Comment by demosthanos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by demosthanos | Hacker News Reader

> As the sector grows, consumption is expected to reach 90 million cubic meters by 2030, according to the water sector lobby Water Europe.

People who are trying to organize opposition to particular uses for water have a habit of citing the raw numbers without putting them in context, which works because there's so much water that the numbers are eye-wateringly large.

It's hard to find concrete stats on total water usage (as opposed to percentage changes), but one report I found that helps to put this number in context is this [0]:

> In addition, it takes 17,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of chocolate. According to statistics from 2019, Europe produced 3.7 million tonnes of chocolate, which equates to an eyewatering 63,625,200,000 litres of water.

Since a liter is 1/1000 of a cubic meter, we're looking at 63 million cubic meters for European chocolate alone, which places chocolate in the same ballpark as Europe's data centers.

Obviously data centers can and should work to conserve water (no misting in dry regions would help), but on the surface ~40% more water for data centers than for chocolate doesn't seem like that bad of a balance.

[0] https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/07/09/our-water-footprin...

TBH, if I had to choose, I'd rather have chocolate than "AI data centers".

These comparisons to existing uses of water besides cooling "AI data centers" ignore the fact that water use for "AI data centers" is additive. It is a _new_ use of water not seen before. As such, the comparisons to existing uses are unconvincing.

A bizarre "justification" such as "[existing use, e.g., chocolate] is permitted to deplete water supplies therefore [new use, e.g., AI data centers] should be permitted to deplete water supplies by similar amounts" does not scale. The supply of water is not unlimited. Not all new uses can be accomodated without affecting other uses.

This strange "reasoning" something like "so-and-so already does it" may appear to be based on some AI cheerleader notion of "fairness" but in reality it is based on a disregard for the limited nature of the resource, as if there is an unlimited supply. There is more money behind "AI" than chocolate. Truthfully, in the event of shortage, "fair" allocation where every use is accomodated is not realistic.

People want chocolate. There are hundreds of years of history to prove it.^1 But do people want "AI". It is being forced on them. If they accept it, if they essentially have no choice, then is that the same as "wanting".

1. The history of "AI" is absurdly short by comparison. It includes long periods of years where interest in "AI" was lost. Perhaps an AI cheerleader can dig up something about "Chocolate Winters".

> These comparisons to existing uses of water besides cooling "AI data centers" ignore the fact that water use for "AI data centers" is additive. It is a _new_ use of water not seen before. As such, the comparisons to existing uses are unconvincing.

No, I'm not ignoring that. I'm saying two things:

1) When put next to existing water usage, data center water usage stops looking as crazy large as is implied in TFA. All data centers for all compute purposes in the EU used as much water in 2024 as the creation of a single food product used in 2019. That's important perspective to have when we're talking about additive water usage, because it hints out what percentage increase we're talking about [0].

2) I don't accept the presumption that existing usage has preeminence now and forever by simple virtue of being older. We should be able to look at all water usage that currently stands and decide which usages are worth keeping and which are worth adding.

You're welcome to disagree that data centers (AI and otherwise, because non-AI workloads are included in the numbers) are worth more than chocolate, but it should be as part of a fair comparison between them on the merits, with no grandfathering chocolate and agriculture in just because the chocolate companies and farmers got there before anyone was paying attention to monitoring water usage.

[0] If you can find a percentage increase from data centers figure that would be even better, but I can't find absolute numbers for total water usage in the EU to construct such a figure.

"Amazon does not disclose its total water footprint."

conveniently

I agree that the raw numbers without context can be misleading but couldn't it be argued that the water usage for chocolate is way too high and that we're vastly overproducing? Adding on more and more usage and saying it's only a percentage of what we already waste isn't a good long-term strategy.

Sure, but then it's silly to throw a fit about data centers which pretty clearly provide a greater benefit to Europe's interests than chocolate does. It's just another example of how the rhetoric gives the established water abusers a free pass while scrutinizing every cubic meter used for tech.

but if you compare with another product mentioned in your link, it takes 15,000 liters of water to produce a kilo of meat and the EU produces about 6.5M tons of beef / year, which would put the water consumption at very roughly double that for chocolate; that would be only 1.3x the projected use by AI data centers.

So chocolate has a shockingly high water consumption especially for an "extra" product (much like almonds) compared to beef (leaving aside the vegetarian argument, and in terms of societal dependency only). And beef by far consumes the most water per kilo compared to other meats.

I think the main takeaway is that we should reduce chocolate consumption, and that AI data centers may consume as much or close to, all beef production.

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