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Comment by Aransentin | Hacker News Reader

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone.

This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity.

What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

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Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production, either. Your example would be even more extreme if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle. Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year in the US.

The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years.

Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.

>Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production,

Excellent, that means we can save massive amounts of water by stopping almond production in the western US.

>Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use.

If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)

Yes, that's roughly what I said in my post. If we're doing a controlled economy and triaging for the health of the ecosystem, we'd start with feed for cattle, and almonds wouldn't be much further down on the list.

The contention with AI water use is that something like this is currently happening as local water supplies are being diverted for data-centers.

People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that doesn't really help the counter-argument.

Example article from a decade ago: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

Aren't Californian almonds like 80% of the world's production?

Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ?

I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples.

Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have cloud AI compute. It's personal, but I'd be more sad that I'd never get to experience the taste of an almond and all the cuisine that comes with it.

> Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT

You've misread it. It's not compared to AI datacenters, it's every type of datacenter, for all types of computing.

In the future scenario you've laid out it wouldn't be cloud AI compute. You wouldn't be able to use HN or send email or pay with a credit card or play video games or stream video.

But the recent complaints are specific about cloud AI compute no? And how it's driving the build out of all these new data-centers?

Depends on what the datacenters are used for.

AI has no utility.

Almonds make marzipan.

Well, I don't like marzipan, so both are useless? Or maybe different people find uses/utility from different things, what is trash for one person can be life saving for another, or just "better than not having it" (like you and Marzipan it seems).

"AI has no utility" is a pretty wild claim to make in the tail end of 2025.

Still surprised to see so many take this as such a hot claim. Is there hype, absolutely, is there value being driven also absolutely.

Whenever I see someone say AI has no utility, I'm happy that I don't have to waste time in an argument against someone out of touch with reality.

I'm more unhappy than happy, as there are plenty of points about the very real bad side of AI that are hurt by such delusional and/or disingenuous arguments.

That is, the topic is not one where I have already picked a side that I'd like to win by any means necessary. It's one where I think there are legitimate tradeoffs, and I want the strongest arguments on both sides to be heard so we get the best possible policies in the end.

I agree, but you can't win against religious people. Better spend your time talking to the rest of us.

The article made a really interesting and coherent argument, for example. That's the kind of discourse around the topic I'd like to see.

If AI is so useful, we should have a ton of data showing an increase in productivity across many fields. GDP should be skyrocketing. We haven’t seen any of this, and every time a study is conducted, it’s determined that AI is modestly useful at best.

I don't need data to know that I use it every day and offload lots of tasks to it.

It's like the smooth brains who still post "lol 6 fingers"

ok in that case you don't need to pick on water in particular, if it has no utility at all then literally any resource use is too much, so why bother insisting that water in particular is a problem? It's pretty energy intensive, eg.

AI has way more utility than you are claiming and less utility than Sam Altman and the market would like us to believe. It’s okay to have a nuanced take.

AI has no utility _for you_ because you live in this bubble where you are so rabidly against it you will never allow yourself to acknowledge it has non-zero utility.

Activated almonds create funko pops. I’d still take the data centers over the funko pops buying basedboys that almonds causes.

Marzipan is fun, but useful?

AI is at least as useful as marzipan.

What does it mean to “use” water? In agriculture and in data centers my understanding is that water will go back to the sky and then rain down again. It’s not gone, so at most we’re losing the energy cost to process that water.

and water from datacenters goes where...? just disappears?

No it’s largely the same situation I think. I was drawing a distinction between agricultural use and maybe some more heavy industrial uses while the water is polluted or otherwise rendered permanently unfit for other uses.

So with the water used in datacenters. It's just a cooling loop, the output is hot water.

The problem is that you take the water from the ground, and you let it evaporate, and then it returns to... Well to various places, including the ground, but the deeper you take the water from (drinking water can't be taken from the surface, and for technological reasons drinking water is used too) the more time it takes to replenish the aquifer - up to thousands of years!

Of course surface water availability can also be a serious problem.

I'll take the almonds any day.

Other people might have other preferences. Maybe we could have a price system where people can express their preferences by paying for things with money, providing more money to the product which is in greater demand?

Sure.. Except some people / companies have so much more money, they can demand impractical things and pay above-market rates for them, causing all others to scramble to live day-to-day with the distorted market.

Tried buying a GPU lately?

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