Data centers consumed 264B gallons of water as drought hits nearly 63% of US | Hacker News Reader

Data centers consumed 264B gallons of water as drought hits nearly 63% of US

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24 pointsyogthos27 comments

While it seems reasonable to comment about how we're using water it also seems like a complex topic.

What happens to the (slightly warmer) water after it has been used? Is there a way we could return it in a way to minimise impact? I.e if we extract ground water should we inject it back into the ground? Would that even matter?

In the end I have a feeling that the most efficient solution will most likely be to just increase the price of water during a drought. People will complain but it won't be long before the big consumers will happily adjust their consumption or move to an area with abundant water.

Lawn & Grass Watering consume roughly 8 to 11 times the volume consumed by AI servers globally, so we can reduce Lawn by 10%

I've been wondering this too (what happens to the warmer water), and haven't found a satisfying or objective explanation. Everything is "AI drinking my water" which... just makes no sense.

Systems with open-loop evaporative cooling towers lose water to evaporation.

Probably a redundant comment, but it's the evaporation, i.e. conversion of water from liquid to gaseous form, that provides the cooling effect. At that point it's gone.

Using water to cool a data center is absolutely not equivalent to using it for farming. Once you irrigate a field, that water is gone. But if water is cooling something, then it can be collected and used again. Of course, that requires a city or county to have a water reclamation program.

Likewise, if you water a lawn, that water is gone. But if you flush water down a toilet or a shower drain, the water is potentially reusable. Just needs to be cleaned.

Waste water can also be used for cooling. I believe that's how the Palo Verde nuclear plant outside of Phoenix is cooled.

> Once you irrigate a field, that water is gone.

This doesn't seem true to me, in the sense that anything is truly "gone". The water doesn't cease to exist or is converted to anything other than water. It just moves.

Right. The water isn't gone from the universe, certainly. But it's gone from the city/county water system. You've then got to wait for it to come back via the natural water cycle. Whereas it's a lot more efficient to keep as much water as possible in the human system and just keep cleaning and reusing it.

"it can be collected" is far different from "is collected".

If the data center uses evaporative cooling then most of the water vapor leaves that water basin. While some of that irrigation water goes into the ground and stays in the water basin for a longer time.

Likewise, if you water a lawn - and assuming you are not so daft as to do it when the sun is high - the most of the water will go into the ground, reaching eventually the acquifer or a waterway, for eventual downstream reuse.

This is why cities in dry climates, or places facing a drought, will have restrictions like "No outdoor watering between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m."

Its about a third of the amount of water used to irrigate golf courses across the United States.

(The number in the article doesn't specify whether data center water usage is just us-bound or global)

There’s around 1M acres of alfalfa grown in California each year. Each acre requires around 5 acre-feet of water, or 1,629,250 gallons per acre.

1,000,000 acres * 1,629,250 gallons per acre = 1.629 trillion gallons of water. That’s just California.

That's about 0.25% of total water consumption. I.e. the entire country uses about that much per day.

>According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025

I'm sorry, what? "Palantir" wasn't bad enough?

Anyway this is silly propaganda as usual. USA gets through over 300B gallons daily. Irrigation alone is over 100B of that. Most of that goes to corn for animal feed. You're not allowed to get all high and mighty about AI water use if you still eat meat.

> You're not allowed to get all high and mighty about AI water use if you still eat meat.

What is the origin of this rule? What is the enforcement mechanism?

It's from KJV Vegans 2:11, Pauls Epistle to the Vegans, chapter 2, verse 11. Know your Bible, man!

999 billion liters of water.

From a quick search I gather that US citizens' daily use is around 300B gallons https://watercalculator.org/footprint/how-united-states-uses...

I was just curious of the number and scale.

Just once I'd like to see one of these data center stories acknowledged that data centers existed before the current AI bubble, and maybe try to engage with the question of why nobody seemed to care one bit about them until the past couple of years.

yeah, in very fine print on page 6.

People did care, but there weren't anywhere near as many locations so you heard less about them.

For an example from 5 years ago, at https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/29/google-water-data-cen...

> Residents of an Oregon city in the Columbia River Gorge are uneasy with tech giant Google’s latest plan to expand in the region. ...

> The deal to deliver groundwater to Google has drawn skepticism from members of the public who’ve grown wary of Oregon’s water stability in a changing climate, and that suspicion was on full display at a recent City Council meeting. ...

> “I know a number of people have voiced concerns … and you know I share those concerns. Water’s just absolutely critical to our community,” Richardson said at Monday’s council meeting. “As I’ve said to you, Mr. Mayor, and probably to others, this city is an oasis on the edge of a big desert, and the only reason we’re able to thrive here is because of our water supply.”

I feel like it’s disingenuous to talk about drought in one place and water consumption in another. Water is one of those interesting resources that’s valuable but only in huge amounts that make it largely not transported except for pipelines in very specific circumstances. So it’s not like water use near a plentiful source of water necessarily has any impact on water availability in a drought area (although it could for instance if the drought is happening downstream).

There is plenty of bad stuff in the world it seems silly to invent new things to be upset about unless they are actually happening.

> There is plenty of bad stuff in the world it seems silly to invent new things to be upset about unless they are actually happening.

Unfortunately, ragebaiting about this specific issue is very lucrative.

> I feel like it’s disingenuous to talk about drought in one place and water consumption in another.

I recall my dad had a Tanzanian visit via work. My dad took him out for dinner, and as soon as they got a table the waiter came with glasses and a jug of water, as is customary here.

The guy got really upset, neither of them had asked for water and as such he thought it might go to waste.

My dad had to explain that in Norway water is not a scarce resource, at least not to the point of having to save a jug of drinking water.

1-2% of the whole US consumption

I mean, if they would just stop launching the water via rocket into the sun after using it then it would not be so bad. I strongly suspect the water could somehow be re-used. Though we might need to spend several decades in r&d in order to figure out how.

According to this from oracle the technology is there for closed loop systems. https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/closed-loop-co... But is it green washings?

That's the joke OP is making. Some people (albeit usually teenagers) legit think that water is a nonrenewable resource and once it's used, it's gone forever.

The USA consumes 2 trillion gallons per year in lawn irrigation so what?

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