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.
Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.
The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect.
It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage.
Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.
The problem is that water isn't traded on a normal market at all. Lots of people have historical water rights and pay nearly nothing for their water use. There's byzantine regulation and many have the right to use for some purpose on their land but not to resell, so the market cannot allocate to more efficient use.
If you just let the 101 level solution actually work, water prices will rise until inefficient uses like water-intensive agriculture (not even all crops!) are pushed out. Urban users easily outbid almost all agricultural use, even at what any person would consider dirt cheap prices. For example, desalinated water, which is considered expensive for agriculture, can be 40 cents per cubic meter of water. That's a lot of water! Usually the last mile of urban water delivery costs more than that.
The amount required to satisfy all urban use, including water hungry lawns etc, and datacenters, corresponds to a very minor reduction in agriculture. Perhaps even just changing which crop is grown or switching irrigation techniques.
Charging more to higher users, price discrimination, causes several problems. First, it creates an incentive to cheat. I'm not using all this water myself, its for this whole group of people who "live" here. Don't allow this kind of spreading (somehow...)? Now you actually screw any business or institution that serves a lot of people. A farm produces food for thousands- do they count as one user? A park uses much more water than a garden but serves many more people. Whatever framework you create will require another bureaucracy to run. Lobbyists will find or insert loopholes for their friends.
The heavy users actually improve the system robustness, in both electricity and water. Their higher demand pays for more supply infrastructure, which itself often benefits from economies of scale, and in a shortage they may even be more responsive to price increases due to their high use.
We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on.
Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
1. You're thirsty and need a sip of water? That should be free
2. You're an household and use water? That should cost progressively more the more you use if you use more than typically needed
3. Your business model requires you to evaporate every last drop of water in a desert region? That should be so prohibitively expensive that your business model does not work
This is basically just a low amount threshold and a exponential function. You just need to select the exponent.
Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.
That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.
People need to work and not everyone can be a tech bro keyboard warrior. Hell apparently the end game is to replace IT workers with AI!
Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.
How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at.
1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.
So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.
> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’
> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.
So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-dat...
[2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-cente...
Also, the fact that the AI hyperscalers will sue to keep the usage secret isn't something they're doing 'cos the usage looks good.
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!
This comment could have been someone's hamburger!
If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.
The southwest is basically exporting its water very cheaply in the form of agriculture. Why when its such a constrained resource here?
People have all kinds of needs in addition to those for food and water.
Based in Colorado.
Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into.
It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people talking about how terrible this is for the environment deserve to be ignored first, scorned later.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
And so in that context all water usage is not equal: watering a golf course where run off goes back to local estuaries is different to evaporative cooling is different to industrial or residential usage.
Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.
Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.
This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods.
Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.
Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.
Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen
Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.
The important difference WRT beer is that the water used in the process likely in a larger part goes towards... the beer itself. This in turn is going into the person who drinks it. So, the water here is actually hydrating human beings.
This can be argued as one of the 2-3 absolutely necessary uses of water. Hydrating people.
So, spending less than the beer industry is not that great of an achievement.
However, a casual reader may see comparison to "beer" and think "oh yeah, beer, just a random thing out of a million, so yeah AI is totally ordinary".
Which is a very incorrect conclusion to reach.
Careful, your bias is showing.
Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.
They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.
Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage.
Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.
But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?
We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to.
This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it.
Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system.
[0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.
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).
There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded.
Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)
If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.
The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.
Nothing but costs! All of those people have been replaced by AI. What's the point of keeping all those economically useless people alive?
This is our future if we don't achieve the fabled post-scarcity society soon.
If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.
A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.
Kind of reminds me of things like "low fat" labels on foods that have little fat anyway, but tons of sugar.
In this case, electricity is the elephant in the room.
Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans.
It's a strawman.
Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...
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.
Very little water that would have been used for any other purpose, or isn’t naturally returned to the water cycle, ends up being consumed in the production of the burger patty.
To be clear I think your point about AI not consuming all that much water relative to other things is valid, but comparing it to the water consumed by eating meat weakens your point for anyone that hasn’t bought into the bunk “cows are driving climate change” narrative.
I hadn’t heard about cows eating alfalfa though, where is that happening? Wouldn’t it be more valuable to sell it to people instead of using it as feed?
Now measure the amount of electricity the same prompt will use in 6 years when both algorithmic efficiency and 3-4 generations of silicon lower that by 95% (or more).
Will your microwave become 95% more efficient over the next 6 years? No.
Also how many video prompts will the average person run in a given year? Almost certainly 0. I heavily use AI daily and have probably played with AI video less than 4 times, ever.
Yet certainly the average person will use 20,000-100,000 microwave minutes over their lifetime. I use my microwave for 2-3 minutes every day at lunch for example.
From first principles, the idea that electricity use = bad is wrong. If your electricity comes from burning coal or lignite, then obviously yes using that electricity has bad externalities.
But a french person running their microwave on Nuclear powered grids? This is good. Dirty energy sources is the problem. Not energy use itself.
Also agree there are other ways we should pursue in parallel regarding emissions.
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)
> U.S. specific estimates put beef water use at 317, 441 and 808 gallons per pound of boneless beef when precipitation water is not accounted for in calculations.
So, let's just say around 400 gallons of water per pound of beef if you don't include rainfall use.
Each almond takes about a gallon of water to grow: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
A "drop" is not well defined, but some math says there's about 75,000 drops in a gallon: https://www.quora.com/How-many-drops-of-water-can-fit-into-o...
Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.
That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.
Doubly so when they use such innocuous and authoritative titling as "Our World in Data" which implies some collectivist, community-based outlook that this website is indeed not.
To wit, this page is produced in part by the Global Change Data Lab which is a team of economists, and YCombinator.
For for thousands of pounds of beef, I’ve barely used any water at all. Don’t notice the extra consumption on my well at all, and I have a very low producing spring fed well (1 gallon per minute).
“Vegan” crops on the other hand line corn which are irrigated in many parts of the country use a great deal of water and often very inefficiently so.
In other words, bringing up some anecdotal, hyper specific (how many meat eaters just "have a few cows"?) information says absolutely nothing about the truth of the matter, but a lot about what you believe constitutes an argument.
People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.
Some people get an Angry. They love their Angry, and nobody will take it from them.
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...
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.
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.
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).
> Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
Sure but we are talking about whether the enormous investment into AI infrastructure is prudent or not. Also I reckon most people on here made a living just fine before everything moved to remote data centers, and many if not most HNers workloads could run on individual machines... But that's another conversation.
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.
You should read Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus. He calls this "the naive view of information," which is ignorant of the existence of what he astutely identifies as "intersubjective" realities (see also Angela Cooper-White's entry on "intersubjectivism" in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion):
[...] its deepest and most complex
usage is related to the postmodern
philosophical concept of
constructivism or, in social
psychology, social constructionism –
the notion that reality is co-
constructed by participants in a
relationship and in society.
Historically Jungian psychology and indeed religion (a form of proto-psychology, from which Jung inherits by way of the alchemical tradition; see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) was humanity's collective storehouse of wisdom and techniques for managing intersubjective realities and group "information hygiene." Such techniques are now being lost to antiquity with the late 20th and 21st century focus on only objectively verifiable, quantitative measurements (as opposed to the private subjective, qualitative phenomena experienced as the inner ruminations, contemplations, and dream life of the individual).
White Rose: Do you ever think
that if you imagined or
believed in something, it
could come true... Simply by
will?
Angela: Yes. Actually, I did
believe that. But I'm slowly
having to admit that's just
not the real world... Even if
I want it to be.
White Rose: Well, I guess it
all depends on what your
definition of real is.
I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era. But I think we can add this to the list of our poorly-grounded narratives.
There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
At least from the Newtonian perspective, reality definitely unfolds either one way or the other, and it's not a matter of opinion.
> There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information, which "says that information leads to truth, and knowing the truth helps people to gain both power and wisdom." You miss the point of the root comment.
I 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?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/25/m...
In a far science fiction future, I could e.g. imagine connecting LLM inference data centers to a global data network instead of always having to drive up to them to ask my prompts.
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.
DCs will just use the cheapest source that meets their needs. If they have to treat greywater and that costs more than municipal potable water, they'll use the potable water. (In part this is utilities selling their potable water too cheaply.)
> Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?
No; if it was cheaper for DCs, they'd already be doing it. But it isn't an insurmountable cost -- DCs still pencil with slightly more expensive cooling.
I live near the Potomac and always figured the region was wet enough that water was not a concern. You have me rethinking that somewhat.
However the place for that to be least likely to be a problem would be Wisconsin with their evaporated water blowing east over top of the Great Lakes 90% of the time and any excess humidity will rain back down or slow down lake evaporation because the air over the lakes is already saturated with humidity most of the time.
But there still can be a problem if all that water is being pumped from deeper underground aquifers instead of surface water, so the source still matters. Those aquifers still should replenish fairly quickly in that area, but draining aquifers can happen in decades if the demand is there, while replenishment from non-surface aquifers can take hundreds of years even in water filled areas. And in certain ground compositions, underground aquifers can collapse and subside if the water is mostly drained, never again being able to hold that much water again and causing changes in surface topology.
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.
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...
Anyway agricultural water usage is way worse in California.
But it doesn't have to happen in California.
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.
Just like an agriculture, data center puts water to cool chips and ships token to some other reason?
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.
"Since the technology uses synthetic fluids, it requires significantly less water than other approaches." This is like saying that a new car radiator uses less water than an old water-based one, like yeah technically it requires water to work but you aren't boiling it away.
It does mention the real ways to use less water too, either chillers (which use way more power) or running in a colder climate.
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.
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.
~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.
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...
Datacenters expel water filled with all kinds of heavy metals and other kinds of toxic sludge. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
It should be pretty obvious the parallel I’m drawing here. Where’d you get your epidemiology PhD?
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...
Air pollution, GHG and water use are concerns, but these projects will not dramatically increase the load on the electric grid.
Natural gas is cheap and abundant in Alberta, and the province (actually the whole country, via transfer payments) benefits financially from resource revenues from extracting the gas. So, these projects are generally an easy sell to the public.
There are already have a couple in Calgary and they're hooked directly to the grid. The cost of electricity for the city shot up at the same time. Also, there have been a few brownouts caused by them not being ready to handle late night draws from those data centres.
That's at least what I'm seeing. Though, admittedly, it's from older project articles. Maybe something has changed in recent months?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ai-data-centre-albert...
this bit especially tells me the reader needs a pile of salt.
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.
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.
That doesn't seem to be an unusual state of affairs at all; it instead seems like a very normal way of doing things.
But if you think this is honestly a GOOD thing, you have deep anti-human sentiments.
So you could have a closed-loop water system cooling your machines or chips, but still be consuming water to cool the coolant. And they will advertise this as "closed loop." Better to ask if they have a cooling tower.
It’s all just a lack of imagination.
There is ample evidence around the world of data centers causing extreme water crises [1].
Not a water expert but I find the focus on evaporation very confusing. Draining ground water and aquifers causes environmental degradation in itself and waste water from data centers can’t just be fed back into the water cycle?
1) https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-08-17/ais-backyar...
The result is that now I think water usage should be taken into account when siting data centers. Great Lakes and eastern seaboard fine, maybe not as much in California or Arizona.
> my breathing in making the blog post above might well have evaporated more water than occurred (incrementally) from all four AI estimates.
Clearly his continued breathing is not as much of an "economically effective use of water" as AI. If clean water ever becomes a scarce resource in California, thankfully he's already done the ChatGPT queries needed to justify cutting back on 68-year-old Emeritus Distinguished Professors.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
Discussed here:
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-n...
> The one remaining question: why the clean step change?
In the middle of this piece, he runs into a critical flaw in his reasoning and just shrugs it off.
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-mem...
This IS the complaint.
For places that don't have plenty of water, that becomes trickier: Capacity is finite.
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.
> shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe.
Is rare earth mining specifically for semiconductor manufacturing actually a significant driver? My intuition is that rare earth and most raw material mining would be driven much more by EV car motors and batteries.
Certainly you can say all energy use is indirectly responsible for the pollution of the oil, solar, wind, etc. I don't disagree at all! I'm say in-addition to the pollution of raw inputs like energy - contemporary industries have additional and unavoidable side products.
> are earth mining harms millions around the globe.
Those mines are going to operate day after day because it's unfortunately the best economic opportunity in those areas. Those areas deserve our support to improve their socioeconomic realities but opposition to data centers in rich countries does not suddenly provide better opportunities to those regions.
> 6. Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below.
The prompter should have redone this image a couple of times until they had all three actually draining the lake.
U.S. power generation is the largest industrial user of water, withdrawing approximately 47.7 trillion gallons in 2021, mostly for cooling thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, natural gas).
1. Tallying the total water consumption impact, embodied water (construction), operational water (cooling), indirect water (electricity generation), supply chain water, etc.
2. Mapping current water intensity onto AI growth forecasts through 2030+
And if you look at those things in combination, there are reasons to be alarmed.
Who are these people who think AI will end civilization? Ya'll know it's just autocomplete and deepfakes, right? Maybe they need to read a book about the industrial revolution? It changed the world entirely, but it didn't end it.
Gotta love statistics.
You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:
> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-int...
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...
That being said, I’m not too worried about it. I think it’s okay if your average person has this misconception, because at the end of the day they are correct that datacenters threaten their water supply. They might not have the mechanism right. The resultant skepticism might force hyperscalers to commit to water preservation.
If republicans and centrist dems didn’t run the show right now I would say regulation should be passed forcing datacenters to treat all water prior to expelling it back into the water supply, with a state funded test facility located on premise to make sure they’re doing it right.
And not to mention - and this is for the AI cheerleaders that actually read this far - the air pollution. Musk’s datacenter in Memphis is running on GAS GENERATORS. So in many cases the DCs are actually polluting the air as well as the water. In a poor and predominantly black neighborhood of course. It’s just absolutely disgusting and the backlash against this will be swift and harsh. Honest to God us tech people are no different from those at Dow chemical that dump(ed) metric shit tons of highly carcinogenic PFAS into countless rivers. I work in this industry. But I don’t have the ability to fool myself the way most of HN seems to.
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.
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
“His 68-year-old hardware with 50,000-year-old architecture is enjoying and struggling with the promise, threats, and turbulence of the AI revolution.”
AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.
Both sides have dishonest reporting
Very insightful bullet points, ordered lists and grok tables! Articles like this are certainly a net benefit to society
Cities are…people. Literally the most important use of water.
So far, AI seems to just put people out of work and enrich a small group of oligarchs who own the technology.
If tech companies want people to change their view away from my above statements above maybe they should spend less time moving to the far right and being hostile to regular people.
We already see that the public perceptions of AI is collapsing: https://www.highereddive.com/news/gen-z-ai-gallup-poll-negat...
Peter Thiel is out there building a military AI surveillance state and basically all the tech billionaires are turning MAGA and anti-democracy.
I don’t really care how much water AI uses, I’m not going to sit back and make excuses for billionaire assholes and their revenue toys. I don’t benefit from AI being embraced by society outside of stuff like cancer research (which was happening before LLMs took over the mainstream).
In reality, the most likely outcome is that I’ll be harmed by AI. I will be replaced by software and the billionaires who replaced me won’t exactly create a utopia, will they?
>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.
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...
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.
You could imagine running way more water, but I guess these racks are extremely dense.
If we're trying to deny the usage "tier," I'd argue we're being intentionally obtuse at worst and foolish at best.
Sidebar, I'm very curious to see where AI goes. Definitely not on the hype train. More curious than anything. This article was a breath of fresh air.
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?
Ah yes, those invaluable tens of jobs created by DCs....
Do you really not consider taxes before repeating this tired argument?
[1] https://www.loudoun.gov/DocumentCenter/View/219184/General-F...