Here a neat fact: Palo Verde, a nuclear power station in Arizona that generates so much power that it is the 2nd largest power plant in the United States is cooled entitrely by the treated waste water from Phoenix.
This is to illustrate that Data centers can be designed to be environmentally friendly, its just the greedy corpo pigshit that demands they suck drinking water out of water tables to power AI that nobody wants.
Albania showed us the way. Doing nothing is a choice. Vive la revolución ✊🏼🇦🇱
The AI apologists in this thread are wild to me. It’s too bad they don’t have access to some kinda tool that could give them information on how water tables work.
They’re in fuck around mode, they’ll eventually find out how it works.
Their plan is: they fuck around, and let the rest of us find out.
I think a lot of them know, they are just hoping to cash out before the find out phase.
I’m personally hoping for the day when AI and LLMs become more expensive for business than real people.
Already happened, doesn’t seem to matter.
Last time I looked at this the numbers were essentially meaningless, is it different this time?
How long until angry farmers attack a data center?
For the record, we use several orders of magnitude more gallons of water keeping grass and golf courses alive. This is why I hate reports with large, absolute numbers. It sounds like a lot. It’s really nothing.
According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025.
I’m sorry, the market research firm is named what now?
Tech Bros love naming their stuff after evil Tolkien shit. And they seem to do it totally unironically - as if they read the books but were confused about which side the good guys were.
Did you see the post yesterday about Thiel unironically arguing that Mordor was the optimal society in the story and Gandalf was just a confused old guy.
Be aware there is no good original source for this. Just articles referencing each other.
Be aware there is no good original source for this.
Well, there is a source. Good? I don’t think so, but I’m sure there are those who will argue.
Thats a source for the idea but not for the question of whether Thiel agreed with that idea or not.
It’s a tough one because he is already known to be that twisted of a person, so it’s almost not even interesting to know if he actually said it.
His actions provide evidence that this is consistent with his morally bankrupt value system
Consumed? Where did the water go? I’m guessing it’s still water.
The issue is heat. If your data center consumes 100 megawatts, that’s 100 megawatts of electricity that turns into 100 megawatts of heat. Part of the challenge of a data center is getting rid of that heat and keeping the servers cool.
There’s a fun little principle called latent heat in phase change. To take 1 g of water and heat it from just above freezing to just below boiling consumes about 100 calories of energy. To then boil it, to raise it just a fraction of a degree and turn it into steam, takes another 433 calories of energy. So if your data center has 100 megawatts of heat to get rid of, turning water into vapor is a great way to get rid of it.
You don’t actually even need to boil the water, if you take warm water and spray it into the air, some of it will evaporate and the water that comes back on the ground is significantly colder than what you sprayed in the air. This is harnessed with a machine called a cooling tower, it’s a big boxy thing that has a ton of little waterfalls and wet plates inside it while a giant fan blows tons of air through it. You pour warm water in, some of it evaporates, the water that comes out is much colder. Many buildings use this as part of their air conditioning system. But when that water evaporates, you need more water to replace it. And that’s why they say data centers consume water. The water isn’t destroyed, but it is released into the atmosphere as steam or humidity and thus is no longer usable until it rains again. Which, depending on your climate, may be sometime away or may be some distance away.
They (usually) pump water out of the ground because they don’t need it to be filtered or treated. The hot towers turn liquid water into vapor, which they (usually) pump outside. The vapor floats into the air and then gets carried away and dumped somewhere else, like the ocean.
Exactly. The water isn’t destroyed, just put through it’s normal cycle.
The problem is that it accelerates the cycle of freshwater to undrinkable salt water (most rains down into the ocean) while the cycle taking that water back to clean watersheds is no faster than before, which contributes to depletion of limited drinking water - especially since municipalities are often all to eager to strike deals with data centers to provide cheap hookups to the drinking water supply.
Source?
Not entirely. If it’s pumped from the water table, it can take many years for it to filter its way back in through the bedrock.
My dad had a house on a mountain and when his well went dry, I celebrated when it started raining. But then he said it wouldn’t matter, as that rain wouldn’t hit the water table for years, and it would just run off and away mostly.
We could start by using non pottable water in the first place. In Canada, no data centres use groundwater extraction because of stricter regulations. You can shake your fist at the clouds, but far better to lobby your government to pass regulations to protect groundwater.
Yeah, man. Consumed in the same way that we mean water is consumed in every other context. Doesn’t change the fact that the ground water is now sky water. Ground water takes months to decades to replenish, using it isn’t harmless to the ecosystems you take it from.
There’s no reason AI datacenters couldn’t be closed loop systems and just reuse the water. There are a multitude of ways water could be used more efficiently, it just has to be regulated.
And there’s no reason I couldn’t be a bicycle if you attached wheels to me. We’re talking about what is, not what could be.
So reach out to your representative to encourage them to implement regulations.
it’s basically evaporative cooling. so they could condense it but that takes energy. energy takes money. money takes from profit. and the water is a public resource and capitalists hate the public anyway.
Yeah that’s what I don’t get about all of this. Why can’t they recycle this water if it’s just being used for cooling. Why must it always be fresh water?
Many of these facilities are using evaporation coolers. Which means the water just evaporates. And the ends up raining into the ocean later.
They’re going to cheap out in whatever way they can. Using a different cooling system, or using non-potable water isn’t going to be done voluntarily.
Because recycling the water would require condensing it, and the laws of thermodynamics necessitates that the energy that was taken away into the water by the phase change from water to vapor must be taken back out of the vapor in order to change it back into water.
That’s to say, in order to get the water back that was evaporated to cool something, you must cool the water the same amount that it cooled your other thing. This makes recovering the water completely pointless as you have to do the exact same amount of cooling again to recover it.
Data centers use evaporative cooling because it’s cheap. Not recovering the water is what makes it cheap. They can use cooling methods that don’t rely on disposing of water to the atmosphere (like heat pumps), but it’s not cheap.
Data centers use evaporative cooling because it’s cheap. Not recovering the water is what makes it cheap.
This is where regulations need to step in. The extra cost of non-evaporarive cooling is not going to make or break the datacenter, but it might cut into the CEO’s bonus. Make them pay for it! They’ve got the money.
This is where regulations need to step in
This is the part where you need to realize that regulations only come into play long after devastating impacts occur and can’t be denied any longer (or, more accurately, until they can be denied again. See, the state of anti-trust in the US). Capitalism only exists because it can foist externalities onto the public. And capitalism will do anything to avoid paying for the externalities that allow them to “generate” profits.
They evaporate it using cooling towers. Because it’s the cheapest way to shed heat.
It does have a touch of fear mongering. The water wouldn’t even be contaminated.
They evaporate it using cooling towers. Because it’s the cheapest way to shed heat.
Global beef production used approximately 264 trillion gallons. Quite literally 1000x more water.
For a single type of food.
Water for irrigation of peoples lawns is just under 3 trillion liters a year in the US, about 10x as much.
Where are the protests against that?
Nowhere, because people are sheep and can’t use their critical thinking skills.
This is like watching people yell at their kids to turn off the light in their room(which is an led) while leaving the AC running at home while they run out to the grocery store 10 miles away in a 7 seat SUV.
Missing the forest for the trees. The lot of you.
“The Holocaust only killed like six million people, while Communism in China and the USSR killed tens of millions each, therefore the Nazis weren’t ackshually that bad!”
That’s what you sound like, ya fucking clown.
🤔 heavy
The Malthusian argument to defend AI…
AI apologists in the wild are so weird.
LLMs in current form are protested because they’re a worthless “technology” that also wastes a fuck ton of resources so the ruling class can do IP theft at scale.
Why does everyone jump to AI? A gigantic portion of data centers power streaming services, cloud hosting, and content delivery networks / caching services.
I understand the sentiment against the proliferation of data centers and the impact they have on the local environment but services people consume on the regular have driven this for years now.
You can find both of them bad. It’s simple, we have big enough brains usually.
This article about data centers though. Trying to whataboutism is forum sliding.
Except it’s using very little water overall
Ban almonds. They suck anyways.
Meat apoligists are also weird, just saying. Meat Production is way worse than AI. Lots of animals are sufferint and it’s very bad for the enviornment.
Nice Forum sliding attempt.
Yeah let’s get rid of meat and agriculture and eat ai tokens
No, let’s get rid of ai and meat and eat more sustainable foods.
Global South doesn’t eat enough meat. Let’s get rid of first worlders being fat and lazy, and distribute the food to all countries equally, then talk about meat consumption.
What do you mean by “eat enough meat”? Humans don’t have a biological need to eat meat, so by definition technically everyone has “enough” meat. If you just mean in terms of fairness then sure, the global south should get a bigger share of resources, that’s clear.
Humans don’t have a biological need to eat meat
I do. And so do a ton of other people with digestion/absorption diseases/issues. And for some of us it is a source of recurring stress. Maybe try to be as inclusive in your statements around diet as you would around anything else.
How the fuck can we get enough protein without eating enough meat? People in global south do not only suffer from calorie deficiency but also protein deficiency, which is related to meat (red or white) and dairy usage.
Yeah but billionaire bad.
Think about it. You might be on to something
We use twice as much to maintain golf courses and 4x as much to water our lawns every year. I’m not saying it’s a drop in the bucket, so to speak, but it’s not the worst offender. We have bigger fish to fry.
Keep in mind data center water use is set to grow geometrically over the next few years. It will soon be one of the worst offenders. The time to get it under control is now.
We’re not about to run out of water. You should be asking for better permitting for renewable energy because we can run out of that
Texas actually outgrew California in renewable energy because of less regulation
I was almost offended at the responses to your fact checking comment, then I remembered I’m on Lemmy
To be fair at least both of those provide something green instead of just excess heat, waste, and bullshit. Plus it is only going to get worse as we build way more.
Plus they largely pay their own bills. We are largely paying for the ai industry to overinflate their value and line their pockets before the bag holders buy in and it crashes.
