AI uses less water than the public thinks
californiawaterblog.com
californiawaterblog.com
Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap.
People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.
Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.
They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
It seems like maybe there is though.
The first problem is the "use it or lose it" provisions where someone has the rights to use water but not sell it, thereby encouraging waste. That one has a solid solution: If they have the right to use it, they get the right to sell it. Make sale inalienable from use. Then you don't have to pay them anything because you're giving them something instead of taking it. But you get higher water availability as now all these people wasting "free" water start selling it because the opportunity cost of not selling it is now worth more than the wasteful use. The only "problem" here is that they get a windfall, but we can solve that in the same way as the second "problem".
Which is the takings clause. The purpose of that is to prevent unequal takings. If the government needs your land to build a railroad, they have to pay you for it, because they're taking yours but not anyone else's. Whereas when they take everyone's property at the same rate it's called property tax, and that's allowed. So if you just got a windfall of water rights in a dry place, congrats, you now have a valuable property right which is subject to property tax. Not using the water and don't want to pay the tax? Then sell the water. Since the buyer values it at more than you do, and the tax is less than 100% of the value, everyone comes out ahead compared to the status quo. The previous inefficient user gets $100 in money instead of $10 worth of inefficient use, the government gets some proportion of that in new tax revenue (variously property tax on the rights and income tax on the sale), the buyer gets water it values at >$100.
And the wettest places tend to have the least-regulated water.
(Nobody talks about it because shortages make bigger headlines than surpluses do, but there's a ton of agricultural areas in the US that have too much water and where providing drainage for farm fields is much more commonplace than irrigating them is.
It doesn't really matter in this context, though, because folks hate datacenters in these water-rich areas just the same as they do everywhere else.)
The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect.
It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage.
Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.
We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on.
Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year.
> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone.
No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible.
Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.
The better argument is that diesel is worse for air quality and then it's a pigouvian tax in proportion to how much you burn.
The realpolitik argument is that fewer people have diesel vehicles and democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But taxing commercial trucks is also a pretty sneaky way of taxing ~everything while pretending to not, so it's also the principal/agent problem. Legislators want to spend money while pretending not to take it from you.
It is taxed less than gas in lots of Europe where that is more common. You also need to factor in mpg vs gas, where it is higher, so more road-wear pCO2 was part of the debate in Europe, even though it is longer carbon chain so worse co2 ratio per calorie, the engines are more efficient. Diesel is worse for local air, better for long term co2.
There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one. Farm fuel with no road wear isn't taxed much at all in lots of places and is more often diesel.
But then it's even worse at recovering the cost of road maintenance from heavy trucks.
> You also need to factor in mpg vs gas, where it is higher
Passat TDI (diesel), ~3500 pounds, ~45MPG. Toyota Camry Hybrid (gas), ~3500 pounds, ~50MPG.
In theory diesel hybrids would be even more efficient but diesel engines and hybrid transmissions both add up-front cost and further efficiency improvements have diminishing returns because reducing a $100 fuel cost by 30% isn't as much money as reducing a $70 fuel cost by 30%.
> There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one.
Road wear is the irrelevant one in terms of fuel. Because of the fourth power law, essentially all road wear is from full-size buses and semi trucks. The contribution from passenger cars and even the likes of diesel pickup trucks rounds to zero. Meanwhile the largest vehicles use a minority of the fuel because there are several times more passenger cars than semi trucks.
OK but the market intervention being discussed here does not create a free(er) market. Its intent and effect is the literal opposite.
When hurricanes come to South Florida, the well off migrate North to wait out the storm while the poor suffer the dangerous conditions. Part of this is due to the price spikes of gasoline in the local market as supplies dwindle due to fewer truck shipments and refineries shutting down for the storm.
Water is similar. Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The “markets work” heuristic is frequently wrong if you don’t glaze over the very many counterexamples.
Rationing is an inevitable response. But to say that is like saying witch hunts are inevitable - they are. They're still bad ideas. People who can maintain access to their higher reasoning should resist them.
Sure, but OP is advocating that we should "systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds." They're not arguing that this is something to be applied only in emergencies.
Similarly in your post, you use the need to ration gas after a hurricane to argue that we should ration water all the time. This does not follow.
> Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The logical extension of your argument here is that the world would be better if we subsidized gasoline for "poor utilities bill payers" and "rural residents".
But why gasoline and water specifically? Why not also healthcare, food, childcare, and other necessities?
Then consider, if we have a budget of $X per family to subsidize necessities, surely the government is not best suited to decide how to split up those dollars between water, gas, healthcare, food, and childcare? There's no right answer universally, some people need food more than they need gas, and vice versa. Surely an individual family would be better equipped to decide for themselves?
We have now invented "giving money to poor people instead of subsidizing demand", which I wholeheartedly support.
As with many things, markets do work, but people don’t make rational choices for their well-being.
> systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
This is what I'm arguing is a bad idea, by using gasoline as an example.
If you want to argue that imposing this pricing structure systematically is good because it would help prevent a bad monopoly like Standard Oil, you'd need to explain (a) how this market intervention would prevent monopolies and (b) how it's a "better" way (according to however we decide to measure "better") to prevent monopolies than the alternatives. I don't see how this is true, though.
> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
The problem is that water isn't traded on a normal market at all. Lots of people have historical water rights and pay nearly nothing for their water use. There's byzantine regulation and many have the right to use for some purpose on their land but not to resell, so the market cannot allocate to more efficient use.
If you just let the 101 level solution actually work, water prices will rise until inefficient uses like water-intensive agriculture (not even all crops!) are pushed out. Urban users easily outbid almost all agricultural use, even at what any person would consider dirt cheap prices. For example, desalinated water, which is considered expensive for agriculture, can be 40 cents per cubic meter of water. That's a lot of water! Usually the last mile of urban water delivery costs more than that.
The amount required to satisfy all urban use, including water hungry lawns etc, and datacenters, corresponds to a very minor reduction in agriculture. Perhaps even just changing which crop is grown or switching irrigation techniques.
Charging more to higher users, price discrimination, causes several problems. First, it creates an incentive to cheat. I'm not using all this water myself, its for this whole group of people who "live" here. Don't allow this kind of spreading (somehow...)? Now you actually screw any business or institution that serves a lot of people. A farm produces food for thousands- do they count as one user? A park uses much more water than a garden but serves many more people. Whatever framework you create will require another bureaucracy to run. Lobbyists will find or insert loopholes for their friends.
The heavy users actually improve the system robustness, in both electricity and water. Their higher demand pays for more supply infrastructure, which itself often benefits from economies of scale, and in a shortage they may even be more responsive to price increases due to their high use.
The heavy users have more influence over the laws which govern the infrastructure, as the history of water rights in the West clearly shows. We see it now when secretive organizations negotiate with water companies under NDA to get water for new data centers - something a smaller water user couldn't do.
The riparian doctrine of the East, with its high rainfall, don't work so well in the dry West, which is why it generally uses the prior appropriation doctrine. Water management was traditionally under a communal system. Some of these still exist as acequia associations, which include equity and fairness in their decisions, which doesn't follow the prior appropriation doctrine.
Econ 101 doesn't handle these issues.
If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them. They can choose to use it inefficiently on subsistence farming, or they could sell at the going rate. A normal market itself doesn't imply any particular allocation of water rights, just that they should be as fungible and transferable as possible.
Why are the laws that govern the infrastructure particularly important? It only matters now because its a tangle of regulation. Yes, big users can often get bulk discounts or other special arrangements by committing to use. This happens in many areas.
There's no law governing what products my grocery store must carry. Yet, I can still choose a store with many things I like, at affordable prices. My store may (and frequently does) exclude all products containing some chemical considered harmful even if it isn't banned. Of course, water has more of a natural monopoly problem, but that's more for last mile infrastructure and not broader supply.
I don't understand the details of the riparian vs prior appropriation doctrine. How does this create an issue? If the water rights are defined somehow, in a usage-independent way, only in terms of the net water removal, to account for runoff from local use, and the water from them can be traded, then a market can work regardless of the specific nature of the right.
Any association holding the rights could allocate its water internally as it sees fit. Just like any other asset? Or it could decide to sell it and distribute the money instead- perhaps even better for fairness to it's members!
You've just described the standard practice for taking over Native American lands by economic coercion instead of direct force. Take away land and water using market forces, and a culture based on land and water shatters.
That's precisely why the Native Americans protected their rights by treaty, not market forces.
Econ 101 was created to justify British colonial expansionism. Econ 101 justifies indentured servitude. Econ 101 justifies vote selling. Econ 101 justifies rule by the rich.
We've collectively decided that some part of life are off-limits to Econ 101.
Water is not simply a commodity. Water is life. Water is culture.
> How does this create an issue?
Water rights in the West are at least a Econ 400 level course, if not graduate school.
I am suggesting expanding their water right- instead of only the right to do X, Y, Z with the water, take whatever right to the water they do have, in terms of amount of water, and say "you can do whatever you want with this much water". How to allocate resource rents doesn't have much effect on the market structure itself.
A lot of vitriol against supply and demand without any evidence.
Food is life. Food is culture. Just as much as water. Which countries have had famine, those that allocate via some system of food rights, or those that had a free market in food? The largest examples of famine I am aware of, in the USSR and Maoist China, were driven by some central allocation of food rather than a market. Not a good record.
One of the great features of markets is that things don't need to be decided collectively. Perhaps 90% of people want to wear blue T shirts, but I want a red one. If we collectively decide, I get a blue T shirt. In the market, I buy a red T shirt- perhaps at a very slightly higher price due to less economy of scale.
We certainly know of areas where vanilla markets can fail- externalities etc, but these do not apply to the situation here. The existing system of water rights doesn't feel like a collective decision, but rather entrenched special interests and lobbyists.
It's very odd that you talk about a decentralized market when water allocation in the US Southwest was decided by the Colorado River Compact in 1922. This is central allocation and, famously, based on over-estimated flow numbers.
Most large famines were caused by flooding or drought. More people died in the Chinese famine of 1906–1907 than the Russian famine of 1921–1922 and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 combined.
> The existing system of water rights doesn't feel like a collective decision, but rather entrenched special interests and lobbyists.
That is absolutely correct, and would covered in the first week of any water rights class. In the West, "water flows uphill toward money", as I learned from reading "Cadillac Desert".
Or if you want a novel, read "The Milagro Beanfield War." The small farmers (mostly Hispanic) were drafted for WWII and couldn't farm, so lost their water rights, while the large farmers (mostly Anglo) could hire help.
And who got to set up the water law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Ring
"The Santa Fe Ring was an informal group of powerful politicians, attorneys, and land speculators in territorial New Mexico from 1865 until 1912. The Ring was composed of newly-arrived Anglo Americans and opportunistic Hispanics from long-resident and prominent families in New Mexico. Acquiring wealth, both groups realized, lay in owning or controlling the millions of acres of land which the Spanish and Mexican governments of New Mexico had granted to individuals and communities. The acquisition of grant lands by members of the Santa Fe Ring was facilitated by U.S. courts who had no allegiance to Mexican claims and land practices which featured allocating most of the land in grants to the common ownership of the first settlers and their descendants vs. legal private ownership."
What exists is a patchwork of economic systems, there is no cohesive whole, and you clearly prefer the US one which prioritizes the private ownership model of Econ 101.
That's why you can't view it simply through an Econ 101 lens.
Nominally is exactly right! The treaties have been violated many times.
You're missing the 1959-61 famine in China! Sure, famines have happened for other causes. Typically 100+ years ago before technology advanced. Now, famines largely come from poor governance.
Thanks for the background info!
Yes, I agree it is a patchwork system- and its probably quite difficulty to analyze! I'm arguing that a private ownership model with trading would lead to better outcomes, and basically end for all practical purposes water shortages.
For example, the smaller mostly Hispanic farmers you described above wouldn't lose their water rights in a rights ownership system- they could hold them, rent them out, sell them etc. But they wouldn't lose them merely for being unable to farm. Of course, water rights are a resource rent and it might be desirable to tax them as well- effectively economically partially public ownership- but this doesn't change the core argument about the efficiency of tradable rights.
1. You're thirsty and need a sip of water? That should be free
2. You're an household and use water? That should cost progressively more the more you use if you use more than typically needed
3. Your business model requires you to evaporate every last drop of water in a desert region? That should be so prohibitively expensive that your business model does not work
This is basically just a low amount threshold and a exponential function. You just need to select the exponent.
Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa.
Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?
The main thing is, we are not making any new carbon that was not already here billions of years ago.
:)
That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.
Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.
Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.
How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at.
1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.
So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.
> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’
> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.
So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-dat...
[2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-cente...
Also, the fact that the AI hyperscalers will sue to keep the usage secret isn't something they're doing 'cos the usage looks good.
Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.
You don't have to eat a burger.
Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).
Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
This comment could have been someone's hamburger!
A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.
I'd be on board if for every data center a farm gave up the amount of water to use in that data center. Instead of carbon offsets, we'll let them purchase water offsets. Of course that's not a serious answer.
Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert and drain the western US's aquifers and rivers because we have insane water rights doctrines that entitle them to trillions and trillions of gallons of free or almost-free water far in excess of what the watershed regions can bear.
If we don't change that system, data center water usage is a rounding error that is barely noticeable at the scale of the problem. If we do change that system, data center water usage isn't a problem at all.
Well, to me, this sounds basically like "Jeff Bezos already exists, this school does not. Increasing the government budget to build a school here is not going to help our finance, so that's where we will push back."
(I don't think Jeff Bezos should lose all his money, but he could definitely pay more tax.)
Scale matters, and you're completely ignoring it. A single hamburger takes about 2,500 liters of water to produce. The US eats a lot of them and produces a lot of them.
Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into.
It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people talking about how terrible this is for the environment deserve to be ignored first, scorned later.
Oh yeah, excellent place to put effort, it's not entrenched, it's just straight up against technological giants in a race that is considered relevant for national security. That should be easy yeah, outstanding target to set.
>and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.
I'll just repeat myself here:
>Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively.
Regarding pollution??? Completely preposterous.
Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as <other company> to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them"
Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.
Because I don't have anywhere near enough brain damage to do that and I'm not sure I can get there in a medically safe manner.
If Bob made a huge deal about company's abuse of fluffy animal and never otherwise talked about fluffy animal, that would seen as inauthentic
Because we who actually care about this subject go through the effort of educating ourselves and tend to use our energy in ways that actually make a difference, that are effective. Because we care about making an impact, not about brownie points.
People are just embarrassed to admit they're scared they might lose their job. They shouldn't be but they are because they've attached their identity to their career and to the concept of it making them uniquely skilled and creative, in a way that a machine could never replace.
Please don't take this as saying they are replaceable by AI. Maybe it never will. That doesn't matter, what matters is that they're scared that it will, and they're too embarrassed to admit they're scared of it, so they point towards the environmental damage.
Based in Colorado.
If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.
The southwest is basically exporting its water very cheaply in the form of agriculture. Why when its such a constrained resource here?
People have all kinds of needs in addition to those for food and water.
Once operational they just need electricity, cooling, internet, and enough local infrastructure to support up to a couple hundred employees. It should be possible to place all of them in locations where electricity and water are so abundant that no one cares about their use.
Heck, people are seriously talking about putting them in space (although I don't see how they will be able to solve the cooling problem).
Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...
Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.
Careful, your bias is showing.
The important difference WRT beer is that the water used in the process likely in a larger part goes towards... the beer itself. This in turn is going into the person who drinks it. So, the water here is actually hydrating human beings.
This can be argued as one of the 2-3 absolutely necessary uses of water. Hydrating people.
So, spending less than the beer industry is not that great of an achievement.
However, a casual reader may see comparison to "beer" and think "oh yeah, beer, just a random thing out of a million, so yeah AI is totally ordinary".
Which is a very incorrect conclusion to reach.
Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.
Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans.
It's a strawman.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
And so in that context all water usage is not equal: watering a golf course where run off goes back to local estuaries is different to evaporative cooling is different to industrial or residential usage.
But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?
We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to.
This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it.
Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system.
[0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.
Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.
They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.
If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.
The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.
Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.
This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods.
Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.
Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.
Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen
Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage.
Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.
If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.
A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.
Kind of reminds me of things like "low fat" labels on foods that have little fat anyway, but tons of sugar.
In this case, electricity is the elephant in the room.
There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded.
Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)
Nothing but costs! All of those people have been replaced by AI. What's the point of keeping all those economically useless people alive?
This is our future if we don't achieve the fabled post-scarcity society soon.
You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.
There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.
Also agree there are other ways we should pursue in parallel regarding emissions.
The difference between an average diet and a vegan diet via Scarborough et al. 2023/Poore & Nemecek 2018 is in the realm of 1450kg CO2e/year.
Assuming those numbers, that difference is around 14,500 prompts per day, or ~5.3M prompts per year.
So unless the prompt estimates are off by more than two orders of magnitude...
Basically, there's a lot of words in your initial link, but they all hinge on the readers taken the stated energy assumption for a single (undefined) prompt at face value. If that initial assumption is wrong (at min, it's poorly defined in your link) all further conclusions are invalid.any a scientific publication have done this same trickery =].
They don't define what a query is when they are talking about AI power usage. If we want to get serious, we'd tie usage to tokens since we can actually track token usage.
Huh? The latter blog post does link to the former's blog, but not as a source for that claim. It cites an Altman blog, an estimate from EpochAI, an article in the MIT Technology Review (albeit one that estimates 3x higher), and a paper put out by Google. It's really surprisingly well cited and I don't know how you came away from it thinking it was a circular reference. The google study is in the subheading!
1) I click your link
2) I click the link associated with the 0.3 Wh of energy claim in the section "The full cost of a prompt".
3) The link from 2) takes me to a blog post from Hannah Ritchie. In Hannah's post, I click a link associated with the following excerpt:
"Third, as a result, more recent estimates suggested that the assumptions I relied on (h/t to Andy Masley’s work on this) — that one standard query used 3 watt-hours (Wh) of electricity — were possibly an order of magnitude too high. In this case, I was happy to be conservative and overestimate the energy use."
4) This link takes me to the author of your original post, but earlier.
None of this quantifies cost per token, which is really the much more relevant metric than whatever a "cost per text based query" means => which I think is both quite broad and quite model dependent.
This source says that a 100 prompt spends half a liter of water https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
I remember this year google reported one google search spend a drop of water (or 5 drops, around that)
Doubly so when they use such innocuous and authoritative titling as "Our World in Data" which implies some collectivist, community-based outlook that this website is indeed not.
To wit, this page is produced in part by the Global Change Data Lab which is a team of economists, and YCombinator.
I'm going to have to ask for a little more rigour than "they use data".
Data can be wielded in all manner of manipulative fashion to suit a preferred narrative. And when it's wielded by engineers defending large AI (or any) companies, they should at least acknowledge the fact that the data reporting is "coming from inside the house", so to speak.
> U.S. specific estimates put beef water use at 317, 441 and 808 gallons per pound of boneless beef when precipitation water is not accounted for in calculations.
So, let's just say around 400 gallons of water per pound of beef if you don't include rainfall use.
Each almond takes about a gallon of water to grow: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
A "drop" is not well defined, but some math says there's about 75,000 drops in a gallon: https://www.quora.com/How-many-drops-of-water-can-fit-into-o...
Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.
That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.
For for thousands of pounds of beef, I’ve barely used any water at all. Don’t notice the extra consumption on my well at all, and I have a very low producing spring fed well (1 gallon per minute).
“Vegan” crops on the other hand line corn which are irrigated in many parts of the country use a great deal of water and often very inefficiently so.
In other words, bringing up some anecdotal, hyper specific (how many meat eaters just "have a few cows"?) information says absolutely nothing about the truth of the matter, but a lot about what you believe constitutes an argument.
Now measure the amount of electricity the same prompt will use in 6 years when both algorithmic efficiency and 3-4 generations of silicon lower that by 95% (or more).
Will your microwave become 95% more efficient over the next 6 years? No.
Also how many video prompts will the average person run in a given year? Almost certainly 0. I heavily use AI daily and have probably played with AI video less than 4 times, ever.
Yet certainly the average person will use 20,000-100,000 microwave minutes over their lifetime. I use my microwave for 2-3 minutes every day at lunch for example.
From first principles, the idea that electricity use = bad is wrong. If your electricity comes from burning coal or lignite, then obviously yes using that electricity has bad externalities.
But a french person running their microwave on Nuclear powered grids? This is good. Dirty energy sources is the problem. Not energy use itself.
But as chips improve and the algorithms improve (eg. a paper just came out about getting the same results with 90% less inference using a few algorithmic techniques...on top of the fact we've already had multiple 90% efficiency jumps in AI already) the energy use per prompt will drop over time.
Meanwhile energy use per microwave minute will not meaningfully improve over time. So to make the comparison is silly.
And to pretend like the efficiency of AI will never improve given it runs on compute which by definition constantly becomes more efficient, is dumb.
Very little water that would have been used for any other purpose, or isn’t naturally returned to the water cycle, ends up being consumed in the production of the burger patty.
To be clear I think your point about AI not consuming all that much water relative to other things is valid, but comparing it to the water consumed by eating meat weakens your point for anyone that hasn’t bought into the bunk “cows are driving climate change” narrative.
I hadn’t heard about cows eating alfalfa though, where is that happening? Wouldn’t it be more valuable to sell it to people instead of using it as feed?
> Around 14 percent of the 3 670 km3 of freshwater withdrawn each year for the irrigation of crops and pasture is allocated to produce feed items for livestock
[1]: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/a7f...
Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1].
Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3].
It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the exact same way.
Edit: can't reply
> AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid
Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on.
Same with nuclear power in Germany and GreenTech in much of the America.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-tech...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-gives-20-year-tax-...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afr...
[3] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...
So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.
Every company and project I know of has a long list of things they want to do that they believe would be good for customers - but they cannot afford the people needed, and the risk is too high to borrow. That is if AI was really increasing efficiency in a good economy they would be keeping everyone and getting more work done with them.
Of course in reality we cannot know if AI has really increased efficiency - we only have short term measures at best which we know from experience are often wrong. (most often because there are many ways you can make a shortcut today that will kill your long term)
What are you referring to here? The latest fad before AI was crypto, or maybe "the metaverse" and I don't think anyone credited those for layoffs. Before that, the latest large round of layoffs was during what, 2008? And the blame for that was correctly laid on the very real economic collapse occurring.
Humans have some repeatable bugs in our wetware, and it can be predictably exploited in a way that is hard to correct. It isn't "some people" - it's all of us, and the moment we think we're immune is the moment that we are most easily affected.
Yes, even the smartest of us are idiots in some very predictable ways.
AI is also:
- Boosting existing small businesses and enabling the creation of new small businesses by making previously expensive resources like market research, accounting/legal advice, etc. available for $20/month.
- Helping the world progress towards cheaper healthcare: https://www.vox.com/health/487425/open-ai-chatgpt-diagnosis-...
- Allowing lower income communities to access legal advice that would previously have been prohibitively expensive: https://www.probonoinst.org/2026/02/06/ai-and-technology-hel...
If Anthropic can allow millions of people from all around the world to access these benefits, why shouldn't it be worth a trillion dollars?
Wealth in the modern world is not a zero sum game. Wealth is created, not allocated. The fact that Anthropic is worth a trillion does not prevent you from making money.
This is naive and shows lack of understanding of second order effects. Technology has been so far one of the only things to lift all boats. The last 100 years almost eliminated extreme poverty, hunger and improved material life for everyone. How? Technology - agricultural, industrial.
Of course AI is going to be a rising tide but there will be a blip where people can lose jobs.
Wealth inequality is just a proxy issue or jealousy. Industrial revolution also increased inequality (just in narrow terms).
Can you provide any evidence for the supposed rising tide? So far I've seen nothing that indicates that anyone besides the people directly invested in AI companies will benefit from it. Even the best case scenario right now - software developers becoming more productive - doesn't actually benefit anyone not invested in AI companies.
People losing their jobs (and in many cases, their livelihoods/lives as a result) are also not the only negative effects.
> Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
Sure but we are talking about whether the enormous investment into AI infrastructure is prudent or not. Also I reckon most people on here made a living just fine before everything moved to remote data centers, and many if not most HNers workloads could run on individual machines... But that's another conversation.
Some people get an Angry. They love their Angry, and nobody will take it from them.
People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.
The world would be better without nuclear technology! Yes, it can be used to generate electricity in a much cleaner way than other technologies, but its potential to kill so many people has shaped geopolitics for generations. If we could get the energy without the destruction, that would be ideal, of course. But there's an unacceptable chance that nuclear weapons will kill everyone I care about.
I think AI is actually similar. It's really useful for all sorts of stuff - I'm running multiple agents writing code as we speak. But it's also going to make the world much more dangerous by giving people the ability to kill and spy like never before.
There are better arguments than the water thing.
Are these things usually convincing? The general pattern is that people take a position on something and then find one paper with a DOI identifier that backs the position. The Elephant and The Rider and so on. Trying to provide someone with evidence of the falsehood of their claims rarely makes them reconsider and often makes them dig their heels in while they search for a new paper with a DOI identifier.
We're in an unprecedented time in the information age when people can rapidly achieve basic competency at many things using Wikipedia, Google, and LLMs critically. If information availability and search were the constraint, one would expect us to reach greater alignment with facts.
The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality. In practice, I think the social psychologists are right. For the most part, we form the model of reality and then we seek information that supports it. So if you increase the total amount of information what you do is increase the ability for someone to select out that which supports their model.
That's not to say I don't appreciate these things. It's just that I don't think facts move public opinion very much.
The interesting thing that more information and better search provides is that it accelerates the divide between truth-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily falsifying information) and confirmation-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily supporting information). In general, one can imagine that the former will be more successful at modeling the world ex humanity at least. But if others believe something is true, often a direct approach at their facts is not the best approach to get the outcome.
You should read Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus. He calls this "the naive view of information," which is ignorant of the existence of what he astutely identifies as "intersubjective" realities (see also Angela Cooper-White's entry on "intersubjectivism" in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion):
[...] its deepest and most complex
usage is related to the postmodern
philosophical concept of
constructivism or, in social
psychology, social constructionism –
the notion that reality is co-
constructed by participants in a
relationship and in society.
Historically Jungian psychology and indeed religion (a form of proto-psychology, from which Jung inherits by way of the alchemical tradition; see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) was humanity's collective storehouse of wisdom and techniques for managing intersubjective realities and group "information hygiene." Such techniques are now being lost to antiquity with the late 20th and 21st century focus on only objectively verifiable, quantitative measurements (as opposed to the private subjective, qualitative phenomena experienced as the inner ruminations, contemplations, and dream life of the individual).
White Rose: Do you ever think
that if you imagined or
believed in something, it
could come true... Simply by
will?
Angela: Yes. Actually, I did
believe that. But I'm slowly
having to admit that's just
not the real world... Even if
I want it to be.
White Rose: Well, I guess it
all depends on what your
definition of real is.
I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era. But I think we can add this to the list of our poorly-grounded narratives.
There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
At least from the Newtonian perspective, reality definitely unfolds either one way or the other, and it's not a matter of opinion.
> There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information, which "says that information leads to truth, and knowing the truth helps people to gain both power and wisdom." You miss the point of the root comment.
You won't hear me claim otherwise.
> This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information
That seems unlikely to me as I didn't say anything about "power" or "wisdom".
I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?
My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out.
But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/industrial users, in a way that pushes them toward non-potable sources wherever possible.
A fun Texas water fact I always bring up: the entire state’s monthly freshwater use is roughly a week of freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay. Texas would be the 8th-largest GDP in the world if it were a country, and its whole monthly freshwater demand is basically a few months of water that the Chesapeake just dumps into the ocean. (Of course, estuaries make use of the water so it's not just wasted but it's illustrative imo)
Another fun comparison point is yearly Texas uses 0.08% the volume of the Great Lakes in freshwater but ~ 30-50% of the volume of all the lakes in Texas.
We've got a lot of water but it's not distributed evenly and we should probably build some sort of water pipeline eventually so water rich states can sell to water poor states.
Again, this is all just speculation by someone who knows not a damn thing about municipal water management.
I live near the Potomac and always figured the region was wet enough that water was not a concern. You have me rethinking that somewhat.
Export an abundant resource for a scarcer one seems win/win to me. Kind of the point of interstate commerce.
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/global-fres...
There is also an excess of electricity (thanks to gas peaker plants), so there are lots of transmission lines being built. (My property has an old transmission line on it, and then a new one perpendicular to that, solely built to try to do something with all the excess gas and then excess electricity being generated.)
So with that in mind... we'd probably rather our lake doesn't get drained, thanks, and is just left the way it is.
That's 6 billion gallons a day. And if there were a supply of lots of fresh water, you could expect the consumption by agriculture in desert areas to go way up, so yes, it is entirely possible for lakes to get drained by schemes like thus, such as the Aral Sea disaster. Lake Chad and Lake Poopó are examples from two other continents of the same level of destruction.
The Great Lakes are part of the United States and Canada. If the United States or Canada would like to repurpose the water within them for some better use then that sucks for you
Draining the Great Lakes is not a good idea.
https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/program-areas/water-diver...
DCs will just use the cheapest source that meets their needs. If they have to treat greywater and that costs more than municipal potable water, they'll use the potable water. (In part this is utilities selling their potable water too cheaply.)
> Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?
No; if it was cheaper for DCs, they'd already be doing it. But it isn't an insurmountable cost -- DCs still pencil with slightly more expensive cooling.
It’s probably still not too bad but there’s at least some work done that’s „used up“ by letting tap water (or probably demineralized water used for cooling) evaporate.
When that water source is underground wells, this can take years (on the fast end) or decades (on the moderate end) to get back down. Look at California's water issue -- so many wells extracting water for farming has changed the land topography.
Also, when water 'comes back', it might come back in the ocean and not on land... reducing the available fresh water without desalination.
Data centers need the water to cool... but maybe there's room to find incentives for them to do so while making sure our water bills don't go up like our electric bills are because of the extra load they are putting on utilities.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/virginia_datacenter_w...
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/25/m...
In a far science fiction future, I could e.g. imagine connecting LLM inference data centers to a global data network instead of always having to drive up to them to ask my prompts.
However the place for that to be least likely to be a problem would be Wisconsin with their evaporated water blowing east over top of the Great Lakes 90% of the time and any excess humidity will rain back down or slow down lake evaporation because the air over the lakes is already saturated with humidity most of the time.
But there still can be a problem if all that water is being pumped from deeper underground aquifers instead of surface water, so the source still matters. Those aquifers still should replenish fairly quickly in that area, but draining aquifers can happen in decades if the demand is there, while replenishment from non-surface aquifers can take hundreds of years even in water filled areas. And in certain ground compositions, underground aquifers can collapse and subside if the water is mostly drained, never again being able to hold that much water again and causing changes in surface topology.
Just like an agriculture, data center puts water to cool chips and ships token to some other reason?
For a pre-chewed eli5 overview, check this: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
A responsible human must always verify information. I DW as "secondary l" information source. For instance https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-ai-need-so-much-energy/video-...
tldr: chip immersion uses less water but is more expensive. Water evaporation is the opposite. Datacenters will use the cheapest they can get away with. Water is scarse; evaporated water is as unavailable as contaminated water. Read the information sources.
FWIW the comment is just at +2 at the moment, I think it is just at the top of the thread because it is recent and has discussion.
This suggests a simple fix: charge more to the datacenters (not people) for the water, to make the other option competitive.
No need to throw baby with the ... erm, bathwater.
"Since the technology uses synthetic fluids, it requires significantly less water than other approaches." This is like saying that a new car radiator uses less water than an old water-based one, like yeah technically it requires water to work but you aren't boiling it away.
It does mention the real ways to use less water too, either chillers (which use way more power) or running in a colder climate.
Anyway agricultural water usage is way worse in California.
But it doesn't have to happen in California.
This whole time I've been wondering how it's possible that people don't realize how common evaporative cooling is for much larger buildings that are far more numerous than these data centers, and especially in dry climates where drought is common.
Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Datacenters expel water filled with all kinds of heavy metals and other kinds of toxic sludge. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
It should be pretty obvious the parallel I’m drawing here. Where’d you get your epidemiology PhD?
What I suspect happened here is that you found this study by Googling for it, and forgot that it is in fact very easy to get a capsule summary of any published study posted on HN.
~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.
That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.
One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.
The bigger concern though, is the power requirements. Which are set to double or triple the energy use of the entire Province (analogous to a State in the US).
https://ucalgary.ca/sustainability/mobilizing-alberta/climat...
Air pollution, GHG and water use are concerns, but these projects will not dramatically increase the load on the electric grid.
Natural gas is cheap and abundant in Alberta, and the province (actually the whole country, via transfer payments) benefits financially from resource revenues from extracting the gas. So, these projects are generally an easy sell to the public.
There are already have a couple in Calgary and they're hooked directly to the grid. The cost of electricity for the city shot up at the same time. Also, there have been a few brownouts caused by them not being ready to handle late night draws from those data centres.
That's at least what I'm seeing. Though, admittedly, it's from older project articles. Maybe something has changed in recent months?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ai-data-centre-albert...
this bit especially tells me the reader needs a pile of salt.
e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.
So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
It’s all just a lack of imagination.
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
Citizens had to sue their town to force them to give up water usage, something Google was adamant about hiding from the public.
When there is no accountability, trust plummets. There is no reason to trust anything from these corpos or their pro-corpo rags.
That doesn't seem to be an unusual state of affairs at all; it instead seems like a very normal way of doing things.
But if you think this is honestly a GOOD thing, you have deep anti-human sentiments.
Let's calm down a bit and bring this back down to earth, shall we?
Suppose you buy your groceries from a company.
Do you have a right to inspect that company's books to evaluate things like their energy use and their water consumption?
Yes? No?
Should you have that right?
I haven't stated an opinion here at all, nor have I defended anything. I've merely relayed some observations that I understand to be true, and I've asked some questions.
But I shall now allow myself to be opinionated: You doin' ok over there, bud? You seem to be attacking the choir.
So you could have a closed-loop water system cooling your machines or chips, but still be consuming water to cool the coolant. And they will advertise this as "closed loop." Better to ask if they have a cooling tower.
Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
That being said, I’m not too worried about it. I think it’s okay if your average person has this misconception, because at the end of the day they are correct that datacenters threaten their water supply. They might not have the mechanism right. The resultant skepticism might force hyperscalers to commit to water preservation.
If republicans and centrist dems didn’t run the show right now I would say regulation should be passed forcing datacenters to treat all water prior to expelling it back into the water supply, with a state funded test facility located on premise to make sure they’re doing it right.
And not to mention - and this is for the AI cheerleaders that actually read this far - the air pollution. Musk’s datacenter in Memphis is running on GAS GENERATORS. So in many cases the DCs are actually polluting the air as well as the water. In a poor and predominantly black neighborhood of course. It’s just absolutely disgusting and the backlash against this will be swift and harsh. Honest to God us tech people are no different from those at Dow chemical that dump(ed) metric shit tons of highly carcinogenic PFAS into countless rivers. I work in this industry. But I don’t have the ability to fool myself the way most of HN seems to.
There is ample evidence around the world of data centers causing extreme water crises [1].
Not a water expert but I find the focus on evaporation very confusing. Draining ground water and aquifers causes environmental degradation in itself and waste water from data centers can’t just be fed back into the water cycle?
1) https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-08-17/ais-backyar...
The result is that now I think water usage should be taken into account when siting data centers. Great Lakes and eastern seaboard fine, maybe not as much in California or Arizona.
> my breathing in making the blog post above might well have evaporated more water than occurred (incrementally) from all four AI estimates.
Clearly his continued breathing is not as much of an "economically effective use of water" as AI. If clean water ever becomes a scarce resource in California, thankfully he's already done the ChatGPT queries needed to justify cutting back on 68-year-old Emeritus Distinguished Professors.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
Discussed here:
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-n...
> The one remaining question: why the clean step change?
In the middle of this piece, he runs into a critical flaw in his reasoning and just shrugs it off.
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-mem...
Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.
What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.
> shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe.
Is rare earth mining specifically for semiconductor manufacturing actually a significant driver? My intuition is that rare earth and most raw material mining would be driven much more by EV car motors and batteries.
Certainly you can say all energy use is indirectly responsible for the pollution of the oil, solar, wind, etc. I don't disagree at all! I'm say in-addition to the pollution of raw inputs like energy - contemporary industries have additional and unavoidable side products.
> are earth mining harms millions around the globe.
Those mines are going to operate day after day because it's unfortunately the best economic opportunity in those areas. Those areas deserve our support to improve their socioeconomic realities but opposition to data centers in rich countries does not suddenly provide better opportunities to those regions.
This IS the complaint.
For places that don't have plenty of water, that becomes trickier: Capacity is finite.
> 6. Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below.
The prompter should have redone this image a couple of times until they had all three actually draining the lake.
1. Tallying the total water consumption impact, embodied water (construction), operational water (cooling), indirect water (electricity generation), supply chain water, etc.
2. Mapping current water intensity onto AI growth forecasts through 2030+
And if you look at those things in combination, there are reasons to be alarmed.
Who are these people who think AI will end civilization? Ya'll know it's just autocomplete and deepfakes, right? Maybe they need to read a book about the industrial revolution? It changed the world entirely, but it didn't end it.
U.S. power generation is the largest industrial user of water, withdrawing approximately 47.7 trillion gallons in 2021, mostly for cooling thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, natural gas).
Gotta love statistics.
“His 68-year-old hardware with 50,000-year-old architecture is enjoying and struggling with the promise, threats, and turbulence of the AI revolution.”
You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:
> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-int...
The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
Cities are…people. Literally the most important use of water.
So far, AI seems to just put people out of work and enrich a small group of oligarchs who own the technology.
If tech companies want people to change their view away from my above statements above maybe they should spend less time moving to the far right and being hostile to regular people.
We already see that the public perceptions of AI is collapsing: https://www.highereddive.com/news/gen-z-ai-gallup-poll-negat...
Peter Thiel is out there building a military AI surveillance state and basically all the tech billionaires are turning MAGA and anti-democracy.
I don’t really care how much water AI uses, I’m not going to sit back and make excuses for billionaire assholes and their revenue toys. I don’t benefit from AI being embraced by society outside of stuff like cancer research (which was happening before LLMs took over the mainstream).
In reality, the most likely outcome is that I’ll be harmed by AI. I will be replaced by software and the billionaires who replaced me won’t exactly create a utopia, will they?
AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.
Both sides have dishonest reporting
If we're trying to deny the usage "tier," I'd argue we're being intentionally obtuse at worst and foolish at best.
Sidebar, I'm very curious to see where AI goes. Definitely not on the hype train. More curious than anything. This article was a breath of fresh air.
But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters.
Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?
Ah yes, those invaluable tens of jobs created by DCs....
Do you really not consider taxes before repeating this tired argument?
[1] https://www.loudoun.gov/DocumentCenter/View/219184/General-F...
>Using the broader initial AI water use estimate of 32,000 acre-ft/year to 290,000 acre-ft/year
Note : 1 acre-foot is approximately equal to 325,851 gallons.
AI : That estimate converts to approximately 10.4 billion to 94.5 billion gallons per year.
Ya 10 billion gallons of water (low estimate) is totally nothing. Thx for this informative blog post.
28.6 million gallons per day.
Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord.
There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.
Golf courses use nearly 100x more water per day than datacenters, nearly 2b gallons per day. [1]
Residential lawn water usage is ~9b gallons per day. [0]
0 - https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/docs/f...
1 - https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...
You could imagine running way more water, but I guess these racks are extremely dense.