. According to analysis by the Guardian, two-thirds of planned datacentres in the US are in drought-stricken areas. The larger centres need up to 5m gallons of water a day for cooling, equivalent to the average usage of 50,000 people. It is unclear what the plan is and whose needs will take priority between AI, agriculture and everyone else.
“People are reporting bill spikes,” [Erin]Brockovich says, reading an email from someone who says their monthly water bill went from $22 (£17) to more than $350 (£265). The threat of these centres is about more than money – it feels existential. “How will the water use disrupt the balance of nature? People are asking: “What will happen to us?”
TIL Erin Brockovich is still at it.
Still an absolute legend.
She had a little detour into some dark places, but managed to recover!
Rewatched the movie not so long ago and looked her up and was happy to see she was doing a lot better.
Dark places?
If I remember correctly, she had some addiction issues and I think she was arrested for dui at some point. It’s many years ago at this point, so I don’t want say any more in case I’m getting some details wrong. I just remember looking her up a long time ago after rewatching the movie sometime in the 2010s and seeing her mugshot and reading about “the downfall of Erin Brockovich” or whatever and it made me sad at the time.
I’m double glad that her present is this bright, then.
Apparently (just looked it up) her daughter struggled with drug addiction and Erin has spent years advocating for youths staying away from drugs/recovery.
I don’t know the timeline for Erin’s own problems and the problems of her daughter, but really do hope both of them are in a better place in life today. It’s gotta be such a rough thing to go through as a family.
I still have never seen that Julia Roberts movie.
Funny statistic but relevant:
Data Centers use about 0.06% of the USAs total Water per year.
Watering golf courses in total uses about 0.5 percent.
Not saying Data centers aren’t a problem, but… Water is not the main issue we should be focusing on with them.
*already. Data centers are just getting started with many planned, golf courses have a head start but probably less growth potential lol
That is indeed relevant, I didn’t know that, and it makes me angrier about golf courses. But something to consider is this is 0.06% new water usage that is for building something most people are actively against.
I’m not saying give up on golf courses, but data centers is where the most ire is right now, so that additional water usage out of the blue (heh) is very worth bringing up when many people are worried about the future of access to water.
I would definitely say we should give up on fucking golf courses
You a golfer? I know a few, and yeah, one of the reasons it’s harder to go after golf courses imho is there are some regular folks who genuinely like to do it
At one time, people who didn’t smoke were the outliers.
Make them feel like pariahs and that will soon change (and heavily tax golf courses on their water usage)
I was born in, and raised near, Pinehurst. I can tell you from a lifetime of experience, there are no golfers that are simultaneously normal and good people. They’re either abnormal or evil or both. Or they’re alcoholics.
I know of a handful of regular people who golf regularly, but it is true that they’re all some kind of jerk. I just assumed it was a coincidence.
Wait until you learn Arizona has one of the most golf courses in the US.
I really wish people would stop focusing on the water use of these data centers. The far scarier thing is the amount of electricity they typically use. Many are planned to use direct onsite fossil fuel generators which I’d about as bad as it can get.
The scary thing is it all combined. Sucking up millions of gallons of water while belching out tons of greenhouse gasses all to generate propaganda or to try and replace the working class.
All of it is a huge problem that all compounds. Without the water that these things have sucked up people won’t survive the heat caused by them and their power generation.
Ah yes, golf. The game mostly played by rich white men. The courses mostly owned by rich white men. It sure tracks.
Well, it is a problem for the local residents in the low income areas where the data centers are being placed. Not only is there less water for them now, but the data centers also pollutes the air and makes it life threatening for these people to breathe.
I believe it was Musks datacenters for Grok that were particularly bad with air pollution and while I forget the exact numbers of people affected, it was enough that it was concerning.
It makes total sense to me that Erin Brockovich is getting involved in this shit because it’s literally a repeat of the case that made her famous.
Sure but there isn’t a massive boom of golf courses being built and hey don’t tend to poison the water downstream.
actually, they do tend to poison the water downstream through use of pesticides etc.
Also, Data centers evaporate water to cool stuff, so idk why it would poison anything “downstream”?
Multiple ways data centers can poison the water (and several have been shown to be happening now). For starters the massive pumps they need can churn things up adding silt to the water. Then because so much of the water they use evaporates off the remaining water can become toxic from concentration of existing elements. Finally, the warmer water added back into the water supply can cause more releases of naturally occurring toxic elements from the rock bed.
Add all three together and bam, poisoned downstream.
hm… idk. Data Centers need extremely purified water, much more than drinking water so this seems implausible to me, but if you can find a concrete example i’ll definitely change my mind. I just haven’t heard of any cases of that happening.
I don’t know who told you they need water more pure than drinking water but they’re wrong. Low scaling, low corrosion, and keeping particle size below a certain threshold is all they need. It makes zero sense for them to purify the water beyond that. If you mean they filter to a smaller particle size than drinking water then some do but that’s such a small part of water treatment.
They just pump in phosphonates, adjust pH, and run it through a filter. Real drinking water treatment cares about so much more. Bacteria load, chemical concentrations, heavy metal concentration, and more come into play for drinking water (plus making sure the treatments they use aren’t toxic to humans which AI data centers don’t care about as much, unless told to by the EPA).
As for examples, Meta caused an issue through their pump churn. Though that one is disputed it’s one of those cases of “what changed”? And it turns out Meta adding a data center was the only thing.
An Amazon data center has been linked to increasing concentration of nitrates. Yes it was already a problem in the area but evidence does show they’ve made it worse.
Adding warmer water back is a known issue from even before data centers. (That’s just one example paper, and from when it was only generating around 1GW of power was already a concern, there are more, it’s just the one I had open in a tab already for a different reason). xAI is currently being looked into to see if they’ve increased arsenic concentrations from the aquifer they draw from.
These are just some examples but the evidence is mounting that we don’t even know what the full impacts will be. There’s more out there. Environmental studies about the increasing toxicity of lakes in Utah that will increase with those data centers, increasing algal bloom from increased nitrate concentration and higher water temps, and so on.
ah, fair enough. I guess I was wrong, thanks for providing this!
Do golf courses take water out of the cycle though? Data centers take the water and put it in their system. Golf courses use it to water grass which means it all ends up back in the environment. I imagine most of the golf courses water usage is just wasted (for them)and evaporates vs data centers who take water away.
uh, no. you’re wrong. If data centers had a closed water system, they wouldn’t be “using” any water, effectively. Right now, data centers use water to cool their computers and to do that, they evaporate water.
Golf courses also don’t take water out of the system.
And also, water shortages have other causes, much more systemic, that I feel the datacenter scapegoat is a convenient distraction from.
You can cool chips with air, you can cool them with the sea or with non drinkable water. If they really get built in places where water is scarce, the problem is why the hell are they incentivized for that?
Water is plentiful and there should be no shortage of it. Where it is lacking it is either an environmental problem (desert areas should not be supposed to sustain cities) or a public infrastructure problem.
Sure water is plentiful but drinkable water is not.
Ibam not saying this is wromg but I have also heard a lot of the water use is in generators they basically run all the time for smoother power. And I could definitely see these companies “segmenting off” the power generation to make these numbers look better to the already angry public.
Like mayne the center and servers itself uses little, but the power generation may not.
Mostly, I really want more raw info on this that I keep seeing pushed.
You’ve got that backwards. The power generation is an issue in and of itself but from a water standpoint it’s not the main driver.
Servers require massive amounts of energy to run their calculations, a lot of that energy becomes residual heat. It’s just basic physics we’ve not been able to overcome. Old data centers weren’t as bad because they’d be also full of hard drives and tape backups and other things. Not just processors. These other things didn’t generate anywhere near as much heat and weren’t as dense. The new AI datacenters are just packed basically every square inch with processors, they’re insanely dense compared to the old data centers and filled with the highest heat generators.
In order to keep the things from melting the heat is moved and radiated using the water, this causes a large chunk of it to heat up and evaporate. You won’t get raw info on how much because they’ve tried extremely hard to not let it get released, calling it a trade secret and such. Water to cool data centers isn’t new and the physics of it is well understood (which is why hobby gamers use liquid coolers and such too), it’s just never been at this scale before. It’s not been millions of gallons a day per center.
Not a lot of data centers in deserts.
Averaging water use over the entire US is basically meaningless, water use in Michigan is vastly different from water use in Texas.
but it’s averaged for both, so idk what you mean
And it’s meaningless for both. Neither of them mean anything.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of golf courses either though. Pretentious bullshit sport that takes up way too much space.
Are there fishes inside data center water reservoirs because there are in golf course ponds. You can even fish there.
Most data centers draw their water from municipal sources, which are largely natural or engineered reservoirs, so I’d wager that yes, there are fish in those reservoirs. Depending on local rules, new industrial campuses are required to have their own drainage ponds for storm runoff, so it’s likely that many of those data center drainage ponds would also be home to some wildlife.
Not defending data center water usage, just answering your question. Additionally, fishing is far from the reason why golf courses consume so much water, it’s just a happy little side hustle. If it were then what your statement is alluding to might, dare I say, carry more water.
Shhh…you want an angry mob after you?!
Uh… She meant to say that AI requires blood sacrifices of fully hydrated babies, and once the AI ingests the blood water it’s gone forever. We need to get our pitch forks and put an end to the demonic sacrifices! We don’t need no hallucinations, plagiarized slop and climate-change-causing demons in our computers! Ban AI and kill it before it can lay it’s eggs!
Okay, you should be good now. Just nod along, and never ever admit to having used AI, or even think about informing people there are positives to using it or there are worse things to do than use it.
Some people finding AI the technology useful doesn’t justify this massive all-in rollout of data centers. Sure it’s their money, but they’re using all our resources to build stuff that no one asked for, and actively making life shittier for many many people.
It’s even mentioned in the article
This isn’t a story about AI, she says. “That genie is out of the bottle: it’s here, it’s an effective tool, you can use it or not,” Brockovich says matter-of-factly. This is about the massive structures being built to house the vast computing facilities AI requires. These datacentres, she says, stretch over “hundreds and hundreds of acres”. In May, Utah gave approval to a centre twice the size of Manhattan.
Unfortunately, the “twice the size of Manhattan” line doesn’t hit with the majority of the country who has simply never been to a city nearly that large.
Fuck off
There’s one of the prestigious, intelligent, always correct members of the mob now. Aren’t they charming?
Yes, yes, prole, we know the AI hurt you and it’s very evil. We won’t let it get you.
No one here has ever used AI, and they never will.
Cute
First of all, there needs to be laws that utility bills for residences don’t change when a data center comes into their area. Their rate should remain the exactly same. Data Centers should be able to pay for their own resource use, without expecting the surrounding area to supplement it.
Surprised to see her in the news again.
still fighting the good fight with gusto!
Can somebody explain to me like i’m three, why people always seem to focus on the water they use and not the absolutely out of whack power consumption of these buildings?
Correct me if i’m wrong, but water is never really “lost” whereas power is still a finite and polluting resource so long we still have to burn op liquified or gassified dinosaurs to keep up with demand.
Clean drinking water is definitely a finite resource.
They’re using treated municipal water. Which is meant for drinking. By the people who pay for it.
Because the water cycle you learned in school is not really true. If you remove water faster then it can be replaced that is a problem. If you remove water and take it away from that area like bottled water it is not being replaced. Some of our cities are taking water out of the water table faster then it can be replaced. So having a lot of data centers would remove the water from the water table that would affect everyone.
Water isn’t lost per say, but overusing a water source will deplete it, altering the environment around with no way of knowing how severe the effects will be.
Also, the rejected water can be contaminated (especially with the US relaxing the environment laws)
Energy use is also an issue, but the impact is a lot less severe than water use.
Not a data center expert, but I believe that they use evaporative cooling towers for heat dissipation. If so, the water is in fact lost to the atmosphere.
Evaporative cooling happens but isn’t the desired or main effect. Water rains down in the cooling towers to exchange heat with the air. Some water evaporates, but most heat is lost by conduction to air.
Now, if you’re a dumb and cheap techbro, instead of paying engineers to properly size your cooling towers, you just buy whatever cheap HVAC CTs you can find, which will be quite undersized, and you’ll run the fan at full blast, maximizing evaporative cooling to compensate for the lack of surface area for conductive cooling.
And then condensates and falls back as rain. What is the water cycle, Alex.
Where does the rain fall Alex? Likely not back into the draughtstricken area that a lot of these data centers are being built.
Which is not as simple as is taught in school. Removing water faster from the water table then it can be replaced is a problem.
Enriched with all the NOx from their methane and gas
turbinesjet engines for extra flavour!
I’m also a lot more concerned about energy use than water. Golf courses use 30x more water than data centers. Residential lawns, arguably the most useless crop in the world, use 9 billion gallons of water every day. Orders of magnitude more water goes into growing corn for livestock feed and biofuels.
The immediate issue is how much electricity AI consumes and where that electricity comes from, as that has the larger impact on public health and the environment. xAI relies on gas turbines that violate environmental rules and pollute the surrounding communities. The surge in demand for electricity is driving the cost higher, further increasing the cost of living for a lot of families.
The ELI3 you requested: All the hubub around water is diverting attention away from bigger issues, which the makes the AI companies and the rich people happy.
That said, I don’t think the water issue should be dismissed either, especially since the water demand is projected to increase fourfold by 2028. They’re both legitimate concerns. I just think energy generation is the one with the greater consequences and should be getting more of the attention.
Metrics sourced from here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-couillard_every-ai-data-center-in-america-uses-less-activity-7465076822012235777-QONC
This is the dumbest comparison. How a golf course uses water and how a data centre are completely different. How much of the golf courses water use is lost to evaporation and it all ends back in the cycle. Data centres take the water and lock it away. Yes it does evaporate but at a much slower rate.
Help me understand what you think data centers do with the water.
Man, she looked so much better in the movie.
