> 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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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).
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 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...
> 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.
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.)
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.
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]
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.
> 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).
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.
- 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.
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"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Every year almost 600 million tonnes of methane are emitted in the atmosphere. Of these, about 60 percent originates from human activities. Agriculture contributes to nearly half of the global anthropogenic methane production, followed by fossil fuels and waste. The livestock sector is one of the greatest contributors of methane emissions, mainly produced through the natural digestive process of ruminants known as “enteric fermentation” and manure management practices. Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas that increases global temperature. To limit global warming by 2030, countries should reduce methane emissions, particularly from livestock, by 30 percent. FAO supports countries to mitigate methane emissions from livestock as part of their climate actions, while improving food security and livelihoods.
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.
> 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.
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?
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 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:
Closed-loop is not even part of the discussion, or shouldn't be. They're not even comparable pieces. The water is just how you cool the machines, as opposed to air cooling inside. Either way you need to eject the heat from the coolant to the environment somehow. That's either cooling towers (like swamp cooler, requires water and low humidity), chillers (like A/C, no water but more power), or passive air cooling (like car radiator, only works if 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.
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?
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%.
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.
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.
If we could magically guarantee that our [starry-eyes|gullible|treacherous] political leaders didn't give back most of those property taxes before the DC even broke ground...
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
> 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).
Agricultural water usage distribution prioritizes luxury consumption
Rice is not a luxury for most people. It’s a staple.
--Reserving this spot for someone who will state we must be vegans already and that AI will save the world--
(Not I. I disagree with both)
Loads of agricultural water usage in the western states is on totally optional stuff like beef and almonds
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...
[delayed]
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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 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...
> 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.
Usually when people compare data center water usage to golf course water usage I feel a lot better about the whole thing.
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.)
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.
This image really helped me put it into perspective. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2032858292184117748
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
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Slopulism is effective because people are idiots. Nothing to do with material conditions.
AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid...
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"
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
>Every year almost 600 million tonnes of methane are emitted in the atmosphere. Of these, about 60 percent originates from human activities. Agriculture contributes to nearly half of the global anthropogenic methane production, followed by fossil fuels and waste. The livestock sector is one of the greatest contributors of methane emissions, mainly produced through the natural digestive process of ruminants known as “enteric fermentation” and manure management practices. Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas that increases global temperature. To limit global warming by 2030, countries should reduce methane emissions, particularly from livestock, by 30 percent. FAO supports countries to mitigate methane emissions from livestock as part of their climate actions, while improving food security and livelihoods.
https://www.fao.org/in-action/enteric-methane/en/
While methane isn't CO2, what I believe we are talking is greenhouse gas :
>Methane is more than 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane
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.
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.
What about all the water used to generate electricity? You know human still boils water for electricity.
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
Did anyone find it weird that the author uses AI itself to perform the calculations? Seems like a very poor quality piece
I stopped reading at the crappy ChatGPT comic that shows "water usage" as pipes pouring water
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.
Data center water use is in fact not a valid concern.
The tradeoff is power vs water. Water is currently cheaper.
Regulating AI? America would never!
This is an AI generated article, with AI generated images, claiming that AI isn't a resource problem.
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 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.
Closed-loop is not even part of the discussion, or shouldn't be. They're not even comparable pieces. The water is just how you cool the machines, as opposed to air cooling inside. Either way you need to eject the heat from the coolant to the environment somehow. That's either cooling towers (like swamp cooler, requires water and low humidity), chillers (like A/C, no water but more power), or passive air cooling (like car radiator, only works if 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.
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.
Most of the confusion just stems from anti-DC advocates lying about water usage, not any specific technical details.
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?
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%.
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...
The Empire of AI book seriously did permanent damage on this talking point.
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.
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.
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 brings in net new jobs
Ah yes, those invaluable tens of jobs created by DCs....
If we could magically guarantee that our [starry-eyes|gullible|treacherous] political leaders didn't give back most of those property taxes before the DC even broke ground...
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...
Fantastic news!
Very insightful bullet points, ordered lists and grok tables! Articles like this are certainly a net benefit to society
> 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 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.
c/o Jay Lund, Vice Director, Center for Watershed Engineering Distinguished Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
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
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.