Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad. But nobody really does this because you don't want to keep adding additives to water you're constantly discharging.
The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered.
Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.
I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped.
So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear.
I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.
Maybe but there are citywide chlorine flushes of their water supply. some worse than others
Erin Brockovich tracks this
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/omen-ais-plan-to-optimize-...
I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
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"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"
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Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works.
So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak.
And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
Because companies pay for lobbyist, give donations, and other perks to politicians. Simple as that ... And companies a a-political, they simply give money to both sides, so who is in power has less effect.
While you the normal voter, only matter a few times, and with increased irrelevant as how powerful your vote is.
The fact that companies can now vote in local elections (in some states, you can guess the states colors), tells you how deep the corruption has gone.
After all, the executives of the company (the important people) know not to swim in that lake (their swimming pools are clean) nor drink the water (as they can drink Perrier bottled water).
Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
Otherwise it's an isolated demand for rigor.
You can tell that something has an ulterior motive when the rule or its enforcement special cases the doing of a generic thing only when it's being done by the people being targeted.
All of those are regulated and studied.
> some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants
The whole point of random sampling is to ensure you need as miniscule amount of water as possible. These tests checking likely polutants is also not a bad thing.
Are you claiming these pools are massively poluting water? Or are you just angry that potentially large polutants are not allowed to just do what they want?
They towed it outside the environment.
DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.
Profit over safety all day long
Hey where’s that person from yesterday who argued with me over the 1m vs 1cm hole in the boat?
Everyone saying stop talking about data center water use is missing the entire point as this article shows.
Reference? What's the efficiency of the systems like used here?
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
Even you use HN.
Not everything can be local.
My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
A website that runs on an infra that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs serving hundreds of thousands of users with very small loading time.
> My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house
> (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that.
"Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that."
The largest possible single digit annual electricity bill would be $9. That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
I don't think Dang is responsible of that part, but I may be wrong.
HN used to run on a single server (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041), and I don't see why that would have changed given that the hardware keeps getting better.
> Why does HN use Algolia for search
Algolia is a YC company, it's pretty much free marketing for their asset.
> That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
You don't need to run it for 24 hours a day, nor do you need it to be the only process running on your machine.
Jitsi is a bit heavy for a phone, but easily fits on an old M1 macbook/mac mini, whose idle power consumption is well below 10W (idle power consumption is what matters, since your machine isn't going to be handling calls all the time). If you shut it down at night, you're almost good. And for any additional service you serve from the machine, you reduce the cost per service further.
Modern computers are fast, and fascinatingly energy efficient.
(And honestly I don't see why it would have changed given that the hardware has been getting faster in the meantime).
For example, what is the benefit of google existing? Sure you can do google searches. You can use maps. But can you quantify it?
The benefits of living in a society that respects pluralist values is that even if you personally have never used Instagram ever, you still respect what it provides for broader society.
Its easy to give a popularist argument against anything you don't like - "how does it benefit me?!". Well it need not, but others use the products.
On a side note: I'm glad to live during times where we respect pluralist values. I hate football and find it mind numbing. But its great that those people can have their fun and joy without having to convince me. And I can have mine with League of Legends.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/collectivism
“Pluralism” refers to a society supporting diverse systems of law, religion, or culture. Like the United States.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pluralism
I don’t know what “popularist” is but perhaps “populism”; however, the complement of collectivism is individualism.
From the taxes they provide
If I was in SF & working for Google or Meta then maybe you might have a point but I'm not in SF or any major metropolitan area so from my perspective the whole thing is actually a net negative.
https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-news/2024-12-02/dek...
https://ipmnewsroom.org/how-do-data-centers-benefit-the-plac...
> META received a 55 percent tax break as part of the Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program, which is a state initiative
You asked this
> How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centres?
And I gave the answer. How do you think you can eliminate the middleman?
> Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program
The amount I showed was after accounting for the Tax abatement program. And its almost as if there's a reason the state wants to have this program in the first place. Almost as if it helps broader society.
Your response is that - no you don't need the money, you can get it elsewhere.
This is a kind of senseless argument, I'll let you decide whether that's the case.
> Meta Platforms reported annual income taxes of $25.474 billion for 2025, driven by massive profit margins and a major one-time tax charge stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Despite massive recorded U.S. income, Meta's effective federal tax cash rate dropped to just over 3.5% due to extensive research and development (R&D) credits, stock option tax breaks, and bonus depreciation.
Corporate taxes are calculated on net income, i.e. revenue minus expenses. Amounts paid to employees (e.g. to do R&D) are expenses. The tax code defines which years you can deduct the expenses. Sometimes it requires you to deduct them in a later year than you incurred them, even though that's asinine and encourages companies to do buybacks instead of investing in R&D.
In years when the tax code changes, it thereby causes there to be years when companies are deducting both this year's expenses and previous year expenses they couldn't deduct earlier, and other years when they deducted less than they actually spent. The total deductions are still equal to expenses, but then disingenuous critics point to a low "cash" rate in the year deductions were shifted into, ignoring that it only happened because they weren't allowed to deduct those expenses in a previous year when they were actually incurred.
Taxed generally don't use cash-based accounting and if they did then the companies would have been able to deduct those expenses sooner.
There's a lot of excellent projects here.
Also, people in your community probably own businesses that advertise or sell directly on a Meta platform. That's money affecting many things you interact with online and offline.
Also also, you describe yourself as an ordinary person but say you have no presence on any of the largest social media or messaging platforms. I think that's fairly far out of the ordinary.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
> "I'm all right, Jack" is a British expression used to describe people who act only in their own best interests, even if providing assistance to others would take minimal to no effort on their part.
> The phrase is believed to have originated among Royal Navy sailors: when a ladder was slung over the side of a ship, the last sailor to climb on board would say, "I'm all right Jack; pull up the ladder."
> The latter half of the phrase has been used to call out unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others.
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
AI computing capacity is doubling every seven months. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-chip-production.