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Comment by leakycap | Hacker News Reader

Who "gobbles" water? What a weird title by the site.

> 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?

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Ohio is not exactly short on water.

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.

Water availability is highly local unless you build massive canals or pipelines.

You would be surprised how little water drop is required to cause wells to "go dry". When wells are punched into an aquifer, they stop when they hit water, they don't keep going to be deeper. A water level drop of just 2 inches caused all sorts of issues for locals when Intel built its new Fabs in New Mexico.

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.

If I had to guess, the issue is that they are taking treated water and releasing it back into the environment. It is consumed in the sense that what comes out is not identical to what goes in in terms of its temperature and composition (e.g. what's dissolved in it). If they aren't treating their own water, it will also have an impact on local water treatment facilities.

It's boiling water with GPUs, I guess. Even a fancy anti-matter AI reactor will be boiling water and spin turbines in the future.

500,000 gallons of water per day is approximately 1 golf course. There are 400 golf courses in Georgia. But "we just don't have the water!" screech bad-faith reactionaries.

If the press insists on covering this, it should be in terms of competing economic interests bidding on water, not rapacious ecovillains.

I would wager that the average person against the resource usage of AI datacenters are also against the resource usage for golf courses.

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.

> 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.

Golf courses are semi-regular targets of concern for both people concerned about water availability and housing. So while I’m not sure what your purpose for looping them in is, their existence hardly absolves other water-demanding industry much less establishes anything remotely like a sound basis for establishing bad faith.

We could use more media discourse on the current political realities of water use and potential improved economic structure though.

The problem with "media discourse" is exactly that. The whole newspaper industry is permanently big mad about the success of the internet and can't be trusted to report on this fairly.

I wasn’t aware of gold course water consumption and I’m willing to bet most people aren’t, so instead of thinking they’re acting in bad faith it’s probably better to understand that they’re just naive.

Or - possibly - they would be unhappy with golf courses also, if they were made aware?

If it's impacting water availability to residents, it's a problem, full stop.

If you actually read the original article, the well of the complaining person was destroyed by vibrations from construction, not from overdraft if the aquifer.

That's only one of several relevant complaints.

this whatsboutism comment reminds me of ralph wiggum ‘im helping’

the venn diagram of people supporting golf courses but objecting to data centers has a much smaller overlap than you think

It's not whataboutism. The point is it's a tradeoff. Would the whiners shut up if Facebook bought and shut down the local golf course? Probably not. Google remediated a flood-irrigated alfalfa farm (really!) near Las Vegas (I am not making this up) to zero out the water demands of their Henderson datacenter. This did not prevent the national press from making hay (did you see what I did there?)

Data center water usage should be reported in units of McDonaldses.

Mark?

Yeah Mark. Robotic Alien Lizard types gobble water.

Everyone knows that.

The constant drum of limited-pie headlines is getting really grating. Stock/Personal "paper-money" valuations coupled with Citizens United has really broken our brain into thinking that everything everywhere is just Billionaires stealing stuff, when realistically this is just water that will be recycled, available for anyone else to use.

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!

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