‘We’re up against forces that have all the money in the world’: Erin Brockovich on her battle against AI datacentres
www.theguardian.com
In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she has a new target in her sights – and it’s global

. 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?”

  • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
    1·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • Mistiygirl@lemmy.zip
      1·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
        2·
        3 days ago

        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.