Meta announces new data centers
engadget.com
engadget.com
This is a real issue that could get much worse.
Data centers do open-loop cooling systems because water is cheap… to them. The market reaction would be to raise water prices until it is “worth it” for data centers to invest in closed-loop, low-loss cooling systems. However they have WAY more purchasing power than local residents. So long before the market solution can kick in, social unrest will show up.
In the U.S. we just had a massive cultural shift over ~9% increase in food costs. Imagine how things will go when water starts getting too expensive. And BTW potable water availability is decreasing globally due to global warming.
> Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county's entire daily usage.
> “What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”
I say this as someone who whole heartedly believes in desalination as a way forward, but if we refuse to embrace desalination we need to recognize the tradeoffs like you point out.
The rest is just infrastructure (which is mostly political will).
> Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier.
Then they go on to say guzzling. Really personifying the monster. First, it's bigger than Manhattan... then it's gobbling and guzzling.
I wonder if the author or any people reviewing the piece 'fed' it into a 'starving' LLM?
Everyone knows that.
If the press insists on covering this, it should be in terms of competing economic interests bidding on water, not rapacious ecovillains.
The difference being that those opposing view LLMs as an inherently negative technology, and thus it is a waste of resources for something that is actively detrimental to society. Whereas golf courses are just golf, so the negative aspect is merely the resource usage.
Eh. I agree to your post in principle, but golf courses do have sociopolitical effects based on land values surrounding them. Original point stands though. That effect pales in comparison to the vitriol some have against LLMs.
We could use more media discourse on the current political realities of water use and potential improved economic structure though.
the venn diagram of people supporting golf courses but objecting to data centers has a much smaller overlap than you think
You've got Erie to the North, the Ohio to the South East, and about 40 inches of rainfall per year, or 81M acre-feet of water for the whole state in precipitation, or around ~80 BILLION gallons of rain water per day.
The water is returned to the atmosphere as vapor, not transmuted into bismuth and shipped overseas, never to be seen again.
You're talking about 1/20,000th of the rain water.
Okay, it's not nothing. But it's not going to ruin all the farms or something.
Intel said that it wouldn't be an issue, yet when it happened, they did nothing to help and forced a huge number of people to have to put in new wells. The same will happen in Ohio.
But the imagery of Mark Zuckerberg personally guzzling 500,000 gallons of water to simply waste it away is too attractive to pass up.
Lets Anti-Trust! Let's Break Citizens United! But let's also stop with this sensationalist pablum.
P.S: In the dry western deserts, couldn't this just be salty ocean water just piped through too? Doesn't even need to be de-salinated? Or hell, use the heat to boil the water and de-salinate it. Win-Win!
Unless Data Center uses water in a way we dont know?
I suppose not all water cooling systems (especially of this scale) work exactly like e.g. a water-cooled PC.
Describing it as "gobbling" is definitely odd, in either case.
In the end it's about energy dissipation; that heat's got to go somewhere, and there's only so much you can recapture with cogeneration.
A reminder that Meta tried to go green/nuclear, but couldn't because some bees were on or near the proposed location. Another example, of letting the perfect environmental ideal that isn't feasible be the enemy of the good.
If they're building the data center in the desert or a drought susceptible region, where fresh water usage is way past its limits, fine, but if the data center is in the Upper Midwest or parts of the Pacific NW, the consumption of water there isn't going to have any impact on the areas that have a consumption issue.
https://www.ft.com/content/ed602e09-6c40-4979-aff9-7453ee284... ("Meta’s plan for nuclear-powered AI data centre thwarted by rare bees")
> Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.
Doesn't seem to be a closed system.
But that article lists out several solutions for using water cooling - one of which is evaporative. And another mentioned is closed loop.
How do we know which solution Meta is using here?
At first approximation, water "lost" to cool down industrial installation seems not a concern at all compared to water lost to grow corn to feed cows for human consumption.
Looking at the figures quoted there, this can explain why e.g. the Ariozona data center uses so much more water than the Singapore one, although evaporative (i.e. open loop) cooling probably also plays a role in many of these cases.
> The Ohio Prometheus development will use gas turbines and is based on a new data center design focused on speed to deployment
So it takes away water from people and pollutes the environment. Got it. AI is great!
Is there a way to harness exhaust heat to generate electricity ?
or for other industrial use case, for example light manufacturing, textile, pulp & paper ?
Is it possible to harness heat to boil water and like generate electricity ?
Boiling things directly doesn't work, as the temperature is way below the boiling point of water, and for anything indirect you'll need some type of heat pump – at which point the data center heat also doesn't look that attractive anymore compared to e.g. just using heat from the air or ground.
Maybe you could heat a few buildings in very cold climate, but again, the time or area required for heat exchange is a function of the temperature gradient, so this is something that's typically done using the "waste heat" [1] of power plants, which is much hotter.
[1] Removing steam from CHP cogeneration isn't free in that every joule of heat removed reduces the electricity output a bit, but within a few kilometers of the power plant, it's much more efficient than electric heating using the electricity generated.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-14/finland-s... ("Finland's Data Centers Are Heating Cities, Too" (2025))
"AI uses more power than Bolivia to help some 900/hr consultant poorly craft a painfully generic slide deck to a manager who outsourced most of his primary job functions to the Big4."
Is it just turned to steam?
Does the water get polluted?
Looking forward to reading "The rise and fall of Zuck"
The shares have different voting rights, and Zuck has majority control that way.