12 ms·

Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

240 points by chhum 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago
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avalys 11mo ago
Is this water even “used” in the same sense that water is used for bathing or agriculture? Where does the water go? If they simply take in cold water and release hot water, that water is still available for other uses. Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants?
- deleted 11mo ago
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- xnx 11mo ago
  > Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants? Yes. Not always, but evaporative cooling is much more energy efficient than heat exchange to outside air. That said, stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers like golf courses and agriculture (e.g. to ship alfalfa to the middle east).
  - teeray 11mo ago
    > That said stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers That's something of a fallacy of relative privation. When water is scarce, all frivolous uses should be under scrutiny. The others you mention have been well-known for a long time. The current stories simply highlight a new consumer people haven't thought of before.
    - wahnfrieden 11mo ago
      Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment? If 100x current usage levels become a concern, I don't know why people pretend that current usage is not a concern for a tech that many of those same people are projecting to scale.
      - neoromantique 11mo ago
        >Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment? Yes.
    - Romario77 11mo ago
      I don't think it's a fallacy, it's much easier to optimize water usage for something that much larger. Agriculture uses about 70% of all freshwater while datacenters are less than 0.5% Some leaky channel will cost more than all the datacenters.
  - egorfine 11mo ago
    Even in case of evaporative cooling the water is not used. It's returned to the environment.
    - oceanplexian 11mo ago
      While technically true, if your datacenter is in Phoenix and you just consumed a few acre feet of water to raise the relative humidity by 0.000001%, for all intents and purposes that was a massive waste of water.
  - harddrivereque 11mo ago
    The problem with data center water usage is that it is unnecessary from the PR point of view. Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive. For all I know, we could also do just as good without data centers, like we did 20 years ago. With agriculture, water usage is necessary as eating is not something optional and everyone needs to eat to survive. From the PR point of view, of course. We couldn't live without agriculture, as we had agriculture 20 years ago too. Golf courses are unrelated as they don't use nearly as much water as agriculture or data centers. PR is everything, the narrative is what makes the difference. There is a lot of hypocrisy in this field, which is why I try to avoid it, but there is also some truth in it - we really didn't need that many data centers 20 years ago.
    - triceratops 11mo ago
      > Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive "More expensive" means spending more on air conditioning. Ergo more electricity used, higher electricity demand, more natural gas burned and carbon emissions, higher consumer power prices. So a different kind of PR disaster.
      - harddrivereque 11mo ago
        The difference in energy usage won't be noticeably higher for PR purposes. Of course, the difference comes at a price, cutting which is the main incentive for water usage.
      - undersuit 11mo ago
        OK, so we need to include the effect of introducing a green house gas, water vapor, into the environment.
    - aseipp 11mo ago
      Golf course water usage vastly dwarfs data center water usage. Google used something like 1 billion gallons a year for their DCs. Single golf courses in arid regions can use upwards of a hundred million gallons a year, and in those areas there can be dozens of courses. It's not even close in terms of water usage.
- teeray 11mo ago
  Even if it's evaporative cooling, couldn't the water vapor just be... condensed back into water?
  - johncarlosbaez 11mo ago
    Yes - by cooling it. See the problem?
    - superconduct123 11mo ago
      You don't have to use energy to cool it though do you? Couldn't it just flow into a big passive outdoor radiator?
- mbac32768 11mo ago
  Datacenters can use a few different kinds of liquid cooling, including the one you describe. It varies quite a bit by geography.
- darkwater 11mo ago
  > Where does the water go? If they simply take in cold water and release hot water, that water is still available for other uses. Well, first you need to cool it down in a way that's good for the environment, I presume. You should not pour down hot water in a cold river with all its fishes and plants.
- LgWoodenBadger 11mo ago
  If the data-center depletes the water table used for surrounding wells, whether the "released water" is still "available" is irrelevant to those dependent on wells for water. e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-center-water.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-cent... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
- deleted 11mo ago
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londons_explore 11mo ago
Water use is a pretty close proxy for power use which is a pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. I can totally see why a company wants to keep this info secret. Competitors would really like to know.
- dsco 11mo ago
  Yes if we squint really hard then this could be the reason. It could also be because it's a PR disaster.
  - londons_explore 11mo ago
    The water use actually isn't all that high - it's just easy to make "a million gallons of water every year" sound like a lot, but compared to a 500 acre farm which could easily use 3 million gallons every day, it's not very big. The electricity use is really substantial though, but that's harder for people to visualise so gets less media attention.
    - jvanderbot 11mo ago
      Right, this argument completely lacks context. Agricultural use of water is astounding. And even that is generally much less than the enormous amount of water that is available in agricultural states (CA notwithstanding). Minnesota where I live gets approximately 3x10^13 gallons of rain / year. Yes, almost none of that is captured for use, but it's not like we're talking about a fundamentally physically limited resource here. It's just that there's a bad time/phase mismatch. Hell, a 500 acre data center has >200 million gallons drop onto it out of the sky in MN, each year (20in avg * 500 acre = 10,000 acre-inches)
  - tptacek 11mo ago
    Only because people are innumerate, though.
- SirFatty 11mo ago
  You think that's more of a concern than public backlash with NIMBYs and local governments?
jonhohle 11mo ago
Is data center water use not closed loop? If not, why?
- namibj 11mo ago
  They take in ambient air and release 100% humidity warmer air, basically a giant server-heated humidifier. You could spend more electricity if needed to up the airflow to get the same cooling power without humidifying.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- shagie 11mo ago
  NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Renewable_Energy_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Renewable_Energy_Labo... ) had a neat dashboard of their cooling system for the HPC data center. https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/hpc-data-center https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/hpc-data-center https://web.archive.org/web/20200604033055im_/https://www.nrel.gov/hpc/cool/COOL_Graphic_F.svgz https://web.archive.org/web/20200604033055im_/https://www.nr... That PUE of 1.028 is really good ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness ). And even with all of their closed loop parts of the system, they're still needing to reject heat from the cooling towers. https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/reducing-water-usage https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/reducing-water-us... > The initial design of the data center used evaporative coolers to eliminate the added expense of energy-demanding chillers. However, while the cooling towers were more efficient and less expensive, they would consume approximately 2 million gallons of water annually to support cooling of the IT load—approaching an hourly average of 1 megawatt. Industrial scale closed loop cooling is relatively recent technology. > In August 2016, a prototype thermosyphon cooler—an advanced dry cooler that uses refrigerant in a passive cycle to dissipate heat—was installed at NREL. The thermosyphon was placed upstream of the HPC Data Center cooling towers at the ESIF to create a hybrid cooling system. The system coordinates the operation for optimum water and operating cost efficiency—using wet cooling when it's hot and dry cooling when it's not. It is a goal though... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12/09/sustainable-by-design-next-generation-datacenters-consume-zero-water-for-cooling/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12... > Although our current fleet will still use a mix of air-cooled and water-cooled systems, new projects in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, will pilot zero-water evaporated designs in 2026. Starting August 2024, all new Microsoft datacenter designs began using this next-generation cooling technology, as we work to make zero-water evaporation the primary cooling method across our owned portfolio. These new sites will begin coming online in late 2027. More northerly data centers are likely able to achieve a lower WEU. Again from Microsoft - https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/ https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/
lpln3452 11mo ago
Why do companies actively lie in their advertising about being eco-friendly, instead of just keeping a low profile? Is it because we tend to focus only on current events and quickly forget their past track record? Indeed, if people soon forget the lies, the risk is minimal.
- deadbabe 11mo ago
  One reason is that large institutional investors or lenders enforce certain agendas by only giving money to companies that meet certain criteria. Thus companies will posture themselves as meeting those qualities to attract money and investment. It’s an explanation of why so many companies suddenly appeared to go “woke”, or why they did a complete 180 when the political climate changed. Even powerful companies like Apple must grovel for favor.
  - lpln3452 11mo ago
    Oh, I didn't know it worked that way. Thank you for the information.
    - pixxel 11mo ago
      [dead]
ChrisArchitect 11mo ago
[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710025
imgabe 11mo ago
> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.
- triceratops 11mo ago
  > are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Beef too. It uses the same amount of water but people eat 30x as much annually.
  - macinjosh 11mo ago
    Beef is more nutrient efficient though and has better macros for human consumption. It has 4 times more protein, less fat, and no carbs. Seems to me at least Americans could do well to eat more beef and less products created from processed almonds mixed with refined vegetable oils and sugar. Beef and milk are harvested ready to eat. Vegan substitutes are all highly processed. Processed food consumption is associated with greater cancer and diabetes risk.
    - WolfeReader 11mo ago
      Factory-farmed beef is the worst source of pollution in the food industry. We definitely need less of that.
      - mikkupikku 11mo ago
        "Factory-farmed beef" doesn't even exist. All cows get raised in fields for their first 12-18 months. The ""factory-farming"" is just a feed lot they get taken to for 3-6 months to eat grain before slaughter. If you want to talk about pigs or chickens, that's an entirely different story. Those do get raised full life cycle in factory-like industrial facilities. But those aren't cows.
cm2012 11mo ago
This is incredibly meaningless reporting. Water use for all of AI is inconsequential compared to agriculture. In addition, water is almost never wasted, only moved around. Energy is the important input.
- LurkandComment 11mo ago
  Useage is one issue and should be monitored, but I think you have to understand that in some cases the tech company purchases the water supply and towns become dependant or placed at will of the tech company's interest. On top of that, there is a cost increase to utilities even if the water is moving around a closed loop.
- mcntsh 11mo ago
  Agriculture produces food... it feels silly to compare the two.
  - wongarsu 11mo ago
    Both in terms the amount of food we grow and the types of food we choose to produce we are way past the necessity of feeding ourselves and firmly in the territory of producing luxury goods that harm both ourselves and our environment. It's not as different as it seems at first glance
- Incipient 11mo ago
  The water usage for these new numbers of power consumption, in the GW range, is thousands of tonnes per day (if my maths is right haha). It's a HUGE amount of water.
- bryanlarsen 11mo ago
  It should be inconsequential. Sometimes it isn't. If you're pumping water from an aquifer in the desert for evaporative cooling, that's highly consequential. Unfortunately, media sound bites can't distinguish meaningless water usage from meaningful usage.
- pier25 11mo ago
astroflection 11mo ago
I am assuming the 7.7 billion gallons(29b liters) a year is all surface water. It better be. It would be hideously irresponsible to use any ground water for cooling their data centers.
- jeffbee 11mo ago
  or 24,000 acre-feet in the terms that we normally use to speak about water. In other words, basically none.
- shagie 11mo ago
  https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/29/google-water-data-center-the-dalles-oregon/ https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/29/google-water-data-cen... > The company has negotiated a pair of agreements with The Dalles city officials that would significantly reduce property taxes Google must pay on the new development and secure for the company the water it needs for its expanded operations. > The deal to deliver groundwater to Google has drawn skepticism from members of the public who’ve grown wary of Oregon’s water stability in a changing climate, and that suspicion was on full display at a recent City Council meeting. > ... > “Without this agreement, [Google] or any other industry could use those wells as they wanted just as the aluminum plant previously did,” Anderson, the public works director, told the Council. > Anderson said the amount of water that can be withdrawn from The Dalles groundwater aquifer annually without causing a decline is 5,500 acre-feet per year. Only about 1,800 acre-feet per year are being drawn out of the aquifer currently. --- Most surface water has a "you can't drain this" compact. For example, the Great Lakes compact - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact Part of the sticking point for the Foxconn mess in Wisconsin was the water use within the watershed of the Great Lakes. https://observatory.sjmc.wisc.edu/2018/05/10/great-lakes-water-diversion-for-foxconn-plant-explained-debated/ https://observatory.sjmc.wisc.edu/2018/05/10/great-lakes-wat... Microsoft's plan use: https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-data-centers-8-million-gallons-water-each-year https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-data-centers-8-million-ga... > The data obtained by WPR from the city shows the first phase of Microsoft’s data center campus would use a peak of 234,000 gallons per day or 2.8 million gallons per year. Under subsequent phases, the campus would use a peak of 702,000 gallons per day or 8.4 million gallons annually. https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/MKE-Regional-Demands-030124.pdf https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/MKE-Regional-... shows the demand and discharge request.
xhkkffbf 11mo ago
This isn't really about using water as much as dealing with all of the heat that comes out of computation. The water is just the simplest way to dispose of the heat. Isn't there some better way we can, perhaps, turn some of the heat back into something useful? Maybe heat a building? Or turn it back into electricity. It doesn't have to be an efficient conversion because it's now 100% wasted.
- fruitworks 11mo ago
  the efficiency of converting it to electricity would be low, due to low absolute temperature difference and thus carnot effeciency. I think it could be higher with germanium semiconductors, as you could run them at a higher temp and get superheated steam
- cogman10 11mo ago
  > Maybe heat a building? I'm a big fan of district heating, but it's something that needs to be built before the datacenter is. It also doesn't really work well if the datacenter isn't in an already cool region. > Or turn it back into electricity. The temps aren't high enough to do that easily. You need boiling water to generate electricity, and chips don't like running at or above 100C. It's possible you could use a heat pump to turn hot water into boiling water, but that will stop working when temps get out of band. You might be able do it with a sterling engine, but you'd, ironically, need a supply of cool water to keep those running.
  - jodrellblank 11mo ago
    > "You need boiling water to generate electricity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine
jandrewrogers 11mo ago
This is a reaction to the unwarranted fear-mongering in the media over water usage by data centers. The amount of water is utterly inconsequential. Growing corn on the same land the data centers currently occupy would consume more water and provide far less value. We should question the motives of whoever orchestrated a "story" out of this non-story and is pushing it in the media. It obviously isn't being done in good faith.
- orwin 11mo ago
  Agree in spirit, but 'Growing corn on the same land the data centers currently occupy would consume more water and provide far less value' makes the argument weak because those 'agriculture is barely 2% of GDP' argument are like 'brain is barely 2% of your mass'.
krunger 11mo ago
[dead]
Zababa 11mo ago
> Amazon’s data centres were projected to use 7.7 billion gallons of water a year by 2030, according to the leaked strategy memo, which was circulated within the company in 2022. From https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/total-water-use-united-states https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/total-wate...: > Water use in the United States in 2015 was estimated to be about 322 billion gallons per day (Bgal/d), which was 9 percent less than in 2010. It doesn't seem to be very much water at all.
Reason077 11mo ago
What happens to water that a data center “uses”? Is it warmed up and returned to the environment? Contaminated and sent to wastewater? Evaporated into the air?
julianozen 11mo ago
Dumb question, but is this done with fresh water? If so, why? If not, does it matter how much water is used?
- hwillis 11mo ago
  Its freshwater and has to be freshwater because it goes through pipes and/or is evaporated. Corrosion, scaling and fouling are all issues. Even if seawater was easy to use and datacenters were near the shore, it would produce very saline brine which would be difficult to safely get rid of.
  - julianozen 11mo ago
    Thanks!
exasperaited 11mo ago
The company that literally named itself after a river and the threatened habitat it runs through.
1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
""It would be better if they could own up to it," said a current Amazon software developer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. "Even if they said it was a low priority, at least that would be honest."" HN commentary on water use by so-called "tech" companies usually includes a number of mindlessly-parroted, bad faith "arguments" One of these is to try to compare the new (additive) water use by non-essential data centers with existing (non-additive) water use by agriculture Putting aside that (a) data centers are non-essential and not comparable to food, water or shelter and (b) agricultural use is not new, these "arguments" are also ignoring that (c) the so-called "tech" companies are trying to hide the data Employees of these so-called "tech" companies might be experiencing guilt over this dishonest tactic, but not enough to make them quit When their employer hides the data this makes accurate comparisons, e.g., to existing water use by other recipients, difficult if not impossible Does agriculture also try to hide its water use If it did, then HN comments could not attempt bad faith comparisons Because there would be no data to cite
- ajkjk 11mo ago
  no opinion on the rest of the point, but, why do you keep writing "so-called" in front of tech companies? They are called that because they are tech companies; the word's meaning is widely agreed upon.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
  d2FzICsz
nzach 11mo ago
I find it really odd this recent push for discussions around the development of new datacenters. There is a plan for constructing a new high-capacity datacenter [edit: near my city]. And a lot of discussions in the media are done through an emotional tone around water and electricity usage. The media generally frames it as if installing a new datacenter would put the neighbors in risk of not having water or electricity. I'm not arguing that a datacenter doesn't bring any problems, everything has pros and cons. Both sides seems to be using bad faith/misleading arguments, and I thinks that's really bad because we end up with solutions and agreements that don't improve the lives of the people affected by these new developments.
- bittercynic 11mo ago
  One went in 1/4 mile from my home a couple years ago. I ignored the notices of development because I thought it was far enough that it wouldn't affect me, but it blocks the view of the mountains that I used to enjoy, and sometimes I can hear noise from its cooling system (I assume). I wish I'd known what was coming, and gone to the meetings to oppose it.
  - Retric 11mo ago
    Large buildings 1000 feet from you are going to have some impact, but your complaint has little to with being a data center specifically. They could have put in a large warehouse and your view gotten blocked just the same, similarly the noise from the cooling system can be managed well or poorly on any building.
    - Scoundreller 11mo ago
      usually large warehouses will appear where there’s good highway connections and lots of cheap unskilled labour. A DC might catch a lot of people “in the sticks” by surprise.
  - rcpt 11mo ago
    Hopefully we will emerge from this with a legislative framework that says "fuck your view"
DoneWithAllThat 11mo ago
The level of obsession some people have over data center water usage is completely unhinged.
charles_f 11mo ago
> a commitment to “return more water than it uses by 2030”. How would that even be possible?
- bryan_w 11mo ago
  Some are adding/funding water treatment plants tre reduce the load from the city water main
balozi 11mo ago
Concerns about inconsequential water usage at datacenters is a far more welcome problem for the the industry than the other real issues they could be dealing with. People distracted by water concerns will not notice the very real energy usage and AI ethics/practices issues. Say what you want but the industry has figured out how to manage public perception and sentiment. Water usage problem is easy to fix, while energy usage is a far tougher nut to crack.

240 points by chhum 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

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avalys 11mo ago

Is this water even “used” in the same sense that water is used for bathing or agriculture? Where does the water go? If they simply take in cold water and release hot water, that water is still available for other uses. Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants?

deleted 11mo ago
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xnx 11mo ago
> Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants? Yes. Not always, but evaporative cooling is much more energy efficient than heat exchange to outside air. That said, stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers like golf courses and agriculture (e.g. to ship alfalfa to the middle east).
- teeray 11mo ago
  > That said stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers That's something of a fallacy of relative privation. When water is scarce, all frivolous uses should be under scrutiny. The others you mention have been well-known for a long time. The current stories simply highlight a new consumer people haven't thought of before.
  - wahnfrieden 11mo ago
    Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment? If 100x current usage levels become a concern, I don't know why people pretend that current usage is not a concern for a tech that many of those same people are projecting to scale.
    - neoromantique 11mo ago
      >Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment? Yes.
  - Romario77 11mo ago
    I don't think it's a fallacy, it's much easier to optimize water usage for something that much larger. Agriculture uses about 70% of all freshwater while datacenters are less than 0.5% Some leaky channel will cost more than all the datacenters.
- egorfine 11mo ago
  Even in case of evaporative cooling the water is not used. It's returned to the environment.
  - oceanplexian 11mo ago
    While technically true, if your datacenter is in Phoenix and you just consumed a few acre feet of water to raise the relative humidity by 0.000001%, for all intents and purposes that was a massive waste of water.
- harddrivereque 11mo ago
  The problem with data center water usage is that it is unnecessary from the PR point of view. Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive. For all I know, we could also do just as good without data centers, like we did 20 years ago. With agriculture, water usage is necessary as eating is not something optional and everyone needs to eat to survive. From the PR point of view, of course. We couldn't live without agriculture, as we had agriculture 20 years ago too. Golf courses are unrelated as they don't use nearly as much water as agriculture or data centers. PR is everything, the narrative is what makes the difference. There is a lot of hypocrisy in this field, which is why I try to avoid it, but there is also some truth in it - we really didn't need that many data centers 20 years ago.
  - triceratops 11mo ago
    > Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive "More expensive" means spending more on air conditioning. Ergo more electricity used, higher electricity demand, more natural gas burned and carbon emissions, higher consumer power prices. So a different kind of PR disaster.
    - harddrivereque 11mo ago
      The difference in energy usage won't be noticeably higher for PR purposes. Of course, the difference comes at a price, cutting which is the main incentive for water usage.
    - undersuit 11mo ago
      OK, so we need to include the effect of introducing a green house gas, water vapor, into the environment.
  - aseipp 11mo ago
    Golf course water usage vastly dwarfs data center water usage. Google used something like 1 billion gallons a year for their DCs. Single golf courses in arid regions can use upwards of a hundred million gallons a year, and in those areas there can be dozens of courses. It's not even close in terms of water usage.
teeray 11mo ago
Even if it's evaporative cooling, couldn't the water vapor just be... condensed back into water?
- johncarlosbaez 11mo ago
  Yes - by cooling it. See the problem?
  - superconduct123 11mo ago
    You don't have to use energy to cool it though do you? Couldn't it just flow into a big passive outdoor radiator?
mbac32768 11mo ago
Datacenters can use a few different kinds of liquid cooling, including the one you describe. It varies quite a bit by geography.
darkwater 11mo ago
> Where does the water go? If they simply take in cold water and release hot water, that water is still available for other uses. Well, first you need to cool it down in a way that's good for the environment, I presume. You should not pour down hot water in a cold river with all its fishes and plants.
LgWoodenBadger 11mo ago
If the data-center depletes the water table used for surrounding wells, whether the "released water" is still "available" is irrelevant to those dependent on wells for water. e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-center-water.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-cent... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
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londons_explore 11mo ago

Water use is a pretty close proxy for power use which is a pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. I can totally see why a company wants to keep this info secret. Competitors would really like to know.

dsco 11mo ago
Yes if we squint really hard then this could be the reason. It could also be because it's a PR disaster.
- londons_explore 11mo ago
  The water use actually isn't all that high - it's just easy to make "a million gallons of water every year" sound like a lot, but compared to a 500 acre farm which could easily use 3 million gallons every day, it's not very big. The electricity use is really substantial though, but that's harder for people to visualise so gets less media attention.
  - jvanderbot 11mo ago
    Right, this argument completely lacks context. Agricultural use of water is astounding. And even that is generally much less than the enormous amount of water that is available in agricultural states (CA notwithstanding). Minnesota where I live gets approximately 3x10^13 gallons of rain / year. Yes, almost none of that is captured for use, but it's not like we're talking about a fundamentally physically limited resource here. It's just that there's a bad time/phase mismatch. Hell, a 500 acre data center has >200 million gallons drop onto it out of the sky in MN, each year (20in avg * 500 acre = 10,000 acre-inches)
- tptacek 11mo ago
  Only because people are innumerate, though.
SirFatty 11mo ago
You think that's more of a concern than public backlash with NIMBYs and local governments?

jonhohle 11mo ago

Is data center water use not closed loop? If not, why?

namibj 11mo ago
They take in ambient air and release 100% humidity warmer air, basically a giant server-heated humidifier. You could spend more electricity if needed to up the airflow to get the same cooling power without humidifying.
deleted 11mo ago
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shagie 11mo ago
NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Renewable_Energy_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Renewable_Energy_Labo... ) had a neat dashboard of their cooling system for the HPC data center. https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/hpc-data-center https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/hpc-data-center https://web.archive.org/web/20200604033055im_/https://www.nrel.gov/hpc/cool/COOL_Graphic_F.svgz https://web.archive.org/web/20200604033055im_/https://www.nr... That PUE of 1.028 is really good ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness ). And even with all of their closed loop parts of the system, they're still needing to reject heat from the cooling towers. https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/reducing-water-usage https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/reducing-water-us... > The initial design of the data center used evaporative coolers to eliminate the added expense of energy-demanding chillers. However, while the cooling towers were more efficient and less expensive, they would consume approximately 2 million gallons of water annually to support cooling of the IT load—approaching an hourly average of 1 megawatt. Industrial scale closed loop cooling is relatively recent technology. > In August 2016, a prototype thermosyphon cooler—an advanced dry cooler that uses refrigerant in a passive cycle to dissipate heat—was installed at NREL. The thermosyphon was placed upstream of the HPC Data Center cooling towers at the ESIF to create a hybrid cooling system. The system coordinates the operation for optimum water and operating cost efficiency—using wet cooling when it's hot and dry cooling when it's not. It is a goal though... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12/09/sustainable-by-design-next-generation-datacenters-consume-zero-water-for-cooling/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12... > Although our current fleet will still use a mix of air-cooled and water-cooled systems, new projects in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, will pilot zero-water evaporated designs in 2026. Starting August 2024, all new Microsoft datacenter designs began using this next-generation cooling technology, as we work to make zero-water evaporation the primary cooling method across our owned portfolio. These new sites will begin coming online in late 2027. More northerly data centers are likely able to achieve a lower WEU. Again from Microsoft - https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/ https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/

lpln3452 11mo ago

Why do companies actively lie in their advertising about being eco-friendly, instead of just keeping a low profile? Is it because we tend to focus only on current events and quickly forget their past track record? Indeed, if people soon forget the lies, the risk is minimal.

deadbabe 11mo ago
One reason is that large institutional investors or lenders enforce certain agendas by only giving money to companies that meet certain criteria. Thus companies will posture themselves as meeting those qualities to attract money and investment. It’s an explanation of why so many companies suddenly appeared to go “woke”, or why they did a complete 180 when the political climate changed. Even powerful companies like Apple must grovel for favor.
- lpln3452 11mo ago
  Oh, I didn't know it worked that way. Thank you for the information.
  - pixxel 11mo ago
    [dead]

ChrisArchitect 11mo ago

[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710025

imgabe 11mo ago

> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.

triceratops 11mo ago
> are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Beef too. It uses the same amount of water but people eat 30x as much annually.
- macinjosh 11mo ago
  Beef is more nutrient efficient though and has better macros for human consumption. It has 4 times more protein, less fat, and no carbs. Seems to me at least Americans could do well to eat more beef and less products created from processed almonds mixed with refined vegetable oils and sugar. Beef and milk are harvested ready to eat. Vegan substitutes are all highly processed. Processed food consumption is associated with greater cancer and diabetes risk.
  - WolfeReader 11mo ago
    Factory-farmed beef is the worst source of pollution in the food industry. We definitely need less of that.
    - mikkupikku 11mo ago
      "Factory-farmed beef" doesn't even exist. All cows get raised in fields for their first 12-18 months. The ""factory-farming"" is just a feed lot they get taken to for 3-6 months to eat grain before slaughter. If you want to talk about pigs or chickens, that's an entirely different story. Those do get raised full life cycle in factory-like industrial facilities. But those aren't cows.

cm2012 11mo ago

This is incredibly meaningless reporting. Water use for all of AI is inconsequential compared to agriculture. In addition, water is almost never wasted, only moved around. Energy is the important input.

LurkandComment 11mo ago
Useage is one issue and should be monitored, but I think you have to understand that in some cases the tech company purchases the water supply and towns become dependant or placed at will of the tech company's interest. On top of that, there is a cost increase to utilities even if the water is moving around a closed loop.
mcntsh 11mo ago
Agriculture produces food... it feels silly to compare the two.
- wongarsu 11mo ago
  Both in terms the amount of food we grow and the types of food we choose to produce we are way past the necessity of feeding ourselves and firmly in the territory of producing luxury goods that harm both ourselves and our environment. It's not as different as it seems at first glance
Incipient 11mo ago
The water usage for these new numbers of power consumption, in the GW range, is thousands of tonnes per day (if my maths is right haha). It's a HUGE amount of water.
bryanlarsen 11mo ago
It should be inconsequential. Sometimes it isn't. If you're pumping water from an aquifer in the desert for evaporative cooling, that's highly consequential. Unfortunately, media sound bites can't distinguish meaningless water usage from meaningful usage.
pier25 11mo ago

astroflection 11mo ago

I am assuming the 7.7 billion gallons(29b liters) a year is all surface water. It better be. It would be hideously irresponsible to use any ground water for cooling their data centers.

jeffbee 11mo ago
or 24,000 acre-feet in the terms that we normally use to speak about water. In other words, basically none.
shagie 11mo ago
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/29/google-water-data-center-the-dalles-oregon/ https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/29/google-water-data-cen... > The company has negotiated a pair of agreements with The Dalles city officials that would significantly reduce property taxes Google must pay on the new development and secure for the company the water it needs for its expanded operations. > The deal to deliver groundwater to Google has drawn skepticism from members of the public who’ve grown wary of Oregon’s water stability in a changing climate, and that suspicion was on full display at a recent City Council meeting. > ... > “Without this agreement, [Google] or any other industry could use those wells as they wanted just as the aluminum plant previously did,” Anderson, the public works director, told the Council. > Anderson said the amount of water that can be withdrawn from The Dalles groundwater aquifer annually without causing a decline is 5,500 acre-feet per year. Only about 1,800 acre-feet per year are being drawn out of the aquifer currently. --- Most surface water has a "you can't drain this" compact. For example, the Great Lakes compact - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact Part of the sticking point for the Foxconn mess in Wisconsin was the water use within the watershed of the Great Lakes. https://observatory.sjmc.wisc.edu/2018/05/10/great-lakes-water-diversion-for-foxconn-plant-explained-debated/ https://observatory.sjmc.wisc.edu/2018/05/10/great-lakes-wat... Microsoft's plan use: https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-data-centers-8-million-gallons-water-each-year https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-data-centers-8-million-ga... > The data obtained by WPR from the city shows the first phase of Microsoft’s data center campus would use a peak of 234,000 gallons per day or 2.8 million gallons per year. Under subsequent phases, the campus would use a peak of 702,000 gallons per day or 8.4 million gallons annually. https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/MKE-Regional-Demands-030124.pdf https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/MKE-Regional-... shows the demand and discharge request.

xhkkffbf 11mo ago

This isn't really about using water as much as dealing with all of the heat that comes out of computation. The water is just the simplest way to dispose of the heat. Isn't there some better way we can, perhaps, turn some of the heat back into something useful? Maybe heat a building? Or turn it back into electricity. It doesn't have to be an efficient conversion because it's now 100% wasted.

fruitworks 11mo ago
the efficiency of converting it to electricity would be low, due to low absolute temperature difference and thus carnot effeciency. I think it could be higher with germanium semiconductors, as you could run them at a higher temp and get superheated steam
cogman10 11mo ago
> Maybe heat a building? I'm a big fan of district heating, but it's something that needs to be built before the datacenter is. It also doesn't really work well if the datacenter isn't in an already cool region. > Or turn it back into electricity. The temps aren't high enough to do that easily. You need boiling water to generate electricity, and chips don't like running at or above 100C. It's possible you could use a heat pump to turn hot water into boiling water, but that will stop working when temps get out of band. You might be able do it with a sterling engine, but you'd, ironically, need a supply of cool water to keep those running.
- jodrellblank 11mo ago
  > "You need boiling water to generate electricity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine

jandrewrogers 11mo ago

This is a reaction to the unwarranted fear-mongering in the media over water usage by data centers. The amount of water is utterly inconsequential. Growing corn on the same land the data centers currently occupy would consume more water and provide far less value. We should question the motives of whoever orchestrated a "story" out of this non-story and is pushing it in the media. It obviously isn't being done in good faith.

orwin 11mo ago
Agree in spirit, but 'Growing corn on the same land the data centers currently occupy would consume more water and provide far less value' makes the argument weak because those 'agriculture is barely 2% of GDP' argument are like 'brain is barely 2% of your mass'.

krunger 11mo ago

[dead]

Zababa 11mo ago

> Amazon’s data centres were projected to use 7.7 billion gallons of water a year by 2030, according to the leaked strategy memo, which was circulated within the company in 2022. From https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/total-water-use-united-states https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/total-wate...: > Water use in the United States in 2015 was estimated to be about 322 billion gallons per day (Bgal/d), which was 9 percent less than in 2010. It doesn't seem to be very much water at all.

Reason077 11mo ago

What happens to water that a data center “uses”? Is it warmed up and returned to the environment? Contaminated and sent to wastewater? Evaporated into the air?

julianozen 11mo ago

Dumb question, but is this done with fresh water? If so, why? If not, does it matter how much water is used?

hwillis 11mo ago
Its freshwater and has to be freshwater because it goes through pipes and/or is evaporated. Corrosion, scaling and fouling are all issues. Even if seawater was easy to use and datacenters were near the shore, it would produce very saline brine which would be difficult to safely get rid of.
- julianozen 11mo ago
  Thanks!

exasperaited 11mo ago

The company that literally named itself after a river and the threatened habitat it runs through.

1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago

""It would be better if they could own up to it," said a current Amazon software developer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. "Even if they said it was a low priority, at least that would be honest."" HN commentary on water use by so-called "tech" companies usually includes a number of mindlessly-parroted, bad faith "arguments" One of these is to try to compare the new (additive) water use by non-essential data centers with existing (non-additive) water use by agriculture Putting aside that (a) data centers are non-essential and not comparable to food, water or shelter and (b) agricultural use is not new, these "arguments" are also ignoring that (c) the so-called "tech" companies are trying to hide the data Employees of these so-called "tech" companies might be experiencing guilt over this dishonest tactic, but not enough to make them quit When their employer hides the data this makes accurate comparisons, e.g., to existing water use by other recipients, difficult if not impossible Does agriculture also try to hide its water use If it did, then HN comments could not attempt bad faith comparisons Because there would be no data to cite

ajkjk 11mo ago
no opinion on the rest of the point, but, why do you keep writing "so-called" in front of tech companies? They are called that because they are tech companies; the word's meaning is widely agreed upon.
1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
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nzach 11mo ago

I find it really odd this recent push for discussions around the development of new datacenters. There is a plan for constructing a new high-capacity datacenter [edit: near my city]. And a lot of discussions in the media are done through an emotional tone around water and electricity usage. The media generally frames it as if installing a new datacenter would put the neighbors in risk of not having water or electricity. I'm not arguing that a datacenter doesn't bring any problems, everything has pros and cons. Both sides seems to be using bad faith/misleading arguments, and I thinks that's really bad because we end up with solutions and agreements that don't improve the lives of the people affected by these new developments.

bittercynic 11mo ago
One went in 1/4 mile from my home a couple years ago. I ignored the notices of development because I thought it was far enough that it wouldn't affect me, but it blocks the view of the mountains that I used to enjoy, and sometimes I can hear noise from its cooling system (I assume). I wish I'd known what was coming, and gone to the meetings to oppose it.
- Retric 11mo ago
  Large buildings 1000 feet from you are going to have some impact, but your complaint has little to with being a data center specifically. They could have put in a large warehouse and your view gotten blocked just the same, similarly the noise from the cooling system can be managed well or poorly on any building.
  - Scoundreller 11mo ago
    usually large warehouses will appear where there’s good highway connections and lots of cheap unskilled labour. A DC might catch a lot of people “in the sticks” by surprise.
- rcpt 11mo ago
  Hopefully we will emerge from this with a legislative framework that says "fuck your view"

DoneWithAllThat 11mo ago

The level of obsession some people have over data center water usage is completely unhinged.

charles_f 11mo ago

> a commitment to “return more water than it uses by 2030”. How would that even be possible?

bryan_w 11mo ago
Some are adding/funding water treatment plants tre reduce the load from the city water main

balozi 11mo ago

Concerns about inconsequential water usage at datacenters is a far more welcome problem for the the industry than the other real issues they could be dealing with. People distracted by water concerns will not notice the very real energy usage and AI ethics/practices issues. Say what you want but the industry has figured out how to manage public perception and sentiment. Water usage problem is easy to fix, while energy usage is a far tougher nut to crack.