Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.
> I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a different story: the farmer said that the local utility was set to hike rates for the third time in three years, with the most recent proposed hike being in the double digits.
The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it. There are plenty of credible reasons to criticize data enters, use those instead!
Water is used in modern datacenters for evaporative cooling, and the reason it's used is to save energy -- it's typically around 10% more energy efficient overall than normal air conditioning. These datacenters often have a PUE of under 1.1, meaning they're over 90% efficient at using power for compute, and evaporative cooling is one of the reasons they're able to achieve such high efficiency.
If governments wanted to, they could mandate that datacenters use air conditioning instead of evaporative cooling, and water usage would drop to near zero (just enough for the restrooms, watering the plants, etc). But nobody would ever seriously suggest doing this because it would be using more of a valuable resource (electricity / CO2 emissions) to save a small amount of a cheap and relatively plentiful resource (water).
Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
"...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..."
"I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption" - https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
"...So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption. If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated..."
> U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021).
Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture.
USGS 2015 report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has irrigation at 118 billion gallons per day - that's 43,070 billion gallons per year.
163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than half a percentage point.
It's very easy to present water numbers in a way that looks bad until you start comparing them thoughtfully.
I think comparing data center water usage to domestic water usage by people living in towns is actually quite misleading. UPDATE: I may be wrong about this, see following comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945
It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that water, but a significant fraction of that activity is effectively essential.
If you're going to minimize people's concern like this, at least compare it to discretionary uses we could ~live without.
The data's about 20 years old, but for example https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2... suggests we were using over 2b gallons a day to water golf courses.
We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions for themselves. I'm not sure why we should take a different approach when making decisions about compute.
If you look at the data for animals, that’s not really true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is that the vast majority of water used for animals is “green water” used for animal feed - that’s rainwater that isn’t captured but goes into the soil. Most of the plants used for animal feed don’t use irrigation agriculture so we’d be saving very little on water consumption if we cut out all animal products [2]. Our water consumption would even get a lot worse because we’d have to replace that protein with tons of irrigated farmland and we’d lose the productivity of essentially all the pastureland that is too marginal to grow anything on (50% of US farmland, 66% globally).
Animal husbandry has been such a successful strategy on a planetary scale because it’s an efficient use of marginal resources no matter how wealthy or industrialized you are. Replacing all those calories with plants that people want to actually eat is going to take more resources, not less, especially when you’re talking about turning pastureland into productive agricultural land.
[1] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
[2] a lot of feed is also distiller’s grains used for ethanol first before feeding them to animals, so we’d wouldn’t even cut out most of that
Since you like their work, the authors of your paper answered that question more generally here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 where they conclude "The water footprint of any animal product is larger than the water footprint of crop products with equivalent nutritional value".
You make some often debunked claims, like we'd have to plant more crops to feed humans directly if we stopped eating meat.
This shouldn't make intuitive sense to you since animals eat feed grown on good cropland (98% of the water footprint of animal ag) that we could eat directly, and we lose 95% of the calories when we route crops through animals.
That paper isn’t actually debunking anything that I’m saying. If the water foot print per calorie is 20x for beef but the feed is grown with 90% of its water from rainfall, that’s not a 20x bigger footprint in a way that practically matters because most of that water is unrecoverable anyway. The water that is recoverable just makes it through the watershed.
Meat is a way to convert land that cant grow things people can or want to eat into things that people will eat. That pastureland and marginal cropland growing animal feed can’t just be converted to grow more economically productive crops like fruit and vegetables without Herculean engineering effort and tons of water and fertilizer. Instead the farming would have to stress other fertile ecosystems like the Southwest which would make the water problems worse, even if their total “footprint” is smaller. The headline that beef uses 20x more water per calorie completely ignores where that water comes from and how useful it actually is to us.
I don’t doubt that we can switch to an all plant diet as a species but people vastly underestimate the ecological and societal cost to do so.
Add a datacenter tax of 3x to water sold to datacenters and use it to improve water infrastructure all around. Water is absolutely a non-issue medium term, and is only a short term issue because we've forgotten how to modestly grow infrastructure in response to rapid changes in demand.
If data center usage meant we didn't have enough water for agriculture I would shout that from the rooftops.
Exploring how it stacks up against an essential use probably won't persuade people who perceive it as wasteful.
If Americans cut their meat consumption by 10%, we would use a lot less water in agriculture and probably also live longer in general
It's a common reasoning error to bundle up many heterogeneous things into a single label ("agriculture!") and then assign value to the label itself.
They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to misleading conclusions on the impact.
The same person who mentioned potable water being an important distinction also cited a report on data center water consumption that did not make the distinction (where the 628M number came from).
> water evaporation from hydroelectric dam reservoirs in their water use calculations
The fact data centers are already having a major impact on the public water supply systems is known, by the decisions some local governments are forced to do, if you care to investigate...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
"...in some regions where data centers are concentrated—and especially in regions already facing shortages—the strain on local water systems can be significant. Bloomberg News reports that about two-thirds of U.S. data centers built since 2022 are in high water-stress areas.
In Newton County, Georgia, some proposed data centers have reportedly requested more water per day than the entire county uses daily. Officials there now face tough choices: reject new projects, require alternative water-efficient cooling systems, invest in costly infrastructure upgrades, or risk imposing water rationing on residents...."
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
Does it count water use for cooling only, or does it include use for the infrastructure that keeps it running (power generation, maintenance, staff use, etc.)
Is this water evaporated? Or moved from A to B and raised a few degrees.
> Honestly, we probably use more water than they do
This kind of proves my point, regardless of the actual truth in this regard, it's a terrible argument to make: availability of water starts to become a huge problem in a growing amount of places, and this statement implies the water usage of something, that in basic principle doesn't need water at all, uses comparable amount of water as farming, which strictly relies on water.
Especially since so many anti-crypto people immediately pivoted to anti-AI. That sudden shift in priorities makes it hard to take them seriously.
Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide?
This is nothing but whataboutism.
People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the other bad things happening in the world at the same time.
If you take a strong argument and through in an extra weak point, that just makes the whole argument less persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people think).
You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave factories produce is terrible for the environment."
Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.
Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.
You can easily write a law that looks like this: There is now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for data-centers. It does not apply to residential use, agricultural use, or any other industrial use.
We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My home's power rate through the state owned utility is very different than if I consumed the exact same amount of power, but was an industrial site. I just checked and my water rate at home is also different than if I were running a datacenter. So in all actuality we already discriminate for power and water based on end use. at least where I live. Most places I have lived have different commercial and residential rates.
In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.
But the environment doesn't really care whether the water is being used by a datacenter or something else. My point is just that data centers are actually more efficient users of water compared to many less-controversial users.
And yet, if you believe the environmentalist argument in the first place, the price of beef should go up for the damages it causes. Hence why a lot of people think the people complaining about AI are wearing an environmentalist mask, rather than having an actual care about the environment.
Pigouvian taxes are fine, but should be applied across all sources of damage.
I can live without another datacenter - I get very little utility from "one more" - but I have to eat, generally every day..
Might as well get rid of all the lawns and football fields while we’re at it.
My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss.
And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading.
Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month.
Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections—driven largely by anticipated data center growth"
With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than it did yesterday.
Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual impact on the world, engaging with the facts and understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
It's not even an externality? They just pay market price for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.