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Comment by MatekCopatek | Hacker News Reader

What exactly are you getting at? Datacenters do use potable water from municipal sources for evaporative cooling. Are you claiming that's not true?

Here's a recent source: https://pacinst.org/publication/how-much-water-do-data-cente...

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They do use water, and the numbers look very large which makes for big scary headlines. However people who actually know how water is used in a city are used to numbers much larger than that.

it's the demand delta, not the total demand, that's concerning. Also not all use cases are created equal: using water to keep people alive is legitimate and using water to build a machine that can automatically almost count the number of vowels in a sentence is not legitimate, especially when that usage drives up demand and makes it harder to use water to keep people alive.

Why do you get to choose what is and isn’t legitimate?

Well "you" don't "get to", but this is precisely why we made the concept "states" and use "state power" to counteract other natural modalities of power.

Which is being demonstrated by the use of state power to kill data center development.

Yeah but it's all Chinese propaganda so it doesn't count this time. /s

Because the water system is a public utility funded by the people who live within the community?

Little Red hen, why do you get to choose who get's to eat your bread?

there's a really special type of crowd to whom you can say "People staying alive is good" and their response is "SOURCE??!!!"

What are you trying to achieve by posting comments like this? You're not trying to have a discussion at all.

golf courses use much more. But you don’t see massive resistance against new golf courses being planned.

Farms use an order of magnitude more than either. You don’t see any demands whatsoever on agriculture to reduce water usage.

Sure. Those should be addressed, too.

The difference is they already exist while the datacenters don't. And its a lot easier, in a democracy, to stop a thing from being built in the first place than to tear it down after the fact, what with pesky laws about private property and so forth.

Or are you really saying that if we can't solve all water usage problems then we shouldn't solve or prevent any? Is that what you're suggesting?

What an aggressive way to interact with people. Do you need a nap? Do you?

Instead of replying to your rather silly question I’ll just point to this sibling which I’ll co-sign: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568295

It is deeply funny to me that my asking a rhetorical question and using a little italics triggered you while "So, you can scream fake news all you want, but..." earned not a single complaint.

Perhaps I just struck a nerve.

Ok. For the avoidance of doubt, that is not what I was suggesting.

I would expect that a golf course construction is relatively rare event. And there is definitely no explosion of new golf courses. Total DC power consumption growth is practically exponential for the last 5 years.

>I would expect that a golf course construction is relatively rare event

That's just status quo bias, given that they're an ongoing source of water consumption. "oh it doesn't matter that [thing] is guzzling water, because it's already there!".

Exactly right. It's a lot easier to prevent an asshat venture than it is to dismantle it. Now that the public is aware, I wouldn't be surprised if new golf courses start getting the same treatment.

They haven’t been. I’m aware of new golf courses being planned in my area and I hear nothing but enthusiasm. Literally no one brings up water consumption as a concern.

This whole thing is a sublimation of vaguer anxieties about AI (which are perfectly rational!) into areas where people feel like they can make more concrete objections that are likelier to succeed. The water thing is completely fake, whether people think so or not.

Not entirely. Lack of regulations mean recycled water facilities can end up being consumption facilities with pollution risk. Also Meta plans to restore as much water as they use by 2030. Which, seems like a while to break even. That's primarily because ai data centers require a lot more cooling water and power than traditional ones. So, you can scream fake news all you want, but it is a concern and it is a good way to oppose ai in general. And power consumption, noise pollution, and pollution are also serious issues. "Whatabout this worse thing" is a pretty terrible argument. You can whatabout anything, but it doesn't make that thing any less bad. aka two wrongs don't make a right.

It’s not just whataboutism, it’s pointing out that the people up in arms about data center water usage don’t even know about the long list of things that use way more water than data centers, and when told, they don’t care.

I think it’s pretty reasonable to conclude that their beef is not really with water usage as much as a general hatred of AI, big tech, etc, and water usage is an easy thing to focus on.

golf courses don't contaminate the water supply. Amazon was just forced to settled a lawsuit for 20 million because they took a community's water supply and made it undrinkable. Now they'll be paying to improve public water treatment infrastructure and dig deeper wells looking for cleaner water. When's the last time a golf course had to do that?

Yeah, it’s one thing when SV runs the Uber script (ignoring the law to build big enough to buy politicians) to hurt cab drivers. It’s very different when it’s your neighborhood.

Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though? Sounds like a municipality problem, a water consumer shouldn't be feeding back into the system, or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices? Maybe when they first pipe in or something is being left open during construction, this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly, water supply systems are not a new technology so who is dropping the ball?

Yeah, all these stupid little municipalities have to do is shit they've literally never had to do before while getting sued out of their socks by literal trillion dollar companies.

That's all it takes for them to do their part in generating gargantuan amounts of value for people who live 1,000 miles away and their uberwealthy hardly-human CEOs and investors.

what is it that they have to do? I'm still confused as to what is causing the water to change

Have you considered Googling? Or is this the type of curiosity that one just offloads to others?

https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data...

it's social media, and a human who strongly signals they know something is usually much more reliable than a search engine for knowing the real upshot, 9 times out of 10 the person who already has a strong opinion has keyed in on the detail that even if I found a search result might not be so easy to decipher, or you could have some professional experience, anyways it was worth a shot, thanks for sharing

In the case of one amazon data center the town already had nitrates in their water due to agricultural runoff, but at levels that weren't a problem. Amazon took in hundreds of millions of gallons of that water for cooling, which evaporated away some of the water, but left the nitrates. Then amazon dumped the concentrated nitrate 'waste water' at such high volumes that it was pushed so deep into ground that it reached the aquifer contaminating the source for some 45k people. Soon people's taps were delivering water contaminated at 10x the legal limit. People got sick. A bunch of parents lost their babies.

Amazon was forced to settle for 20 million which will pay for digging to find uncontaminated water sources deeper in the ground. They'll also pay for water treatments to help remove the excess nitrates.

Data centers don't have to bring in new toxins and pollutants. They can also make existing problems much much worse.

This doesn't even make any sense. "deeper in the ground" is mostly wishful thinking. Why wouldn't the contamination spread? How can anyone be sure there is even potable water deeper?

With regular rainfall/usage the nitrates don't get far enough down to reach the aquifer. The nitrates get filtered naturally and remain in upper layers of the soil. Amazon concentrated the contamination and drove it far enough down that it reached and contaminated the aquifer, but below that the father down you dig and pull up water the less contaminated it will be. Part of the settlement is a fund for digging new private wells deep enough that the water contamination is under legal limits. I guess if there's no clean water below the contamination they'll have to stop using wells entirely and depend on treated water from the contaminated source.

> Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though?

One recent-ish example: ^[1]

> ... or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices?

I believe their contractor was responsible for this one IIRC?

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2026/07/09/meta...

The construction itself absolutely alters local watersheds:

1. Replacing forests and fields with concrete buildings prevents rainwater from filtering into the soil, which stops local aquifers from recharging.

2. During storms the rain runs off impervious surfaces and can cause downstream flooding.

3. Heavy land grading washes loose sediment into nearby waterways, destroying aquatic habitats and turning private drinking wells muddy. (That especially gets local homeowners angry and gets lots of video views).

And then you have the ongoing operation of open cooling systems:

4. Evaporative cooling systems discharge concentrated mineral brine that spikes the salinity of freshwater ecosystems.

5. Cooling water is treated with toxic biocides and anti-scalants that can contaminate local water basins. It can also contain leached copper, zinc, and PFAS.

6. Discharging warm wastewater depletes oxygen in streams and alters the overall ecology.

Of course all of these issues could be mitigated to a reasonable degree with proper care and effort:

>this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly

Do you want to bet your whole town on things being done properly right now?

All of this applies to all construction of all types. There are already plenty of environmental regulations around buildings and their construction. Maybe these aren't being enforced, maybe the laws need to be stricter. I'm not an expert but it sounds plausible. But if that's the case, we have to fix those problems otherwise you're just playing whack-a-mole with development. When you specifically focus on datacenters and stopping datacenters it gives away that environmentalism is just a fig leaf for your actual goals.

It seems like many of these town council debates are citizens asking for the laws to be enforced.

The first three apply to any construction project with a paved surface and there are ways to mitigate that, you can collect the runoff in a cistern/tank that filters back into the groundwater or collect it in a retention pond which does the same thing.

Items 4 and 5 apply to any facility with cooling towers, not limited to but including hospitals, apartment buildings, schools, prisons, cold storage warehouses, combined cycle power plants, large commercial buildings, paper plants, retirement homes, commercial bakeries, industrial facilities with heat rejection needs, etc.

The sixth one applies to virtually every power plant in existence.

Yes, and...? Data centers are the large projects being built right now. Often in communities with no prior experience with projects of such scale.

I don't doubt that politics plays a role, but we also can't deny that the current moment is a different category.

how would this mess with a water supply though, or are we talking the private wells? with a private well though it's something you want to mitigate either way, filters, etc, granted I have only seen the handful of clips where someone is showing dirty water coming out of the tap and I am trying to trace the chain of responsibility for the water supply, thanks for the detailed response btw

My county, for example, only processes surface water. If someone altered our upstream collection or polluted the reservoir, it would be a very big deal.

For private wells: if you're a rural person who previously had perfectly fine water, and now someone comes along to mess with that, even if it "just" requires installing expensive new equipment, you're going to be pissed.

>The construction itself absolutely alters local watersheds:

The first 3 apply to all construction. It's just being selectively applied because people hate datacenters.

My understanding is that they don't but there's a measurable amount of the population that thinks they can.

Some do, some use closed-loop systems that are essentially 'charge once'. higher energy use, but less water

Not sure why this is getting downvoted, most of the new facilities (e.g. Stargate) are running closed loop systems. PUE goes up a bit if you have to use chillers, but ultimately it's faster/easier to build a large facility in a closed loop fashion than get water (permitting, treatment, etc.). NVIDIA pushing 45C inlet temps is to allow facilities to run dry coolers instead of chillers and make this even easier! Two phase cooling (required above ~3kW TDP) would eliminate water use in the secondary loop (if not the primary, eventually).

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