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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Data centers use very little water, right down to none if they want. And state-of-the-art hyperscale data centers really are operated by AIs.

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This is false. Evaporative cooling systems consume significant amounts of water and do not reuse it. They can't anyway, recondensing the water would release all the heat they removed by evaporating it.

You don't have to evaporatively cool a data center. You can make a direct trade between energy efficiency and water consumption.

You don’t have to but in hotter climates, especially those with higher energy costs (ca), it’s a lot cheaper to cool evaporatively.

You don't HAVE to, but most of the big ones do.

Source on that water claim? Everything I've seen suggests the opposite.

You believe lies, 99% of data shows that data centers do not use appreciable amounts of water compared to almond farms, or gold courses, or bog standard lawns.

https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/data-centers-less-wa...

compared to almond farms? You phrase that as if almond farms use a reasonable amount of water.

Present your own data

Not OP, but here's a link from one of the previous times this was discussed.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

Almond farming uses massive amounts of water, which has caused environmental impact concerns in the past.

That source says data centers use a lot of water. Less than all almond farms combined, sure, but it doesn't support the parent argument. It's also 3 years out of date, and not relevant to protests against all the data centers that have not yet been completed.

Present your own data

You say that like environmentalists support those things. We don’t. We regularly criticize golf courses as a waste of water and land. We regularly call out the water waste and ecosystem impact of manicured, uniform lawns.

Most people who believe that data centers use a lot of water aren't mislead about how much water data centers use, but they are unaware of how much water everything else uses. In the great scheme of things data centers simply do not evaporate that much water. They are too small and too few. As a comparative example, all the data centers in Arizona combined use less than 1/50th of the water evaporated by Arizona's own thermal power stations. Or, to choose another benchmark, the evapotranspiration of the rice crop in California is more than 250x the water used by data centers in California.

I think also to a degree, even if someone knows those other water use figures, it's easy to see an intrinsic value to the community from those sources. Many people do not see much value in pushing AI to such a degree where all this new compute is required, and others see a negative impact from this activity. It's much easier to argue against something you feel is wrong or bad than something that is arguably crucial for day-to-day life like electricity and staple crops.

Of course. The American consumer is the greatest hypocrite of all time. Their cars, fuel, airline travel, hamburgers, and paper goods are beyond reproach. Your matrix multiplication is an abomination.

> Data centers use very little water, right down to none if they want. And state-of-the-art hyperscale data centers really are operated by AIs.

There are many, many reasons to oppose datacenters. Not the least is they're there to drive inequality to ever-greater heights and they're 21st century version of the toxic waste dump (put 'em where people are weak and marginalized).

But water use is a very simple argument, and sometimes you have to pound on those to get through to the general public that's not immediately affected.

Sorry but no, you don't get to lie just because your arguments don't resonate with the public. That makes you a bad person.

> Sorry but no, you don't get to lie just because your arguments don't resonate with the public. That makes you a bad person.

You misunderstand: data centers usually do use a lot of water, and I think the lie is "data centers use very little water." I believe it's possible for them to use little, but that's a choice that costs money. What I mean was instead of arguing the nuances of cooling or a particular project (which probably keeps all the details secret anyway), it makes sense to simplify and emphasize the water use angle.

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