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Good for them. No groundwater for data centers! Data centers should be run closed loop, if they can't, they shouldn't exist. AZ should also make them generate a

Good for them. No groundwater for data centers! Data centers should be run closed loop, if they can't, they shouldn't exist. AZ should also make them generate at least 70% of their power onsite.

belter 1y ago
> No groundwater for data centers! It's worst. They use tap water. "...For the purposes of cooling, data centres mainly use potable water (water that is safe to drink or use for cooking, free from harmful contaminants). .." - https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/cooling-the-cloud-a-focus-on-the-water-usage-of-data-centres https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/cooling-the-cloud-...
- jeffbee 1y ago
  This particular data center was going to build a wastewater pipeline to cool their facility with currently-squandered wastewater.
  - mac-mc 1y ago
    I also wonder why this isn't the go-to if you want to work in water-stressed places. Become a water distillation plant at the same time, have a win-win solution.
bob1029 1y ago
I think the most cursed aspect in all of this is the fact that regions where evaporative coolers work best tend to have the scarcest water resources. Evaporative cooling is unreasonably effective when water is happy to evaporate. You can cut the power consumption of a datacenter by 70-80% in these regions if you are willing to sacrifice water. I think in this case, solar energy is the best way to run the cooling systems, even if it requires an absurd amount of power to exercise compressors, etc. in order to improve heat concentration and rejection efficiency. As long as it's all green and theres a disaster recovery plan, who cares?
- hooverd 1y ago
  If you're doing large scale evap cooling in the Sonoran you're just removing water from an already stressed water table. I'd say put them somewhere cold and do district heating during the winter.
  - duped 1y ago
    I'm not a geologist but...does evaporation remove water from the water table? Where I live, my understanding is the answer is "no" because the vast majority of rain water is deposited in our groundwater. Things like agriculture are dangerous because the answer is "yes" - you're literally shopping the water away as an agricultural product. Another dumb question: why are we building projects that need tons of power and water in the Sonoran desert instead of next to the Great Lakes
    - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      It at least removes water from the local water table. You pump water up from the local water table to run your evaporative cooler. The water evaporates. But the air was at 10-20% humidity. The water from the evaporative cooler will raise the humidity, a little bit, but not enough to make it rain. It may make it more likely to rain somewhere downwind a few miles, or a few hundred, but not here. For your second dumb question: At least some of the Great Lakes have at times had issues with water level. (They want enough to allow ships to pass between the lakes.) The upside is, there the humidity is high enough that you're more likely to get the water back in the form of increased precipitation.
    - dreamcompiler 1y ago
      Depends on the aquifer. The assumption you're making is "natural precipitation recharges aquifers" and that assumption is not always true. Sometimes it's true, but it takes 10,000 years so if you mean "recharges while our current civilization exists" then it's effectively false. This is the case for the Ogallala aquifer which supplies 27% of the irrigated land in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer Sometimes it's just completely false because the groundwater exists as a sealed bubble of water put there during the last ice age. That glass of water you just drank? Congratulations! It's 25,000 years old, and we know this through isotopic analysis. Your drinking water was mined and once it's gone it's gone forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_water Sometimes recharge can happen but only via snowmelt at high altitudes (and of course Tucson doesn't get much snow). Sometimes it's completely true. The Edwards aquifer in Texas gets recharged every time it rains. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_Aquifer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_Aquifer So it's complicated. Generally speaking, deeper groundwater sources take longer to recharge if they recharge at all. I don't know the particular groundwater situation around Tucson. > why are we building projects that need tons of power and water in the Sonoran desert instead of next to the Great Lakes Evaporative cooling is effective and cheap where humidity is low. It doesn't work well where humidity is high.
jandrewrogers 1y ago
What should water be used for then? They do large-scale agriculture in the same area, which uses several orders of magnitude more water while generating substantially less value.
- EA-3167 1y ago
  Food that people and livestock eat is less valuable than data centers used to chase the "AGI any day now" pipe dream? You're kidding right?
  - morkalork 1y ago
    Let the people eat and drink slop
    - UncleOxidant 1y ago
      * AI slop
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Food that people and livestock eat is less valuable than data centers This is objectively false, particularly when we consider that much of that food and water are exported. It’s also irrelevant in Tucson, which doesn’t have Central Valley syndrome.
    - EA-3167 1y ago
      You... do understand that it isn't exported to be incinerated, it's exported in return for money, and then people and livestock in other countries eat that food. The fact that there's a transaction in the middle of the process doesn't change the value proposition, just like the absurd overvaluation of all things AI doesn't change the value proposition there either.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > it's exported in return for money Which is also paid for data centre access. We need food production as a matter of survival. That doesn’t mean all food production is inherently more valuable than everything else. We let most food spoil without being eaten because it’s more efficient to do that than treat every calorie as precious. > just like the absurd overvaluation of all things AI doesn't change the value proposition there either Literally does. There are good arguments against a data centre in Tucson. “We could grow food with that water” isn’t one of them.
jeffbee 1y ago
Please apply this rule to Tucson's 40 golf courses.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  But where will the poor elites go hang out then?
  - NickC25 1y ago
    They can bugger off to Phoenix and get the same type of weather, landscape, etc. They won't be as high of altitude though so their shots won't go as far. Too bad.
- pxc 1y ago
  Most Tucson residents undoubtedly agree. The golf courses are almost exclusively used by rich out-of-town visitors
joshuaheard 1y ago
It was going to use 1% of the available recycled water. That's about the equivalent usage of a medium size farm.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  per year? Day? Month? Microsecond?
  - mjmas 1y ago
    the available water as volume per time is already in the correct units.

Good for them. No groundwater for data centers! Data centers should be run closed loop, if they can't, they shouldn't exist. AZ should also make them generate at least 70% of their power onsite.

belter 1y ago

> No groundwater for data centers! It's worst. They use tap water. "...For the purposes of cooling, data centres mainly use potable water (water that is safe to drink or use for cooking, free from harmful contaminants). .." - https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/cooling-the-cloud-a-focus-on-the-water-usage-of-data-centres https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/cooling-the-cloud-...

jeffbee 1y ago
This particular data center was going to build a wastewater pipeline to cool their facility with currently-squandered wastewater.
- mac-mc 1y ago
  I also wonder why this isn't the go-to if you want to work in water-stressed places. Become a water distillation plant at the same time, have a win-win solution.

bob1029 1y ago

I think the most cursed aspect in all of this is the fact that regions where evaporative coolers work best tend to have the scarcest water resources. Evaporative cooling is unreasonably effective when water is happy to evaporate. You can cut the power consumption of a datacenter by 70-80% in these regions if you are willing to sacrifice water. I think in this case, solar energy is the best way to run the cooling systems, even if it requires an absurd amount of power to exercise compressors, etc. in order to improve heat concentration and rejection efficiency. As long as it's all green and theres a disaster recovery plan, who cares?

hooverd 1y ago
If you're doing large scale evap cooling in the Sonoran you're just removing water from an already stressed water table. I'd say put them somewhere cold and do district heating during the winter.
- duped 1y ago
  I'm not a geologist but...does evaporation remove water from the water table? Where I live, my understanding is the answer is "no" because the vast majority of rain water is deposited in our groundwater. Things like agriculture are dangerous because the answer is "yes" - you're literally shopping the water away as an agricultural product. Another dumb question: why are we building projects that need tons of power and water in the Sonoran desert instead of next to the Great Lakes
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    It at least removes water from the local water table. You pump water up from the local water table to run your evaporative cooler. The water evaporates. But the air was at 10-20% humidity. The water from the evaporative cooler will raise the humidity, a little bit, but not enough to make it rain. It may make it more likely to rain somewhere downwind a few miles, or a few hundred, but not here. For your second dumb question: At least some of the Great Lakes have at times had issues with water level. (They want enough to allow ships to pass between the lakes.) The upside is, there the humidity is high enough that you're more likely to get the water back in the form of increased precipitation.
  - dreamcompiler 1y ago
    Depends on the aquifer. The assumption you're making is "natural precipitation recharges aquifers" and that assumption is not always true. Sometimes it's true, but it takes 10,000 years so if you mean "recharges while our current civilization exists" then it's effectively false. This is the case for the Ogallala aquifer which supplies 27% of the irrigated land in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer Sometimes it's just completely false because the groundwater exists as a sealed bubble of water put there during the last ice age. That glass of water you just drank? Congratulations! It's 25,000 years old, and we know this through isotopic analysis. Your drinking water was mined and once it's gone it's gone forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_water Sometimes recharge can happen but only via snowmelt at high altitudes (and of course Tucson doesn't get much snow). Sometimes it's completely true. The Edwards aquifer in Texas gets recharged every time it rains. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_Aquifer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_Aquifer So it's complicated. Generally speaking, deeper groundwater sources take longer to recharge if they recharge at all. I don't know the particular groundwater situation around Tucson. > why are we building projects that need tons of power and water in the Sonoran desert instead of next to the Great Lakes Evaporative cooling is effective and cheap where humidity is low. It doesn't work well where humidity is high.

jandrewrogers 1y ago

What should water be used for then? They do large-scale agriculture in the same area, which uses several orders of magnitude more water while generating substantially less value.

EA-3167 1y ago
Food that people and livestock eat is less valuable than data centers used to chase the "AGI any day now" pipe dream? You're kidding right?
- morkalork 1y ago
  Let the people eat and drink slop
  - UncleOxidant 1y ago
    * AI slop
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Food that people and livestock eat is less valuable than data centers This is objectively false, particularly when we consider that much of that food and water are exported. It’s also irrelevant in Tucson, which doesn’t have Central Valley syndrome.
  - EA-3167 1y ago
    You... do understand that it isn't exported to be incinerated, it's exported in return for money, and then people and livestock in other countries eat that food. The fact that there's a transaction in the middle of the process doesn't change the value proposition, just like the absurd overvaluation of all things AI doesn't change the value proposition there either.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > it's exported in return for money Which is also paid for data centre access. We need food production as a matter of survival. That doesn’t mean all food production is inherently more valuable than everything else. We let most food spoil without being eaten because it’s more efficient to do that than treat every calorie as precious. > just like the absurd overvaluation of all things AI doesn't change the value proposition there either Literally does. There are good arguments against a data centre in Tucson. “We could grow food with that water” isn’t one of them.

jeffbee 1y ago

Please apply this rule to Tucson's 40 golf courses.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
But where will the poor elites go hang out then?
- NickC25 1y ago
  They can bugger off to Phoenix and get the same type of weather, landscape, etc. They won't be as high of altitude though so their shots won't go as far. Too bad.
pxc 1y ago
Most Tucson residents undoubtedly agree. The golf courses are almost exclusively used by rich out-of-town visitors

joshuaheard 1y ago

It was going to use 1% of the available recycled water. That's about the equivalent usage of a medium size farm.

actionfromafar 1y ago
per year? Day? Month? Microsecond?
- mjmas 1y ago
  the available water as volume per time is already in the correct units.