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0 pointsAransentin7mo ago0 comments

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone.

This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity.

What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

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27 comments · 6 top-level

fmbb7mo ago· 10 in thread

Depends on what the datacenters are used for.

AI has no utility.

Almonds make marzipan.

oompydoompy747mo ago

AI has way more utility than you are claiming and less utility than Sam Altman and the market would like us to believe. It’s okay to have a nuanced take.

simonw7mo ago

"AI has no utility" is a pretty wild claim to make in the tail end of 2025.

infecto7mo ago

Still surprised to see so many take this as such a hot claim. Is there hype, absolutely, is there value being driven also absolutely.

stavros7mo ago

Whenever I see someone say AI has no utility, I'm happy that I don't have to waste time in an argument against someone out of touch with reality.

2 more replies

BeFlatXIII7mo ago

It's like the smooth brains who still post "lol 6 fingers"

embedding-shape7mo ago

Well, I don't like marzipan, so both are useless? Or maybe different people find uses/utility from different things, what is trash for one person can be life saving for another, or just "better than not having it" (like you and Marzipan it seems).

roywiggins7mo ago

ok in that case you don't need to pick on water in particular, if it has no utility at all then literally any resource use is too much, so why bother insisting that water in particular is a problem? It's pretty energy intensive, eg.

ben_w7mo ago

Marzipan is fun, but useful?

AI is at least as useful as marzipan.

Der_Einzige7mo ago

Activated almonds create funko pops. I’d still take the data centers over the funko pops buying basedboys that almonds causes.

HumanOstrich7mo ago

AI has no utility _for you_ because you live in this bubble where you are so rabidly against it you will never allow yourself to acknowledge it has non-zero utility.

LPisGood7mo ago· 4 in thread

What does it mean to “use” water? In agriculture and in data centers my understanding is that water will go back to the sky and then rain down again. It’s not gone, so at most we’re losing the energy cost to process that water.

Etherlord877mo ago

The problem is that you take the water from the ground, and you let it evaporate, and then it returns to... Well to various places, including the ground, but the deeper you take the water from (drinking water can't be taken from the surface, and for technological reasons drinking water is used too) the more time it takes to replenish the aquifer - up to thousands of years!

Of course surface water availability can also be a serious problem.

tux37mo ago

So with the water used in datacenters. It's just a cooling loop, the output is hot water.

kachapopopow7mo ago

and water from datacenters goes where...? just disappears?

LPisGood7mo ago

No it’s largely the same situation I think. I was drawing a distinction between agricultural use and maybe some more heavy industrial uses while the water is polluted or otherwise rendered permanently unfit for other uses.

lynndotpy7mo ago· 3 in thread

Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production, either. Your example would be even more extreme if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle. Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year in the US.

The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years.

Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.

AgentME7mo ago

>Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use.

If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)

lynndotpy7mo ago

Yes, that's roughly what I said in my post. If we're doing a controlled economy and triaging for the health of the ecosystem, we'd start with feed for cattle, and almonds wouldn't be much further down on the list.

The contention with AI water use is that something like this is currently happening as local water supplies are being diverted for data-centers.

pixl977mo ago

>Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production,

Excellent, that means we can save massive amounts of water by stopping almond production in the western US.

didibus7mo ago· 2 in thread

Aren't Californian almonds like 80% of the world's production?

Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ?

I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples.

Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have cloud AI compute. It's personal, but I'd be more sad that I'd never get to experience the taste of an almond and all the cuisine that comes with it.

squeaky-clean7mo ago

> Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT

You've misread it. It's not compared to AI datacenters, it's every type of datacenter, for all types of computing.

In the future scenario you've laid out it wouldn't be cloud AI compute. You wouldn't be able to use HN or send email or pay with a credit card or play video games or stream video.

didibus7mo ago

But the recent complaints are specific about cloud AI compute no? And how it's driving the build out of all these new data-centers?

kajika917mo ago· 2 in thread

I'll take the almonds any day.

derektank7mo ago

Other people might have other preferences. Maybe we could have a price system where people can express their preferences by paying for things with money, providing more money to the product which is in greater demand?

hn_acc17mo ago

Sure.. Except some people / companies have so much more money, they can demand impractical things and pay above-market rates for them, causing all others to scramble to live day-to-day with the distorted market.

Tried buying a GPU lately?

LevGoldstein7mo ago

People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that doesn't really help the counter-argument.

Example article from a decade ago: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

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