are absolutely evaporating fresh water for cooling. The piece that's missing from that discussion is that it helps them use less electricity.
- tyjen 23d ago
  I don't even know who owns forgeeks.net. They're only a couple months old and is disseminated by a new HN account. Some of the "author" social media links appear AI generated. Red flags galore. Wouldn't surprise me if it was bankrolled by bad actors and/or a website created/operated by AI agents.
thevinter 23d ago
Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless. Annual withdrawals (2015) - Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal - Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal - Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal - Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal - Aquaculture: ~2.76 trillion gal - Mining: ~1.46 trillion gal - Livestock: ~730 billion gal - Total: ~117.5 trillion gal (322 Bgal/day) Source: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015: U.S. Geological Survey Circular - https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441 https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441
- paxys 23d ago
  Almond farming - ~1.5 trillion gal (1.1 gal per almond)
  - shimman 23d ago
    I value almonds more than LLM slop.
    - dgellow 23d ago
      I hate almonds and agree with you
    - Marha01 23d ago
      I hate almonds and love LLMs.
    - letmevoteplease 23d ago
      I think most of the people who act like this are secretly using ChatGPT like a Republican on Grindr.
      - shimman 23d ago
        Yes I use LLMs at work because I'm "highly encouraged" to as a condition to keep my job. All I see is more paying customers finding more bugs and having a worse experience using our products.
zachwill 23d ago
One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water. It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists. There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.
- shimman 23d ago
  If you want to play these stupid games how much water did you think was used to make the concrete for the data centers? Or how much water was used to cool the steel? How much water did all the workers drink while building the data center? How much water did they use to build all those GPUs? Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the delusional fantasies of the tech elite (all of which hold deeply anti-human + anti-democratic views).
  - tester756 23d ago
    >Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. Let's do not act as if there wasnt other food, a lot of it actually. Meanwhile LLMs aren't that easy to replace, they're biggest human achievement up to date.
    - deaton 23d ago
      Are they? What has gotten better because of LLMs?
      - tester756 23d ago
        Search e.g
        ndsipa_pomu 23d ago
        Strongly disagree. Now when I use an internet search, the top answer is an AI guess/approximation to the result and can be completely inaccurate. I have to ignore that and move onto the traditional results and hope that they aren't A.I. slop websites. LLMs have degraded the internet and search.
slibhb 23d ago
Lots of places in the US have plentiful water. Don't build data centers where there's a lack of water! And it's a dead horse at this point, but we don't need to be growing almonds in CA. If you actually care about water use, focus on that. Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.
krunck 23d ago
Potable well water should NEVER be used for such purposes. Aquifers recharge at a rate far lower than industry wants to pull from them. At some point potable water for humans will run out. If you're using water just to evaporate it for cooling then use surface water.
- elil17 23d ago
  Using water for cooling significantly reduces cooling energy use. The decision of whether to use dry, evaporative, or hybrid cooling approaches should be driven by the specific water availability in the area where the cooling process is to be used. Many regions do have enough water to support evaporative cooling. When water is available, using it is prudent because it saves so much electricity. Using surface water is not a practical approach for most cases because the process would need to be built next to a river or lake - there is limited industrial real estate in these areas.
goalieca 23d ago
I’ll not dance around it. It seems like most people don’t like the inputs or outputs to this massive generational endeavour.
shimman 23d ago
It's weird how all these statistics could end if the owners of these data centers would just simply release the numbers for the public to learn from. Instead they are keeping these figures private and we have people trying to best-estimate the reality. Mostly for reasons we all understand: true figures would cause an even larger public backlash. Fun fact, citizens of The Dalles, OR had to sue their own government to get them to release numbers on how much Google data centers were consuming (info Google stipulated should be kept "proprietary"): https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles-settles-public-records-lawsuit-over-googles-data-centers-will-disclose-water-use.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
imglorp 23d ago
Is anybody working on using all this waste heat for desalination? I think cold seawater can be used for the external loop, through a heat exchanger where it would meet the heated pure water from the internal cooling loops. This would cause evaporation of the salt water which could be captured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Multi-stage_flash_distillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Multi-stage_flash...
- elil17 23d ago
  Waste heat from data centers is significantly below the temperature that desalination systems typically use. While a desalination system could theoretically use data center waste heat, it would require far higher capital costs than other desalination systems.
  - imglorp 23d ago
    I see, good point. One page over, there does appear to be a low temperature process which specifically calls out using waste heat. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0011916499000454 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00119...
    - elil17 21d ago
      It's possible, just not economical
- antisthenes 23d ago
  That would require building data centers next to where salt water is or energy used for pumping will eat any savings from using waste heat.
delichon 23d ago
Support for data centers jumps a net 31 points after voters are told modern facilities can reuse the same cooling water for up to 10 years, new poll finds. -- https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2092209623583404461 https://www.raineycenter.org/polling/data-centers-voters-are-persuadable-but-they-want-accountability-and-clean-energy https://www.raineycenter.org/polling/data-centers-voters-are... For a closed loop cooling project: Fluid renewal occurs only every 7–15 years and is performed in a fully contained process that meets state and federal environmental standards. This design ensures zero water withdrawal, zero discharge, and continuous operation — fully aligned with TeraWulf’s commitment to sustainable digital infrastructure. -- https://www.lakemarinerdata.com/closed-loop-cooling
- elil17 23d ago
  Would support still jump if voters were told that cooling towers which don't use water need to use significantly more electricity instead?
- utopiah 23d ago
  > modern facilities can reuse Can, but do they? Feels a bit like Musk's Colossus that "could" use nuclear power but has been running on "temporary" natural-gas turbines for years now.
  - KennyBlanken 23d ago
    Nope, because dry cooling uses much more power. Latent heat of evaporation is "free" work.
Vvector 23d ago
An acre of alfalfa is typically irrigated at 5.5 AF per year. The standard center pivot field is 130 acres ~ 700 AF of irrigation, to grow alfalfa to ship overseas. Converting to gallons, 210 million gallons, for one field. 80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage. USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.
adolph 23d ago
The article source for the 17B gallons is a Congressional Research Service report and its source is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. Both are interesting reads. The 17B number is an estimate. Here are some of the inputs: * reported numbers of server deliveries * power draw per server * average utilization based on various workloads, including a Llama 70B 8 node training run * mix of data center cooling types * do math to get to 66B liters, which rounds down to 17B galoons 0. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057#fn10 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057#fn10 1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energy-usage-report https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energ...
KennyBlanken 23d ago
Article title is extremely misleading. These are figures from 2023 - almost three years old now, and since then US datacenter power consumption has doubled.
jandrewrogers 23d ago
Now do the amount of water required for subsidized corn ethanol. 30 million acres, trillions of gallons of water, and almost no redeeming value.
1vuio0pswjnm7 23d ago
Again, defensive HN commenters respond to facts about water consumption by citing other sources of water consumption But fail to consider that "AI" adds to those sources and raises total water consupmtion Is total water consumption important Perhaps the comparision that readers will make is not (a) existing non-"AI" water consumption versus "AI" water consumption but (b) total water consumption without the additonal "AI" data centers versus total water consumption with additional "AI" data centers. IOW, "before" versus "after" Will readers ignore (b) and only think about (a) It's the same response from HN commenters every time: compare "AI" data centers to some other water consuming activity
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 22d ago
  *additional
- preg_match 22d ago
  The rise in meat consumption in the past year is already double the TOTAL data center consumption of water. Look at that very carefully - the few percentage points rise in meat consumption consumes more water than all data centers in the entire country. When it comes to the rise of total water consumption like you’re talking about, data centers are a drop in the bucket. Truly negligible.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 22d ago
  To be clear, referencing other sources of water consumption is sleight of hand, a well-recognised diversionary tactic It's like when some Silicon Valley company is breaking the law and HN commenters attempt to defend/excuse the behaviour by pointing at other offenders. This is a juvenile response Something like "See, they do it, too." or "They need to investigate [not a "tech" company] first." If the amount of water used by "AI" data centers was "negligible" then, one might expect, "AI" companies would be transparent about water usage instead of forcing the public to estimate
_DeadFred_ 22d ago
Wild to see pro-AI datacenter people pushing the vegetarian narrative. For the last 50 years people have found the whole vegetarian narrative annoying (even to those of us who have been vegetarian). Way to pick like the worst positions. Anti-human, anti-jobs, and now (newly added) and preaching to people upset that they should be a vegetarian? For being the smartest people you are horrible at understanding people.

70 points by kuuuzya 23d ago

dtech 23d ago

So this isn't really a problem? That's like a small city.

Context: 1 acre-foot, a usual unit of measure for agricultural water, is a bit under 1/3 of a million gallons. 17B gallons is about 52k acre-feet. Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert. The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A. Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no.

thedougd 23d ago
I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?
- WarmWash 23d ago
  Well in agriculture the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of chemical runoff. In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.
  - etiennebausson 23d ago
    heat, too.
  - dgellow 23d ago
    The question is how much is returned to the original source. Given that the water is ~100% evaporated in the case of DCs it’s a genuine and reasonable question to ask
  - shimman 23d ago
    No, the water is extremely hot. It takes a massive amount of infrastructure before this water can be "released." Unless you are one of those massive polluters that think discharging extremely hot water into the ground is safe and not something that immediately kills the life it's dumped into.
- myrmidon 23d ago
  At least ~30% of water is evaporated when you use it in agriculture (that is the whole point; plants typically don't go the the trouble of absorbing water just to pump it back into the ground). Even if you use such an extremely conservative ratio (and assume that all water used in datacenters is 100% evaporated away for cooling) the argument stands.
RajT88 23d ago
Most of those partisans have no idea what other sources of water consumption are by magnitude. They seem to quote any number as if it is a lot. A billion gallons is a lot. 500000 gallons is not a lot.
- zug_zug 23d ago
  Each datacenter uses as much water as 1,000 homes. You're welcome to put such resource constraints in your own local community if you don't care about the increased demand.
  - otterley 23d ago
    On the other hand, many homes could mothballing a misplaced farm provide water for? As far as I know, there's not a single place in the world where someone went without water to cook, drink, or bathe because a data center consumed it.
  - oklahomasports 23d ago
    Completely non responsive
  - RajT88 23d ago
    That is a number that gets quoted, but I just ran the latest numbers for my local city. A couple of dozen planned data centers, with an estimated combined use of 160k gallons per day. Apparently the average household uses 300 gallons a day, which seems insane to me. I guess a lot of people water their lawns. That gets us to a mere 23 households per data center. Even with 100 gallons per day per household or less, the local data centers are not at 1000 households per data center. And where I live, water is not a concern. They are building a pipe out from Lake Michigan, which has been in the works now for 10 years. That primarily gets the tri-city area off of the aquifers which have been drained at an unsustainable rate for the last 100 years. If I lived along the Colorado river system, that's a different discussion.
    - otterley 23d ago
cma 23d ago
Golf courses use about 1.63 million acre feet, about 32X more, some of that probably reenters watersheds and aquifers, not necessarily great with fertilizer runoff. But they pose lower risk of human extinction, so have that going for them.
myrmidon 23d ago
Completely agree. Specifically: If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns. So don't push it.
- dgellow 23d ago
  It’s more nuanced, the water consumption can be a real local problem. The evaporated water doesn’t necessarily come back to the original source, and if the water supply was already stressed you’re adding even more pressure to it. You have to look about the actual details, like all arguments about resource consumption
  - roenxi 23d ago
    Yeah, but the anti-datacentre people won't care about that. That is an issue for local people and specific cases. Myrmidon isn't addressing the comment at people who have actual local issues with water issues; it was advice for the partisans.
  - theultdev 23d ago
    You'd have to look locally at individual datacenter projects then and not be against all of them. If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry. But I just don't see that happening. Noone is going without water because of datacenters. Noone is going without water other than people in California who get there's stolen from farms. That's a real issue, not a hypothetical.
    - dgellow 23d ago
      Correct, yes, aggregate numbers aren’t too meaningful. I mentioned it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434170 Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them

whycome 23d ago

What does it mean to be consumed in this context? After used for cooling isn’t it clean enough for drink and other uses? Can’t it go back into other systems? Can’t it be used for agriculture?

ziofill 23d ago
Exactly. Is that figure about the water 'flowing' through the datacenter? I want to believe they would not just dump it after use.
elil17 23d ago
This refers to water that is evaporated for cooling of both the datacenters themselves and the power plants that give them electricity. The remaining water after evaporation is so full of minerals that it has to be discharged as sewage. This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.
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zug_zug 23d ago
"consumed" means it was used for evaporated cooling and let off into the atmosphere. It's obviously a resource that replenishes, but wells replenish at a limited rate [and can run dry] so it's not a negligible issue. Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.
- dgellow 23d ago
  There is also the issue that evaporated water doesn’t necessarily go back to the original water source
- quickthrowman 23d ago

fridental 23d ago

What happens with the water in the DC after it has been consumed?

elil17 23d ago
Well it is primarily evaporated into the air. It rains down somewhere, often over the ocean.
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kuuuzya 23d ago
It could be infinite, but yes, in the end - vaporating
theultdev 23d ago
a little evaps, goes back into the water cycle. non-issue, chinese propaganda to get us to slow down. unfortunately some people parrot it, but most are smart enough to know it's bs. you'd think they would want to shutdown golf courses first, it's pure leisure and much more water, but it's not about that :)
- elil17 23d ago
  A little evaps? It's like 80%
  - theultdev 23d ago
    The worst designs evap up to 80%. New designs use closed-loop system where very none to little evaps (0-6%) depending on the system. Many designs in-between with air cooling, hybrid, etc. Still a non-issue, it's going back into the water cycle. Any water issue would be specific to the municipality, it's not a national issue, nor is it an issue specific to datacenters, it's true for anything being built in the town (golf courses, power plants, etc.)

avalys 23d ago

This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people. However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.

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dgellow 23d ago
They use closed loop systems. That reduces the water consumption on-site, but you still need to move the energy out of the DC, which requires a lot of energy. That extra energy itself is likely produced by upstream power plants evaporating water. In practice you mostly move the consumption upstream.
sokoloff 23d ago
With regards to evaporative cooled DCs (either primarily cooled that way or assisted some of the time): Imagine an air conditioner that instead of requiring energy to drive the compressor to make the phase change work, all the phase change was provided by taking in liquid water and evaporating it off as vapor, taking the latent heat of vaporization (2257 kJ/kg or 970 BTU/lb) with it.
elil17 23d ago
People have always used a closed loop to move heat in and out of the data hall - but something has to keep that closed loop cool. That's often a cooling tower which uses evaporating water to reject heat into the air in a way that's very energy efficient. Additionally, the power plants which supply electricity to the data centers have the same cooling problem. They also typically use cooling towers. It's not dishonest at all. Datacenters and fossil fuel power plants are absolutely evaporating fresh water for cooling. The piece that's missing from that discussion is that it helps them use less electricity.
tyjen 23d ago
I don't even know who owns forgeeks.net. They're only a couple months old and is disseminated by a new HN account. Some of the "author" social media links appear AI generated. Red flags galore. Wouldn't surprise me if it was bankrolled by bad actors and/or a website created/operated by AI agents.

thevinter 23d ago

Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless. Annual withdrawals (2015) - Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal - Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal - Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal - Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal - Aquaculture: ~2.76 trillion gal - Mining: ~1.46 trillion gal - Livestock: ~730 billion gal - Total: ~117.5 trillion gal (322 Bgal/day) Source: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015: U.S. Geological Survey Circular - https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441 https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441

paxys 23d ago
Almond farming - ~1.5 trillion gal (1.1 gal per almond)
- shimman 23d ago
  I value almonds more than LLM slop.
  - dgellow 23d ago
    I hate almonds and agree with you
  - Marha01 23d ago
    I hate almonds and love LLMs.
  - letmevoteplease 23d ago
    I think most of the people who act like this are secretly using ChatGPT like a Republican on Grindr.
    - shimman 23d ago
      Yes I use LLMs at work because I'm "highly encouraged" to as a condition to keep my job. All I see is more paying customers finding more bugs and having a worse experience using our products.

zachwill 23d ago

One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water. It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists. There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.

shimman 23d ago
If you want to play these stupid games how much water did you think was used to make the concrete for the data centers? Or how much water was used to cool the steel? How much water did all the workers drink while building the data center? How much water did they use to build all those GPUs? Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the delusional fantasies of the tech elite (all of which hold deeply anti-human + anti-democratic views).
- tester756 23d ago
  >Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. Let's do not act as if there wasnt other food, a lot of it actually. Meanwhile LLMs aren't that easy to replace, they're biggest human achievement up to date.
  - deaton 23d ago
    Are they? What has gotten better because of LLMs?
    - tester756 23d ago
      Search e.g
      - ndsipa_pomu 23d ago
        Strongly disagree. Now when I use an internet search, the top answer is an AI guess/approximation to the result and can be completely inaccurate. I have to ignore that and move onto the traditional results and hope that they aren't A.I. slop websites. LLMs have degraded the internet and search.

slibhb 23d ago

Lots of places in the US have plentiful water. Don't build data centers where there's a lack of water! And it's a dead horse at this point, but we don't need to be growing almonds in CA. If you actually care about water use, focus on that. Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.

krunck 23d ago

Potable well water should NEVER be used for such purposes. Aquifers recharge at a rate far lower than industry wants to pull from them. At some point potable water for humans will run out. If you're using water just to evaporate it for cooling then use surface water.

elil17 23d ago
Using water for cooling significantly reduces cooling energy use. The decision of whether to use dry, evaporative, or hybrid cooling approaches should be driven by the specific water availability in the area where the cooling process is to be used. Many regions do have enough water to support evaporative cooling. When water is available, using it is prudent because it saves so much electricity. Using surface water is not a practical approach for most cases because the process would need to be built next to a river or lake - there is limited industrial real estate in these areas.

goalieca 23d ago

I’ll not dance around it. It seems like most people don’t like the inputs or outputs to this massive generational endeavour.

shimman 23d ago

It's weird how all these statistics could end if the owners of these data centers would just simply release the numbers for the public to learn from. Instead they are keeping these figures private and we have people trying to best-estimate the reality. Mostly for reasons we all understand: true figures would cause an even larger public backlash. Fun fact, citizens of The Dalles, OR had to sue their own government to get them to release numbers on how much Google data centers were consuming (info Google stipulated should be kept "proprietary"): https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles-settles-public-records-lawsuit-over-googles-data-centers-will-disclose-water-use.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...

imglorp 23d ago

Is anybody working on using all this waste heat for desalination? I think cold seawater can be used for the external loop, through a heat exchanger where it would meet the heated pure water from the internal cooling loops. This would cause evaporation of the salt water which could be captured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Multi-stage_flash_distillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Multi-stage_flash...

elil17 23d ago
Waste heat from data centers is significantly below the temperature that desalination systems typically use. While a desalination system could theoretically use data center waste heat, it would require far higher capital costs than other desalination systems.
- imglorp 23d ago
  I see, good point. One page over, there does appear to be a low temperature process which specifically calls out using waste heat. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0011916499000454 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00119...
  - elil17 21d ago
    It's possible, just not economical
antisthenes 23d ago
That would require building data centers next to where salt water is or energy used for pumping will eat any savings from using waste heat.

delichon 23d ago

Support for data centers jumps a net 31 points after voters are told modern facilities can reuse the same cooling water for up to 10 years, new poll finds. -- https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2092209623583404461 https://www.raineycenter.org/polling/data-centers-voters-are-persuadable-but-they-want-accountability-and-clean-energy https://www.raineycenter.org/polling/data-centers-voters-are... For a closed loop cooling project: Fluid renewal occurs only every 7–15 years and is performed in a fully contained process that meets state and federal environmental standards. This design ensures zero water withdrawal, zero discharge, and continuous operation — fully aligned with TeraWulf’s commitment to sustainable digital infrastructure. -- https://www.lakemarinerdata.com/closed-loop-cooling

elil17 23d ago
Would support still jump if voters were told that cooling towers which don't use water need to use significantly more electricity instead?
utopiah 23d ago
> modern facilities can reuse Can, but do they? Feels a bit like Musk's Colossus that "could" use nuclear power but has been running on "temporary" natural-gas turbines for years now.
- KennyBlanken 23d ago
  Nope, because dry cooling uses much more power. Latent heat of evaporation is "free" work.

Vvector 23d ago

An acre of alfalfa is typically irrigated at 5.5 AF per year. The standard center pivot field is 130 acres ~ 700 AF of irrigation, to grow alfalfa to ship overseas. Converting to gallons, 210 million gallons, for one field. 80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage. USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.

adolph 23d ago

The article source for the 17B gallons is a Congressional Research Service report and its source is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. Both are interesting reads. The 17B number is an estimate. Here are some of the inputs: * reported numbers of server deliveries * power draw per server * average utilization based on various workloads, including a Llama 70B 8 node training run * mix of data center cooling types * do math to get to 66B liters, which rounds down to 17B galoons 0. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057#fn10 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057#fn10 1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energy-usage-report https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energ...

KennyBlanken 23d ago

Article title is extremely misleading. These are figures from 2023 - almost three years old now, and since then US datacenter power consumption has doubled.

jandrewrogers 23d ago

Now do the amount of water required for subsidized corn ethanol. 30 million acres, trillions of gallons of water, and almost no redeeming value.

1vuio0pswjnm7 23d ago

Again, defensive HN commenters respond to facts about water consumption by citing other sources of water consumption But fail to consider that "AI" adds to those sources and raises total water consupmtion Is total water consumption important Perhaps the comparision that readers will make is not (a) existing non-"AI" water consumption versus "AI" water consumption but (b) total water consumption without the additonal "AI" data centers versus total water consumption with additional "AI" data centers. IOW, "before" versus "after" Will readers ignore (b) and only think about (a) It's the same response from HN commenters every time: compare "AI" data centers to some other water consuming activity

1vuio0pswjnm7 22d ago
*additional
preg_match 22d ago
The rise in meat consumption in the past year is already double the TOTAL data center consumption of water. Look at that very carefully - the few percentage points rise in meat consumption consumes more water than all data centers in the entire country. When it comes to the rise of total water consumption like you’re talking about, data centers are a drop in the bucket. Truly negligible.
1vuio0pswjnm7 22d ago
To be clear, referencing other sources of water consumption is sleight of hand, a well-recognised diversionary tactic It's like when some Silicon Valley company is breaking the law and HN commenters attempt to defend/excuse the behaviour by pointing at other offenders. This is a juvenile response Something like "See, they do it, too." or "They need to investigate [not a "tech" company] first." If the amount of water used by "AI" data centers was "negligible" then, one might expect, "AI" companies would be transparent about water usage instead of forcing the public to estimate

_DeadFred_ 22d ago

Wild to see pro-AI datacenter people pushing the vegetarian narrative. For the last 50 years people have found the whole vegetarian narrative annoying (even to those of us who have been vegetarian). Way to pick like the worst positions. Anti-human, anti-jobs, and now (newly added) and preaching to people upset that they should be a vegetarian? For being the smartest people you are horrible at understanding people.