. 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?”
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.