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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The Erin Brockovich page itself repeats the canard, on the front page, that these sites endanger ecosystems with their water consumption.

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Unfortunately the entire situation is quite confusing because in addition to spanning a wide range of geographies and local utility situations there's also a wide variance in the care taken by the different players. For example I was surprised to learn of a recent ~300 MW buildout with entirely closed loop cooling (I had erroneously believed all cooling at that scale to be evaporative). Meanwhile we've got whatever xAI is doing with "mobile" generators.

The heat has to go somewhere and that is the environment. 300 MWh is enough energy to boil over 3k metric tons of water. That's 107 medium fuel trucks for perspective.

300 MW hr is approximately nothing to the broader environment. A constant gigawatt load is (off the top of my head, probably off a bit) something like 5 sq km of solar over a 24 hour period on average. Granted some of that light would otherwise be reflected but that gets us in the rough ballpark.

In local terms its a fair bit of heating but zooming out it's a drop in the bucket.

This seemed high to me.

According to Google, one ton of water takes about 730kWh to boil. So I think you’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s only ~450 metric tons.

(But this assumes that no heat is radiated away in other forms.)

Google confused you. One needs 730 kWh to fully evaporate 1 ton of water.

Otherwise it's 1.16 Wh/kg (or kWh/ton) to rise the temprature by 1°C. Thus one needs a delta of 80°C, so 93 Wh to boil a kg of 20°C water. That's what my napkin math was based on. I used that metric a lot to calculate heat deltas in storage tanks.

I think it's the context that's confusing here. Given the topic the first thought is evaporative cooling but IIUC your intention was to give perspective by comparing to a volume of water raised to the boiling point.

This makes it seem like you think all energy consumption leads to water boiling? At the peak of a sunny day in the american southwest, a random square mile receives over 2000 megawatts of power from the sun. In a 24-hour period that same square receives ~16 gigawatt-hours of solar energy. It doesn't all get used to boil water. And as others have said, with a closed loop cooling system, no water is evaporated that isn't also re-condensed.

My 1500W space heater could boil 4.32 gallons of water every hour. But it isn't.

Luckily AI data centers produce nowhere near that amount of heat. Remember the heat is waste and 300 MWh is the total draw. Some of that energy becomes heat. That ratio is somewhere like 100:1 though. Also, the waste water is only like 10F hotter than the intake. We build GW sized PP all the time and they will leak far more heat (as like on the order of 100x) than a 300 MWh AI data center. Thought there were supposed to be engineers on this site.

> Some of that energy becomes heat.

I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).

Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.

Some? Where else does the energy go?

An electronic circuit drawing 1W of input power will dissipate all of that 1W as heat (assuming it's not outputting light or sound or other physical side effects).

In the macro physics sense, all energy eventually becomes heat somewhere. My 1500W space heater is perfectly efficient and produces 1500W of heat, and my 1500W crypto mining rig does too. Thermodynamically there's no difference. Where would the energy go if not into heat? Even energy that does things like push air or emit radiation, eventually becomes heat somewhere. In the case of a power plant, that somewhere is just very far away with the end user.

Though there might be practical differences though between the excess heat intentionally exhausted, and other heat. Just speaking from a very macro sense.

Also powerplants are quite (relatively) efficient in terms of heat-to-energy output, often >50% afair. So a 1GW power plant will generate something like 2GW of heat (or less), not 30GW.

Yeah it gets radiated into space

Data centers are massive consumers of water. There are closed loop designs that technically use less water but they: A) Make up less than 10% of data centers; B) Cost much more upfront; C) Require massive investment in waste water treatment. These designs still need to "bleed the lines" once a month and get rid of sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, anti-fungals, and PFAS

It is not at all inaccurate to say data center consumption of water is a huge concern. Too many on HN seem to be puppetting industry lines without realizing it. Closed loop systems are still uncommon and come with their own problems.

We know how much water all data centers put together consume, and it's not even close to what we spend on golf courses.

Yes golf courses use an absurd amount of water. About 2.5b/day. Data centers are about 450m/day so about a fifth of that.

But golf courses are about 2.1 to 2.2 million acres while data centers are between between 340,000 and 840,000.

But I agree with your point. We should be closing both down. They are both water guzzlers and polluting our environment

Wait, are you thinking this through carefully? Because your mitigating issue for golf courses, that they also use way more land, makes them worse, not better.

Agreed, golf courses and data centers need to be regulated and limited. Though data centers seem to use much more water per acre than golf courses. The number I pulled in the original post was global golf course water consumption not just the US. Golf courses also use 7x more pesticides than agricultural land. On the other hand data centers that try to do "closed loop" systems rely on heavy use of anti-freeze, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives which eventually leads to a toxic sludge that is a massive problem to deal with. Especially since they build up with PFAS as well.

Both are massive environmental problems and the economic externalities have not been accounted for.

Again: using more acreage makes golf courses worse.

I don't understand what you're trying to say and I think you might be very confused. Data centers use more water per acre.

If we had the exact same number of acres of golf courses and data centers, data centers would use more water.

That's the point: we won't have the same number of acres of golf courses and data centers. Golf courses intrinsically use more land.

I'm not sure that follows from the GP's numbers. The average data center size seems to be around 120,000 sqft ~ 3 acre. That means data centers also occupy between 1 and 2.5 million acres of land.

Yep companies are cheap bastards. Sure you can make environmentally sound data centers. Those are not the ones they want to build.

Trump has been neutering the EPA for a reason.

I don't know if HN is really naive or just pretending.

Is it a canard? In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing. Even if datacenters are highly efficient, if the water supply is strained, you can pollute people’s supply by drawing wells down too far and things like that.

This happened to me in the middle of the city of Philadelphia when construction of a new apartment building caused a water main collapse. Took them three days to repair. It wasn't anyone's fault. The pipe was simply very old. My water had soil in it and basically I had to run the water until all the soil was flushed. Could have been a lot worse and thankfully I was renting. A lot of these situations are simple construction issues and old pipes. It's not like a data center is pushing gray water into the system.

When AOC is waving a jar of brown water in congress she's being disengenous. Just like the killed Amazon office in NYC it's just gonna kill jobs.

>In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing.

Can you cite a source for this? I can't find it anywhere.

The other comment is correct. I meant QTS in Georgia

I thought that might be what you were referring to. As far as I know the issues there were construction causing turbidity, and water used for construction accidentally going metered. Neither are really relevant to it being a datacenter. Apparently it'll use closed-loop cooling, so it's not going to draw much water in operation either.

It does seem like a canard.

https://dustinrhone.substack.com/p/on-fayetteville-georgia

There are lots of nonsensical stories like this circulating on social media right now. Water draw for datacenters can't turn tap water brown. That's a supply or piping issue.

https://hellawater.com/why-is-my-water-brown-causes-solution... Here's one link amongst many a quick Google search that explains how low system pressure from increased demand can cause discolored water. (Check out the section on municipal water supply disruptions) I live in new orleans and entire neighborhoods need to boil water in periods of high demand.

Me: "that's a supply or piping issue"

Your page: "This discoloration happens because of rust, dirt, or old pipes in your plumbing. Problems with the city water supply can also cause it."

We're saying the same thing. It's the responsibility of the water system to pump clean water to people. Customers actually using that service can't be blamed for the system's failure to deliver it, as the customers aren't actually making the water brown themselves.

Or the responsibility of the city government not to permit a project which exceeds the capacity of the system to handle

That's a strawman, nobody is saying that the datacenters are directly turning the water brown. But if adding a single customer (the datacenters) causes the supply not being able to meet the demand and the water turns brown, then yes the datacenters was the cause. Saying it's a supply issue is like if I come to a party at your house and load all the drinks into my car and saying that there's no drinks left is a supply issue

Hyperscalers are a drain on existing infrastructure- which is exactly why the Netherlands banned them.

Companies are in the business of privatizing profits and socialising losses.

It is absolutely not a canard. The vast majority of data centers use evaporative cooling which is in fact a major consumer of water.

The industry is pushing a line about little to no use of water based on the "existence" of closed loop designs. But even the closed loop designs come with major drawbacks and require investment in waste water treatment infrastructure since they still have to "bleed the lines" monthly to get rid of the sludge that is now full of anti-freeze, PFAS, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives.

I mean, the wastewater issues can be real in some environments. It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed and mitigated. It's not like these things have the ecological impact of steel foundries or fruit orchards, but they're not parks either.

I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable". This isn't like electrification or aviation or the internet or whatnot (technologies that had clear, tangible benefits that everyone could see and understand), there is real discussion happening, by real experts, about essentially all non-physical labor being replaced!

And... what do regular folks get from that? Talking to robots doesn't look like a quality of life improvement!

Basically we in the upper stands here are having a "Let Them Eat Cake" moment, and we should stop. Things are getting ugly.

I don't see it that way at all, but then I'm a housing activist, and I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers. People just like opposing development. It's very satisfying!

When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.

The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built. People are being hypnotized by concentrated minority interests in specific spots in the country. The only big picture thing about it is the left-populist sideshow it's created.

> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.

If that was the case then why are the majority of data center projects getting scrapped?

https://gizmodo.com/data-center-project-cancellations-quadru...

Why are insiders saying they only expect about 10% of data center projects to ever be completed?

Why is 2026 already shaping up to have less than half of planned data centers break ground on construction?

Local community opposition is a big driver but so is permitting and infra procurement.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/why-...

All of this is inconvenient to big tech's "inevitability" narratives.

That Gizmodo article says none of the things you characterize it as saying.

Except sorta - "Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, who spoke to Heatmap, expects only about 10% of the projects that are currently underway to ever be completed."

Perhaps that's why he's a "former director" but that doesn't really qualify as an "insider."

Yea, my bad. "majority getting scrapped” was sloppy wording.

More accurate to say would be that a big chunk of the AI data center pipeline looks delayed/speculative. 16GW is slated for 2026, but only 5GW is actually under construction. https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outloo...

I do think it's a bit ridiculous though to not consider someone a tech insider who was a director for a decade at one of the biggest tech companies in history...

> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.

That seems very untrue - multiple areas have already banned data centers, and senators like Bernie Sanders have proposed stopping data centers nationwide. This is just the next phase of NIMBY-ism. Alternatively, source that the "data centers the industry wants are all going to get built"?

> I've seen fiercer opposition to a 4-story apartment building than to some of these data centers.

I'm guessing you're referring to rather cherry-picked data? I've seen data center opposition making even the national news, but I don't recall any '4-story apartment buildings' opposition doing so? And senators like Bernie Sanders are proposing halting data centers nationwide - are there any similar proposals to similarly outlaw such housing construction nationwide?

> People just like opposing development.… When I see a protest over a golf course opening, I'll take data center water use concerns seriously.

Agreed.

Of course multiple areas have already banned data centers. So what? The United States is absolutely enormous. Data center buildout --- especially for AI training --- has a much easier problem than housing does. Housing needs to be built near centers of economic activity, which means that every marginal unit of housing is likely to be infill and has to pass muster with relatively dense neighborhoods of people who hate development. Data centers tend to be sited in underutilized industrial tracts. There are lots of those around the country.

I feel like what's obviously happening here is that people have a rooting interest against AI, and highly-publicized pushes against "AI data centers" in specific areas are simply sparking joy for people.

Is the argument that opposition to, and proposed bans of, data centers are only occurring on sites near dense population centers, as opposed to even covering incredibly low density sites? I'd say data center opposition goes beyond housing opposition as state-wide or even national bans have been proposed.

Many people similarly have a 'rooting interest' against public housing, public transit, even new housing in general in their area, and similarly celebrate when housing, transit, etc. get stopped. <shrug>

That's exactly what I'm saying. This is an old story; it's just getting airplay because of the "AI" connection.

Bernie Sanders proposes a lot of things that are never implemented. I’m not sure his support is actually a useful signal of greater support.

it is (unfortunately) quite the opposite, if you see what he supports there is a high likelyhood of that not happening.

> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though. Freakouts about AI (which ultimately is what this is) aren't "rational" but they're eminently "reasonable".

A lot of the "sneering" I see from everyone who isn't an investor or an executive is a consequence of resistance to outreach. It's very difficult to discuss subjects with people when many now interpret factual explanations as propaganda and reassurance as manipulation.

By the way, plenty of people feared electricity a great deal (and it wasn't exactly implemented safely when it was new). In the 90s, many people also thought the Internet was a temporary fad, a mere novelty that would fade in some years.

Maybe the issue is the "reassurance" is identical to propaganda and manipulation. It definitely doesn't help that the companies having to "reassure" people have aligned themselves with so many others that have been pushing propaganda to manipulate others for some time now. Nor does it help that many of the same companies that need to "reassure" people are also actively doing the opposite - see the billboards bragging about not hiring humans, or CEOs bragging about how AI will replace the majority of people and leave them destitute.

There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.

Reassurance is identical to propaganda and manipulation insofar as all attempt to convey beliefs. Reassurance, here, should be apparently different in that it conveys true information. In the history of mankind, it has never been easier to discern between true and false information.

If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty not to as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to actively pursue policies based on falsehoods. Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.

If somebody does want to give up on research and working out the truth, please actually give up and say you don't know. Stop coming to the city council meetings and plastering "millions of gallons" on even the social medias where that's surprising.

How can the average citizen who knows nothing about engineering/technology determine that their electric bill [as the result of a new datacenter in town] won't go up as truthful or falsehood?

Condescending responses like these are only reinforcing the original point. People don't want data centers because they don't want AI forced on them.

> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.

Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.

Being angry is not what is under discussion here. Abandoning the pursuit of truth is. Participating, either unthinkingly or with malice, in misinformation campaigns is not acceptable even if you're really mad. Start a 'AI will steal our jobs' campaign if you're angry about that- I don't think most AI critics believe that's true, but the ones you're talking about must. I don't even need empathy to be on board with that, I think my job has 5 years to expiration at best.

Just stop lying and defending liars while slandering the honest people who notice! I don't care how rich the ceos making you angry are, I don't care how pure the hatred in your heart is for this technology, none of that makes it okay! You don't get to demand my empathy while defacing the commons, sorry.

I think the marketing about not hiring humans is mostly what it is. There are also foreign entities actively spreading propaganda. But their claims are so wildly insane they get shot down pretty quickly. So it isn't just about messaging. It is about not being hated. If they hate you, the truth doesn't really matter.

I keep thinking back to that e-card, "once you hate someone, everything they do is offensive."

I don't think tech companies appreciate the extent to which they used to get the benefit of the doubt just because people liked them.

> I do think the tech industry would be wise to do more outreach and less sneering, though.

The industry is actually doing real work on water issues in response to these complaints. Big tech companies are funding projects that will allow them to replenish more water than their datacenters consume. This isn’t actually that hard of a goal for them to meet, because as we know, the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale. Regardless, this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.

Anyway, all of this is a distraction compared to the real problem of carbon emissions. It confuses me that environmentalists are getting sidetracked by the water use distraction here when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.

>...the amount of water we’re talking about isn’t much on a national scale.

Water issues are always local issues. There is no national water distribution system or national aquifer.

>this will mean companies making some positive change in the communities where they build datacenters.

This will remain to be seen. So far, if it had worked out that way then there would be less vocal opposition to these data centers. Local perception seems to be that there will be nuisance to dangerous noise levels; heat islands which can cause local disruptions to weather events; closed-door agreements to build this infrastructure instead of open community involvement in the process; and other issues including concerns about excessive water usage especially in areas where there are already troubling water availability trends due to other forms of development.

>when more natural gas and coal plants are coming online.

Here in NTexas, the availability of and proximity to natural gas compression stations is key to data center siting from the ones that I have monitored. Plans seem to include construction of gas turbine generators to power the new data centers and these generators are sited on parcels very close to existing compressor stations and high-voltage power lines and small or medium local lakes.

If it's not rational it's not reasonable. The two words are more or less synonyms, unless you're using the word reasonable to mean something like "not uncommon".

AI does have clear tangible benefits everyone can see and understand! That's why ChatGPT has 800M+ actives! Those people aren't just experimenting anymore, they're getting real value. I myself ask models questions about all kinds of things many times per day, it's entirely replaced search engines for me. It's much more immediately useful than something like aviation which created a lot of noise and risk (objects falling out of the sky!) yet took many decades to become available at a price point ordinary people could afford.

> If it's not rational it's not reasonable.

That seems needlessly pedantic, even for HN. I genuinely thought the scare quotes were spelling out the distinction I was making, but for the record:

"Rational" is used in the sense of "derived from logic", or "correctly understood". "Reasonable" is used in the sense (this is very common in legal paradigms, for example) of "an understandable opinion", or "an idea likely to be held by a typical person".

[flagged]

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously... Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says... Assume good faith.

Please don't post shallow dismissals...

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> It's not a completely insane idea and like all things can be reasonably discussed

Actually it's a completely insane idea that can't be reasonably discussed.

Because they do.

If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage in comparison if we measure in per person consumption

you quickly went from "AI water consumption isn't a problem", to "it's okay because cows consume water too"

Cows don't steal people's jobs.

Right, see, again, giving away the game. It's not about the water (if it was, the objection would be easy to dismiss). Everything is downstream of a populist argument against AI progress.

The loss of income of people displaced by AI may end up eating less meat to survive.

Is this a serious comment? No one, in an environmental discussion, ignores how much water beef needs. It’s a central part of most vegan/vegetarian commentary.

But this is a conversation about data centers. It would be great if you had the capability of staying even vaguely on topic instead of spinning off into “what about” bullshit.

1. Beef uses trillions of gallons of water per year, while data centers use billions - data center water use is nowhere remotely as much as beef.

2. Despite beef using far more water, is it getting anywhere remotely as much coverage as data center water use?

3. Senators like Sanders proposed stopping data center construction nationwide - have senators proposed similar nationwide bans for beef?

You can go ahead and try to do that. Politically, to say its a DOA bill, is the understatement of the century. Also, water is renewable. This entire discussion is absurd and scientifically illiterate. There is a reason why nobody says, "party of science" anymore.

> Also, water is renewable.

Tell that to the aquafers we’re emptying that won’t refill for generations.

Water is renewable, but not necessarily in the right place or in timely manner.

Using treated potable water to cool servers is just taxpayers subsidizing server cooling.

Beef uses water, but you can eat beef.

Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.

Can you see the difference?

>> If water is the problem then why are we ignoring how much water beef needs? If we measure per person use it is hundreds times more than data center usage

> Ai uses water, but you can’t eat ai.

Almost all other foods don't use trillions of gallons of water like beef does. If someone's goal was to reduce water use, then shouldn't they be making at least as much noise about the non-necessary thing using far more water compared to data center's billions, not trillions, of gallons?

Point I am making is if we need to tackle the water issue then we need to do it via 80/20 rule, focus on the elephant in the room first. Data centers are a fly in a room with an elephant in this case.

No, that logic does not make any sense whatsoever.

Was anyone proposing to eat AI? Was anyone proposing to do data processing with a pot roast?

Why is the difference in what specific use case the consumers of these products are serving with them one that's relevant to the discussion?

Not inherently they don’t.

Inherently, they don't.

The way they are operated, they do.

Sure, but we don’t live in theory, we live in reality. Here in reality, they usually do.

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