Tech companies defeat bill as AI drains local water supplies | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies defeat bill as AI drains local water supplies

theolympus.net

39 pointslaurex29 comments

I think it's super cool that Olympia HS has a student run newspaper, but I don't think this is something that should be posted to HN. The only source quoted on the water issue is an EE professor from a school in California, who I am guessing is not a subject matter expert on water in Washington state.

FWIW, as a Washington resident, I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages. We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water. Obviously, we need to manage it responsibly, but I haven't seen any evidence of looming issues here (please feel free to correct me, though).

> I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages.

Except we are.

> We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water.

Most of our water comes from snowpack that melts over the spring and summer. Almost every year for the last several years, snowpack has been abnormal and has affected downstream flows.

https://ecology.wa.gov/water-shorelines/water-supply/water-a...

https://www.plantmaps.com/www.plantmaps.com/www.plantmaps.co...

https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/november-2021/snowpack-washingto...

And datacenter construction has put a major strain on central Washington power and water supplies: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/pow...

> I think it's super cool that Olympia HS has a student run newspaper, but I don't think this is something that should be posted to HN. The only source quoted on the water issue is an EE professor from a school in California, who I am guessing is not a subject matter expert on water in Washington state. FWIW, as a Washington resident, I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages. We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water. Obviously, we need to manage it responsibly, but I haven't seen any evidence of looming issues here (please feel free to correct me, though).

I agree the lack of source in TFA is less than ideal, and the author is essentially saying "just trust the professor bro".

But you have to admit it's ironic your claim has the same problem, essentially "just trust me bro".

> I think it's super cool that Olympia HS has a student run newspaper, but I don't think this is something that should be posted to HN.

Why shouldn't it? The thoughts and opinions of high schoolers matter just as much as those of adults.

Yeah, that was a classic ad hominem, addressing the author instead of the content of what's said.

I pointed out the very specific major flaw, which is that it had one not entirely relevant source, which makes sense for a high school newspaper.

I'm sure that high school journalism has some great outliers, but in general, I don't think we're the intended audience, nor that the journalistic standards are up to what we'd expect from a better source.

Did you read the article? It's six tiny paragraphs and provides hardly any actual data or reporting.

If this was a positive piece about AI of similar quality, I can't help but suspect you'd be responding differently.

> It's six tiny paragraphs and provides hardly any actual data or reporting.

That's a fair criticism that doesn't rely on the identity of the author.

It wasn't about the identity of the author. It was about the identity of the institution, which is not designed to have the rigor and other institutional structures of a proper journalistic organization.

I just meant to convey that "don't post a news piece from a high school newspaper" is a reasonable rough heuristic that might want to be applied before posting something here.

> The only source quoted on the water issue is an EE professor from a school in California, who I am guessing is not a subject matter expert on water in Washington state.

>The thoughts and opinions of high schoolers matter just as much as those of adults.

But...it's not purporting to be an opinion piece. It seems intended to be a factual news article.

If this was an opinion column, I'd almost be more inclined to give it a pass.

No they don’t. Do you really believe that? Maybe on certain niche issues the opinions of a HS student are useful, but mostly they are still growing into some understanding that can contribute in a meaningful way. Which means mostly their opinions are dumb and useless.

I mean, take your position to its natural conclusion: there are people who understand more than you about basically any given topic, which means your opinions are dumb and useless.

This is absolutely true for many topics. There is a threshold of expertise where opinion that does not meet that threshold has no value. There is also a large gray area where there is sufficient expertise such that the opinion might have value. And then there is some point quite bit after that where someone has sufficient expertise such that it is very important to take what they say on the subject seriously. I occupy the first two regions in almost all areas, possibly all. High school students occupy the first area almost exclusively.

The data centers in WA cluster in Quincy and Moses Lake in the Columbia Basin, which gets 7-9 inches of rain per year. The town of Quincy (pop ~8,200) uses groundwater at rates equivalent to a city of 30,000, and during the 2021 drought the irrigation district cut off data center pumps entirely.

You’re right that WA is a reasonable place relative to alternatives, and data center water use is a rounding error next to agriculture, but the strain is real at the municipal infrastructure level in the specific towns hosting these facilities.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/wa-cit...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/wa-bra...

How much higher would the energy cost be without evaporative cooling? It doesn’t seem that hard to use water-air heat pumps to get rid of the heat without any water use, so the reasons it’s not used are probably economic. I suppose you could just make water more expensive?

Vertiv published a 10-year TCO analysis for a 3 MW facility that found waterless systems actually achieved lower overall cost despite higher energy draw, because water treatment, legionella testing, RO filtration, and cooling tower maintenance add up fast.

The PUE penalty is typically +0.1 to +0.4, so roughly 10-25% more energy for a hyperscaler currently at PUE ~1.1.

Microsoft announced all new builds from late 2027 onward will use zero water for cooling via closed-loop liquid cooling, which suggests the economics have already tipped for new construction.

Evaporative cooling gives you a COP beyond 20 in good conditions. It can be 4-5x more efficient than a heat pump.

Indirect evaporative systems average around COP 17.5 and dew-point systems can hit ~30, so your numbers check out for the best cases. Worth noting that direct liquid cooling with dry heat rejection is now achieving PUE 1.03-1.06 with near-zero water, which narrows the effective gap considerably for the high-density AI racks that are driving most new builds.

> Despite efforts to enforce clean energy, the bill died in committee

I wish it was easy to force issues like this into ballot measures. The citizenry should be able to rip control out of the hands of their representatives when so motivated.

The amount of water mentioned in the article is completely inconsequential. Per the article, across 126 data centers they consume several foot-acres of water per day. That is incredibly efficient!

Annualized, that is 0.0001% of the water used to produce subsidized corn ethanol. If we can afford to waste that much water on corn ethanol subsidies then we can definitely afford the water for data centers.

HB 2125 was killed by the Democrats because it was a deeply unserious bill unrelated to this. For example, it required data centers to turn off their power during ordinary periods of high electricity usage. Because, you know, we can just randomly turn off the Internet during the day and there will be no bad consequences.

Has anyone looked at using greywater for evaporative cooling? I couldn’t find much after a quick Google, aside from small scale domestic usage.

It’s already happening at scale.

AWS expanded recycled water use to 120+ facilities by late 2025, Google’s Douglas County GA site has used 100% recycled municipal wastewater for cooling since 2008, and Microsoft built a $31M water reuse utility in Quincy WA that cut their potable water use by 97%.

The main technical challenges are higher mineral loads causing scaling on heat exchange surfaces and increased Legionella risk from biofilm formation, but these are well-understood treatment problems with roughly a 6-year payback on the additional infrastructure.

Well, seeing as how AI will be replacing humans, all the humans can just move out of the state. Problem solved!

Why are they using blue water? Can't they just use grey water?

That's the thing with evaporation: you don't want your water to leave stuff behind after it evaporates because that will foul your equipment and cause lower efficiency.

You could in principle design systems with enough fouling mitigations that you'd be fine, but its likely that the cost of those mitigations is roughly the same as just purifying the water up-front.

But then... don't you need to distill the water anyway? It's not like blue water lacks impurities.

Short answer: several operators already do. The barrier isn’t technical, it’s proximity to a municipal wastewater source and willingness to invest in on-site treatment (pre-filtration, ultrafiltration, partial RO, ongoing biocide dosing). Recycled water typically costs 30-50% less than potable once the treatment infrastructure is in place.

It's funny that in movies like the matrix they imagine that humanity would fight back against the machines. In reality the first thing ai will do, which it has already done, is capture our governments through the application of money, and then the humans would first have to defeat their own institutions before they can even begin to fight the machines. Neoliberalism is profoundly unable to deal with threats if the threats produce short term profits. That goes for housing shortages, global warming, health care costs, falling birth rates, across the board if it produces short term profits that can be used to bribe politicians its impossible to address. AI is no different.

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