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Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annu

by simonw 1y ago

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you complain about water usage I think it risks discrediting the rest of your argument. (Aside from that I agree with most of this piece, the "AGI" thing is a huge distraction.) UPDATE an hour after posting this: I may be making an ass of myself here in that I've been arguing in this thread about comparisons between data center usage and agricultural usage of water, but that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or for many other industrial purposes. I still think the way these numbers are usually presented - as scary large "gallons of water" figures with no additional context to help people understand what that means - is an anti-pattern.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean datacenters should get a pass. Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.
- simonw 1y ago
  From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-data-centers-that-train-ai-and-drain-the-electrical-grid https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-dat... > I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a different story: the farmer said that the local utility was set to hike rates for the third time in three years, with the most recent proposed hike being in the double digits. The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it. There are plenty of credible reasons to criticize data enters, use those instead!
  - Etherlord87 1y ago
    A farmer is a valuable perspective but imagine asking a lumberjack about the ecological effects of deforestation, he might know more about it than an average Joe, but there's probably better people to ask for expertise? > Honestly, we probably use more water than they do This kind of proves my point, regardless of the actual truth in this regard, it's a terrible argument to make: availability of water starts to become a huge problem in a growing amount of places, and this statement implies the water usage of something, that in basic principle doesn't need water at all, uses comparable amount of water as farming, which strictly relies on water.
    - simonw 1y ago
      The author of the article followed the quote from the farmer with a fact-checked (this is the New Yorker) note about water usage for AI training.
  - belter 1y ago
    > The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... "...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..." "I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption" - https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat... "...So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption. If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated..."
    - simonw 1y ago
      Also from that article: > U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture. USGS 2015 report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has irrigation at 118 billion gallons per day - that's 43,070 billion gallons per year. 163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than half a percentage point. It's very easy to present water numbers in a way that looks bad until you start comparing them thoughtfully. I think comparing data center water usage to domestic water usage by people living in towns is actually quite misleading. UPDATE: I may be wrong about this, see following comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945
- jtr1 1y ago
  I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.
  - danaris 1y ago
    But if I say "I object to AI because <list of harms> and its water use", why would you assume that I don't also object to alfalfa farming in Arizona? Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide? This is nothing but whataboutism. People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the other bad things happening in the world at the same time.
    - naasking 1y ago
      Because your argument is more persuasive to more people if you don't expand your criticism to encompass things that are already normalized. Focus on the unique harms IMO.
    - TheCoelacanth 1y ago
      No, that's not the point. If you take a strong argument and through in an extra weak point, that just makes the whole argument less persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people think). You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave factories produce is terrible for the environment." Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.
    - BeFlatXIII 1y ago
      Adding a weak argument is a red flag for BS detectors. It's what prosecutors do to hoodwink a jury into stacking charges over a singular underlying crime.
- roywiggins 1y ago
  I don't think there's a world where a water use tax is levied such that 1) it's enough for datacenters to notice and 2) doesn't immediately bankrupt all golf courses and beef production, because the water use of datacenters is just so much smaller.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness. Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.
    - roywiggins 1y ago
      I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason datacenters would keep operating and beef production wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per gallon.
      - jandrewrogers 1y ago
        A lot of beef is produced in such a way that taxing municipal water won't make a material difference. Even buying market rate water rights in the high desert, which already happens in beef production, is a pretty small tariff on the beef.
      - dghlsakjg 1y ago
        Taxes can have nuance. You can easily write a law that looks like this: There is now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for data-centers. It does not apply to residential use, agricultural use, or any other industrial use. We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My home's power rate through the state owned utility is very different than if I consumed the exact same amount of power, but was an industrial site. I just checked and my water rate at home is also different than if I were running a datacenter. So in all actuality we already discriminate for power and water based on end use. at least where I live. Most places I have lived have different commercial and residential rates. In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.
- heymijo 1y ago
  You're not wrong. My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss. And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading. Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month. Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections—driven largely by anticipated data center growth" With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than it did yesterday. Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual impact on the world, engaging with the facts and understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.
  - amarcheschi 1y ago
    Not only electricity, air pollution around some datacenters too https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
    - simonw 1y ago
      I'd love to say the air pollution issue get the attention that's currently being diverted to the water issue!
  - Windchaser 1y ago
    > It's an externality like you discuss. It's not even an externality? They just pay market price for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.
    - 1y ago
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  In what way are they not paying for it?
reedf1 1y ago
Yes - and the water used is largely non-consumptive.
- binoct 1y ago
  Not really. The majority of data center water withdrawal (total water input) is consumed ("lost" to evaporation etc...) with a minority of it discharged (returned in liquid form). I believe it's on the order of 3/4ths consumed, but that varies a lot by local climate and cooling technology. There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options, but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction of data centers globally.
lynndotpy 1y ago
Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
- simonw 1y ago
  Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people - than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.
  - notahacker 1y ago
    you can make a strong argument for the greater necessity of farming for survival, but not for golf...
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      God forbid the public has an amenity.
  - idiotsecant 1y ago
    I mean... Food is pretty important ...
    - simonw 1y ago
      Which is why the comparison in the amount of water usage matters. Data centers in the USA use less than a fraction of a percent of the water that's used for agriculture. I'll start worrying about competition with water for food production when that value goes up by a multiple of about 1000.
    - wongarsu 1y ago
      Corn, potatoes and wheat are important maybe even oranges, but we could live with a lot less alfalfa and almonds. Also a lot less meat in general. A huge part of our agriculture is feed to feed our food. We need some meat, but the current amount is excessive
jordanb 1y ago
Water can range from serious concern to NBD depending on where the data center is located, where the water is coming from, and the specific details of how the data center's cooling systems are built. To say that it's never an issue is disingenuous. Additionally one could image a data center built in a place with a surplus of generating capacity. But in most cases, it has a big impact on the local grid or a big impact on air quality if they bring in a bunch of gas turbines.
dlord 1y ago
I think the water usage argument can be pertinent depending on the context. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-centers-latin-america https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-cent... https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/feature-in-latin-america-data-center-plans-fuel-water-worries-idUSL8N3AU1PY/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/feature-in-latin-...
- simonw 1y ago
  That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about here: > A small data centre using this type of cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...] > For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Querétaro sites used 40 million litres of water, it added. > That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the numbers are huge. That's not credible reporting because it makes no effort at all to help the reader understand the magnitude of those figures. "40 million litres of water" is NOT "a lot of water". As far as I can tell that's about the same annual water usage as a 24 acre soybean field.
  - buellerbueller 1y ago
    It's a lot of water for AI waifus and videos of Trump shitbombing people who dare oppose him.
    - lukeschlather 1y ago
      It's not a lot of water for AI weather modeling to ensure the soybean crops throughout the country are adequately watered and maximize yield.
  - Etherlord87 1y ago
    Yes, a 24 acre soybean field uses a lot of water.
    - 1y ago
fny 1y ago
I'm personally excited for when the AGI-nauts start trotting out figures like... > An H100 on low-carbon grid is only about 1–2% of one US person’s total daily footprint! The real culprit is humans after all.
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  Humans have been measuring between human only vs augmented labor for literal centuries. Frederick Taylor literally invented the process you describe in his “principles of scientific management” This is the entire focus of the Toyota automation model. The consistent empirical pattern is: Machine-only systems outperform humans on narrow, formalizable tasks. Human-machine hybrid systems outperform both on robustness, yieldjng higher success probability Good enough?
  - fny 1y ago
    I was making a joke.
dimitrios1 1y ago
> sound scary when presented without context It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at this point and creating the demand for all these datacenters. If it was just for us devs and researchers, you wouldn't need this many.
- simonw 1y ago
  Whether it's a "gigantic" waste of water depends on what those figures mean. It's very important to understand if 25 million liters of water per year is a gigantic number or not.
  - jstanley 1y ago
    For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough utility? And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else, it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.
    - Etherlord87 1y ago
      If only millions of people suffering from lack of water knew this.
      - danielbln 1y ago
        Would we be sending that water to those millions of people instead?
      - jjk166 1y ago
        If you redistributed this water to a million people suffering from lack of water, they'ed get about 2 shot glasses worth per day.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
buellerbueller 1y ago
Fine, fine: get rid of golf courses too. As for food production; that might be important? IDK, I am not a silicon "intelligence" so what do I know? Also, I have to "eat". Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if we can just replace ourselves, so that agriculture is unnecessary, and we can devote all that water to AGI. TIL that the true arc of humanity is to replace itself!
- simonw 1y ago
  See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268 Given the difference in water usage, more data centers does not mean less water for agriculture in any meaningful way. If you genuinely want to save water you should celebrate any time an acre of farm land is converted into an acre of data center - all the more water for the other farms!
  - buellerbueller 1y ago
    the value of datacenters is dubious. the value of agriculture, less so.
    - simonw 1y ago
      Once again, the key thing here is to ask how MUCH value we get per liter of water used. If data centers and farms used the same amount of water we should absolutely be talking about their comparative value to society, and farms would win. Farms use thousands of times more water than data centers.
      - danaris 1y ago
        Yes, it is worthwhile to ask how much value we get. And a whole bunch of us are saying we don't see the value in all these datacenters being built and run at full power to do training and inference 24/7, but you just keep ignoring or dismissing that. It is absolutely possible that generative AI provides some value. That is not the same thing as saying that it provides enough value to justify all of the resources being expended on it. The fact that the amount of water it uses is a fraction of what is used by agriculture—which is both one of the most important uses humans can put water to, as well as, AIUI, by far the single largest use of water in the world—is not a strong argument that its water usage should be ignored.
slightwinder 1y ago
> but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. People are critical of farmland and golf courses, too. But Farmland at least has more benefit for society, so they are more vocal on how it's used.
- randallsquared 1y ago
  The problem is more one of scale: a million liters of water is less than half of a single Olympic-sized swimming pool. A single acre of alfalfa typically requires 4.9 - 7.6 million liters a year for irrigation. Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool and be sent back, but the irrigation water is lost to transpiration and the recycling-by-weather process. So, even if there's no recycling, a data center that is said to consume "millions" rather than tens or hundreds of millions is probably using less than 5 acres of alfalfa in consumption, and in absolute terms, this requires only a swimming-pool or two of water per years. It's trivial.
  - slightwinder 1y ago
    > The problem is more one of scale: I think the source is the bigger problem. If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. There probably wouldn't be any complaints if they would use sewerage or saltwater from the ocean. > Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool Cooling and returning the water is not always that simple. I don't know specifically about datacentres, but I know about wasting clean water in other areas, cooling in power plants, industry, etc. and there it can have a significant impact on the cycle. At the end it's a resource which is used at least temporary, which has impact on the whole system.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      > If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. Surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this mentioned. The water use argument is highly local and depends on where we are building these data centers. Are you building in the great lakes region with plenty of fresh water and no water scarcity issues (yet)? Ok fine. But we aren't building there. We're building in Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa putting further stress in an area that water scarcity is already an issue, or soon going to become one due to long term drought conditions. Or Texas, which already has problems with their power grid. We're building in these locations because they're cheap. If we're going do to this, we need to not let the bottom line be the sole driving decision of data center locations. If it's not profitable to build elsewhere, don't build it until you've figured out how to make it efficient enough to where it is profitable.
the__alchemist 1y ago
I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reaction to the hype promoted by tech CEOs and media outlets. People are seeing through their lies and exaggerations, and taking positions like "AI/LLMs have no values or uses", then using every argument they hear as a reason why it is bad in a broad sense. For example: Energy and water concerns. That's my best guess about the concern you're braced against.
- techblueberry 1y ago
  I mean, it is intellectually honest to point out that the AI debate at the point is much more a religious or political than strictly technical really. Especially the way tech CEOs hype this as the end of everything.
- HardCodedBias 1y ago
  It seems like there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and "AI skepticism." I have no idea why. I don't think that the correlation is 1, but it seems weirdly high.
  - pimeys 1y ago
    Yep. Same for the other direction: there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and praising AI on Twitter. Then there's us who are mildly disappointed on the agents and how they don't live their promise, and the tech CEOs destroying the economy and our savings. Still using the agents for things that work better, but being burned out for spending days of our time fixing the issues the they created to our code.
  - tech_ken 1y ago
    The adoption and use of technology frequently (even typically) has a political axis, it's kind of just this weird world of consumer tech/personal computers that's nominally "apolitical" because it's instead aligned to the axis of taste/self-identity so it'll generate more economic activity.
turtlesdown11 1y ago
Your context is a little lacking. Golf courses almost universally have retention ponds/wells/etc at the facility and recycle their water. Only 14% use municipal water systems to draw water. https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...
- simonw 1y ago
  "Presented by the USGA" (the United States Golf Association) gave me a wry chuckle there. That said, here are the relevant numbers from that 2012 article in full: > Most 18-hole golf facilities utilize surface waters (ponds, lakes) or on-site irrigation wells. Approximately 14 percent of golf facilities use water from a public municipal source and approximately 12 percent use recycled water as a source for irrigation. > Specific water sources for 18-hole courses as indicated by participants are noted below: > 52 percent use water from ponds or lakes. > 46 percent use water from on-site wells. > 17 percent use water from rivers, streams and creeks. > 14 percent use water from municipal water systems. > 12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    It depends on the region. In dryer regions most golf courses are already on greywater system. Irrigation mainly targets fairways, teeboxes, and greens, while the rough is allowed to go to hell in the dryer months. Some golf courses also are designed to spread floodwater and protect surrounding development. Golf is sort of a happy bonus on top of that. Private courses are usually far better irrigated than their public counterparts where even the fairway is liable to be left to dry out.
efsavage 1y ago
The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable to our initial position whatever that is. Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people than not will assume that using water means it's not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer, untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation. Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it seems then some education is in order.
- leoedin 1y ago
  If water is just used for cooling, and the output is hotter water, then it's not really "used" at all. Maybe it needs to be cooled to ambient and filtered before someone can use it, but it's still there. If it was being used for evaporative cooling then the argument would be stronger. But I don't think it is - not least because most data centres don't have massive evaporative cooling towers. Even then, whether we consider it a bad thing or not depends on the location. If the data centre was located in an area with lots of water, it's not some great loss that it's being evaporated. If it's located in a desert then it obviously is.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    If it was evaporative, the amounts would be much less.
    - Blackcatmaxy 1y ago
      Imnot sure why you're saying it would be less? All sources I can find say that evaporative cooling is a tradeoff of more water for less power.
overgard 1y ago
I suppose instead we can talk about people's 401k's being risked in a market propped up by the AI bubble.
- simonw 1y ago
  Absolutely.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  We really need to stop tying people's retirement to the market. I've already lost ground due to 2008, and COVID, and while I was young, I lived through my parents suffering through dotcom as well. It's long past time we have a universal public pension, funded at least in part with a progressive wealth tax, or least go back to private defined benefit pensions to where the employer or pension fund bears the risk rather than the individual. Supplement it with market speculation if you want, but we need something guaranteed for everyone that's a little more robust and provides a better living than the paltry social security we have now.
tomwphillips 1y ago
Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption. If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe. It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view. I really recommend the book.
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  None of which have to do with AI or AGI. Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer. It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case. What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.
  - tharne 1y ago
    Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"? God help us.
    - keeda 1y ago
      My interpretation was "If an industry that actively works to harm the global health of humanity through their addictive and unhealthy food products is using way more water and we're OK with it, maybe we should give a pass to the industry using a fraction of that water to improve human productivity." Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries, of course, but to a first approximation they are accurate.
snowwrestler 1y ago
Water and power are local issues. And data center use of water and power is already, currently having local impact on politics. I saw ads about it during the election cycle that just concluded. Candidates had to answer questions about it at debates and in interviews. People are using these arguments for the simple reason that they demonstrably resonate with average people who live near data centers. They probably don’t resonate with people who have plenty of income and/or do not compete with data centers locally for resources.
cesarb 1y ago
Some time ago, I read the environmental impact assessment for a proposed natural gas thermal power plant, and in it they emphasized that their water usage was very low (to the point that it fit within the unused part of the water usage allowance for an already existing natural gas thermal power plant on the same site) because they used non-evaporative cooling. What prevents data centers from using non-evaporative cooling to keep their water usage low? The water usage argument loses a lot of its relevant in that case.
- josefx 1y ago
  Does it route the hot water back into a river? In europe several power plants get shut down each summer because the heated water from those plants would have significant impact on the local wildlife.
  - cesarb 1y ago
    > Does it route the hot water back into a river? That particular one routed the hot water to a set of fan-cooled radiators (rejecting most of the heat into the air).
swyx 1y ago
> data centers often use potable drinking water hmm why exactly? mineral content?
- simonw 1y ago
  Yeah I think it's to avoid mineral buildup on the cooling equipment which would then need to be replaced more often.
cruffle_duffle 1y ago
I went down that “water use” rabbit hole a month ago and basically… it’s just a bunch of circular reporting that was based on some paper published in 2023[1]. For ChatGPT 3.5 they claimed “500ml for 10-50 responses”. In 2024, Washington Post published an article that took their claim and said “519 milliliters per email”[2] but didn’t source that from the original paper… that “shocking headline” took off and got widely circulated and cited directly, treating the WaPo calculation as if it were the original research finding. Then tech blogs and advocacy sites ran with it even harder, citing each other instead of any actual research[3]. If you look at the original paper they are quite upfront with the difficulty of estimating water use. It’s not public data—in fact it’s usually a closely held trade secret, plus it’s got all kinds of other issues like you don’t know where the training happened, when it happened, what the actual cooling efficiency was, etc. The researchers were pretty clear about these limitations in the actual paper. Basically, it’s urban legend at this point. When OpenAI’s CEO later said ChatGPT uses ~0.3ml per query, that’s roughly 100x less than the viral claims. [1] <https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271> [2] <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-...> [3] <https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai>/
netdevphoenix 1y ago
>Tip for AI skeptics Assumptions you are making: - AI = transformer ANNs - People sceptical of transformer ANNs directly leading to AGI within any reasonable period are also sceptical of transformer ANNs directly leading to AGI any time in the far future This kind of generalisations don't help you as the huge number of comments underneath yours likely shows
- simonw 1y ago
  I don't think anyone who read my comment here misunderstood my usage of the term "AI skeptic" as applying to any form of machine learning as opposed to modern generative AI.
  - netdevphoenix 1y ago
    What you think it is and what it is are 2 different things. You are once more making assumptions.
    - simonw 1y ago
      What assumption did I make here?
gloomyday 1y ago
One of the biggest problems in environmental education (imo) is the lack of notion regarding the footprint of products and services we consume daily; from the water and CO2 costs of a meal, of a heated pool, of a car, etc. It is eye-opening. I first came across this type of info with the book "How Bad Are Bananas", from Mike Berners-Lee. I really enjoyed it, and I just saw that the new edition even includes stuff like hosting a World Cup, data centers, and space tourism! It should give a good foundation to start talking about it.
bwhiting2356 1y ago
Water location matters. Is the data center in a desert with scarce potable water for locals? Or is next to a large Canadian lake, plenty of potable water, with people who want to trade something for currency so they can put avocados in their salad?
- hadlock 1y ago
  A lot of data centers are near the Columbia river, as power is cheap there thanks to hydroelectric; which flows through an arid desert-like region, but is also the largest river in the western US and it's simply impossible to pump too much water out of it.
runarberg 1y ago
Arguments in isolation are usually poor. The water usage arguments usually (always?) comes along with a bunch of other arguments, including power consumption, workers rights, consumer protection, public safety, enshittifcation, etc. When evaluating the economical cost or morality of a thing, (just like when training a machine learning model) the more data you consider the more accurate the result (although just like statistical modelling it is worth to be wary of overfitting).
seemaze 1y ago
On the water front, in my area agriculture flood irrigates with pristine aquifer water, while surface water gets treated and dumped into the drinking supply. This is due to the economics of historic water rights.
lsy 1y ago
It's disheartening that a potentially worthwhile discussion — should we invest engineering resources in LLMs as a normal technology rather than as a millenarian fantasy? — has been hijacked by a (at this writing) 177-comment discussion on a small component of the author's argument. The author's argument is an important one that hardly hinges at all on water usage specifically, given the vast human and financial capital invested in LLM buildout so far.
john01dav 1y ago
Another issue is that you could, in principle, build data centers in places where you don't need to evaporate water to cool them. For example, you could use a closed loop water cooling system and then sink that heat into the air or into a nearby body of water. OVH's datacenter outside Montreal¹ does this, for example. You can also use low carbon energy sources to power the data center (nuclear or hydro are probably the best because their production is reliable and predictable). Unlike most datacenters, AI datacenters being far away from the user is okay since it takes on the order of seconds to minutes for the code to run and generate a response. So, a few hundred milliseconds of latency is much more tolerable. For this reason, I think that we should pick a small number of ideal locations that have a combination of weather that permits non-sub-ambient cooling and have usable low carbon resources (either hydropower is available and plentiful, or you can build or otherwise access nuclear reactors there), and then put the bulk of this new boom there. If you pick a place with both population and a cold climate, you could even look into using the data center's waste heat for district heating to get a small new revenue stream and offset some environmental impact. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzirpvTiOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzirpvTiOo
quickthrowman 1y ago
I did some napkin math on data center water usage for a 500MW data center in the Columbia River valley. It uses as much water per year as 200 acres of alfalfa in California’s Central Valley. There are around 1M acres of alfalfa growing in California. 2.5MW of data center capacity is roughly equal to 1 acre of irrigated alfalfa in water usage. If you’re pulling fossil aquifer water, open loop evaporative cooling may not be the best idea, but there are plenty of places east of 100 degrees west in the US that have virtually ‘unlimited’ water where cooling towers are a great idea since they almost double the COP of a chilled water system.
thatoneengineer 1y ago
The nice thing about the data center water usage panic is that whenever someone appeals to it, I immediately know that either they haven't done their homework or they're arguing in bad faith.
jmccaf 1y ago
I think the water use arguments are relevant, particularly in regions of the world and US (CA) where potable water is scarce, but land and electricity are available . NYT article gift link where people reported wells ran dry after data centers moved in. : 'From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy' https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center-backlash-mexico-ireland.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1E8.sQsh.904mwEZGukJN&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center... From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... , I understand there are two types of cooling with water in DCs, open-loop that's simple but water-intensive, and closed-loop that's expensive but efficient. >> This can be achieved through air cooling using water evaporation, which is an open-loop and more water-intensive method, or through server liquid cooling.
- AgentME 1y ago
  The reported case about water wells running dry had to do with issues in construction rather than anything about the data center's regular operation: > But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater from construction. It had nothing to do with the data center’s normal operations (it hadn’t begun operating yet, and doesn’t even draw from local groundwater). The residents were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this is not an example of a data center’s water demand harming a local population. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake#%C2%A7local https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...
keeda 1y ago
This article goes into an ungodly amount of detail -- with receipts -- making the case that the AI water issue is fake: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
kragen 1y ago
Data center cooling towers have to use fresh rather than salt water, but they don't care about bacterial contamination or toxic traces of arsenic, antimony, and fluorine. Agriculture also has to use fresh rather than salt water. I can't think of any circumstances where water that was usable for agriculture wouldn't also be usable for cooling data centers—except when the farmer owns the water and the data center operator doesn't. I also think the energy usage stuff is kind of nonsense. If energy usage is a major part of your operating expenses, you're probably going to locate your data center where energy is cheap, and cheap energy is always renewable. I'm sure you can find data centers that run off coal plants or other thermal power, but thermal power costs in the neighborhood of 100¢ per peak watt, while solar cells cost 12¢ per peak watt, so thermal power won't be competitive for very long.
- buu700 1y ago
  Not to mention that this is likely a very short-term debate. Modern AI/ML/compute has been a huge boost to fusion R&D, and tons of AI/tech capital is flowing into companies like Helion and CFS. Necessity is the mother of invention and all. It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first few plants go live and mass production begins within the next decade. Knock on wood.
  - kragen 1y ago
    I'm skeptical about that. Helion in particular might work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI) but all the other fusion-energy companies' plans are to convert fusion energy to thermal energy and then convert the thermal energy to electrical energy in the usual way, using steam engines. That's never going to be cheaper than thermal energy powering steam engines, because thermal energy powering steam engines is part of it. But solar energy is. Helion's strategy is to directly convert the hot plasma's expansion into electrical energy by, basically, pushing against a powerful magnetic field. This is potentially higher efficiency than steam engines (because it's working at a higher temperature) and potentially higher power density and reliability. So it could at least theoretically get to be cheaper than steam engines. But I think it's more likely to be far more expensive for the next several decades.
ineedasername 1y ago
>that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or for many other industrial purposes. I think you're still good on your original assertion, it seems many/most of the biggest players are using non potable in new facilities and also retrofitting some old ones to avoid potable water as well [1] I think you'd be good either way: The distinction sounds like an important point until you realize that the cost of turning raw water potable is so vanishly small compared to the cost of these data centers. Some rough estimates place it as less than one single rack of a GB200 NVL72 to build enough-- or more economically, bolster the local existing plants for raw water processing. Even if they had to go to brackish water desalination the cost there looks to be mostly in ongoing electricity costs which amount to ~$3k per day such that their existing power plant build outs for these would easily cover it, or a few such new desalination plants to cover many many data centers. I'm not unsympathetic to aspects of these overall concerns either, but critics have to do a lot better than concerns that are less hyperbolically expressed as the much less catchy "No AI!... without small and reasonable policies for covering proportional infrastructure cost increases!". [1] https://datacentremagazine.com/articles/reclaimed-wastewater-to-be-used-at-20-aws-locations https://datacentremagazine.com/articles/reclaimed-wastewater...
SomaticPirate 1y ago
The AI water usage aspect is pretty clearly a lie and a gross misunderstanding at best https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?r=66lqc&selection=62ba8d88-8f8a-4abd-819c-bf215c96d265 https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/the-ai-water-issu... There are dozens of other things that use we use everyday that have a larger impact. I think there a real concerns here but the water usage argument is a poor one
lfkjfliejlfijal 1y ago
[flagged]
simonw 1y ago
Update on the update: I asked Andy Masley (author of this piece https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake) about the potable water issue and he dug into it, here's his initial take about it not being a big deal: https://bsky.app/profile/andymasley.bsky.social/post/3m5mqcegcps2z https://bsky.app/profile/andymasley.bsky.social/post/3m5mqce... Key quote: > If any region has a lot of freshwater and little potable water, the best way to make potable water more available and cheaper is to introduce a new large buyer, which will give the local utility enough revenue to upgrade and expand their treatment facilities. Saying that my data is misleading because Al "only uses valuable potable water" actually gets the issue backwards: adding demand for more potable water in regions with lots of freshwater makes potable water cheaper and more abundant for everyone else per unit.
- pastel8739 1y ago
  This feels like it makes a lot of assumptions: 1. That just because a region doesn’t have enough potable water to support humans and data centers, it also doesn’t have enough potable water to support the humans alone. 2. That the temporary increase in water prices due to the new demand of the data centers will provide enough revenue to upgrade its facilities 3. Even given enough revenue to upgrade its facilities, that the utility will choose to upgrade its facilities and increase demand 4. That the downsides of a temporary increase in water prices while new facilities are built is acceptable and will not cause suffering 5. Even after new facilities are built, that the cost of those facilities will be low enough and the increase in supply large enough that water prices for humans will be lower than they were originally, even with a large and wealthy new buyer on the market. It doesn’t feel like a very strong argument to me.
  - andymasley 1y ago
    Just as an example, Loudoun County has the most data center concentration in the world by a wide margin, and also has significantly lower water prices than the Virginia average. Seems like they've been able to build out huge new water capacity for data centers and that hasn't raised househould prices, or even kept them low. https://andymasley.substack.com/i/171855599/the-county-with-the-most-data-centers-in-the-country https://andymasley.substack.com/i/171855599/the-county-with-...
jamesoofou 1y ago
skip water discussion because it's just irrelevant. If you can debunk AGI then of course we should stop spending trillions on it. If you can't debunk AGI then water usage is just a nonfactor.
codyb 1y ago
Why can't we use non-potable water for these data centers too?

by simonw 1y ago

paulryanrogers 1y ago

Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean datacenters should get a pass. Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.

simonw 1y ago
From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-data-centers-that-train-ai-and-drain-the-electrical-grid https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-dat... > I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a different story: the farmer said that the local utility was set to hike rates for the third time in three years, with the most recent proposed hike being in the double digits. The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it. There are plenty of credible reasons to criticize data enters, use those instead!
- Etherlord87 1y ago
  A farmer is a valuable perspective but imagine asking a lumberjack about the ecological effects of deforestation, he might know more about it than an average Joe, but there's probably better people to ask for expertise? > Honestly, we probably use more water than they do This kind of proves my point, regardless of the actual truth in this regard, it's a terrible argument to make: availability of water starts to become a huge problem in a growing amount of places, and this statement implies the water usage of something, that in basic principle doesn't need water at all, uses comparable amount of water as farming, which strictly relies on water.
  - simonw 1y ago
    The author of the article followed the quote from the farmer with a fact-checked (this is the New Yorker) note about water usage for AI training.
- belter 1y ago
  > The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... "...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..." "I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption" - https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat... "...So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption. If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated..."
  - simonw 1y ago
    Also from that article: > U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture. USGS 2015 report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has irrigation at 118 billion gallons per day - that's 43,070 billion gallons per year. 163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than half a percentage point. It's very easy to present water numbers in a way that looks bad until you start comparing them thoughtfully. I think comparing data center water usage to domestic water usage by people living in towns is actually quite misleading. UPDATE: I may be wrong about this, see following comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945
jtr1 1y ago
I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.
- danaris 1y ago
  But if I say "I object to AI because <list of harms> and its water use", why would you assume that I don't also object to alfalfa farming in Arizona? Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide? This is nothing but whataboutism. People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the other bad things happening in the world at the same time.
  - naasking 1y ago
    Because your argument is more persuasive to more people if you don't expand your criticism to encompass things that are already normalized. Focus on the unique harms IMO.
  - TheCoelacanth 1y ago
    No, that's not the point. If you take a strong argument and through in an extra weak point, that just makes the whole argument less persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people think). You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave factories produce is terrible for the environment." Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.
  - BeFlatXIII 1y ago
    Adding a weak argument is a red flag for BS detectors. It's what prosecutors do to hoodwink a jury into stacking charges over a singular underlying crime.
roywiggins 1y ago
I don't think there's a world where a water use tax is levied such that 1) it's enough for datacenters to notice and 2) doesn't immediately bankrupt all golf courses and beef production, because the water use of datacenters is just so much smaller.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness. Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.
  - roywiggins 1y ago
    I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason datacenters would keep operating and beef production wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per gallon.
    - jandrewrogers 1y ago
      A lot of beef is produced in such a way that taxing municipal water won't make a material difference. Even buying market rate water rights in the high desert, which already happens in beef production, is a pretty small tariff on the beef.
    - dghlsakjg 1y ago
      Taxes can have nuance. You can easily write a law that looks like this: There is now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for data-centers. It does not apply to residential use, agricultural use, or any other industrial use. We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My home's power rate through the state owned utility is very different than if I consumed the exact same amount of power, but was an industrial site. I just checked and my water rate at home is also different than if I were running a datacenter. So in all actuality we already discriminate for power and water based on end use. at least where I live. Most places I have lived have different commercial and residential rates. In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.
heymijo 1y ago
You're not wrong. My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss. And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading. Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month. Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections—driven largely by anticipated data center growth" With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than it did yesterday. Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual impact on the world, engaging with the facts and understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.
- amarcheschi 1y ago
  Not only electricity, air pollution around some datacenters too https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
  - simonw 1y ago
    I'd love to say the air pollution issue get the attention that's currently being diverted to the water issue!
- Windchaser 1y ago
  > It's an externality like you discuss. It's not even an externality? They just pay market price for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.
  - 1y ago
jstummbillig 1y ago
In what way are they not paying for it?

reedf1 1y ago

Yes - and the water used is largely non-consumptive.

binoct 1y ago
Not really. The majority of data center water withdrawal (total water input) is consumed ("lost" to evaporation etc...) with a minority of it discharged (returned in liquid form). I believe it's on the order of 3/4ths consumed, but that varies a lot by local climate and cooling technology. There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options, but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction of data centers globally.

lynndotpy 1y ago

Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.

simonw 1y ago
Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people - than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.
- notahacker 1y ago
  you can make a strong argument for the greater necessity of farming for survival, but not for golf...
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    God forbid the public has an amenity.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  I mean... Food is pretty important ...
  - simonw 1y ago
    Which is why the comparison in the amount of water usage matters. Data centers in the USA use less than a fraction of a percent of the water that's used for agriculture. I'll start worrying about competition with water for food production when that value goes up by a multiple of about 1000.
  - wongarsu 1y ago
    Corn, potatoes and wheat are important maybe even oranges, but we could live with a lot less alfalfa and almonds. Also a lot less meat in general. A huge part of our agriculture is feed to feed our food. We need some meat, but the current amount is excessive

jordanb 1y ago

Water can range from serious concern to NBD depending on where the data center is located, where the water is coming from, and the specific details of how the data center's cooling systems are built. To say that it's never an issue is disingenuous. Additionally one could image a data center built in a place with a surplus of generating capacity. But in most cases, it has a big impact on the local grid or a big impact on air quality if they bring in a bunch of gas turbines.

dlord 1y ago

I think the water usage argument can be pertinent depending on the context. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-centers-latin-america https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-cent... https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/feature-in-latin-america-data-center-plans-fuel-water-worries-idUSL8N3AU1PY/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/feature-in-latin-...

simonw 1y ago
That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about here: > A small data centre using this type of cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...] > For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Querétaro sites used 40 million litres of water, it added. > That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the numbers are huge. That's not credible reporting because it makes no effort at all to help the reader understand the magnitude of those figures. "40 million litres of water" is NOT "a lot of water". As far as I can tell that's about the same annual water usage as a 24 acre soybean field.
- buellerbueller 1y ago
  It's a lot of water for AI waifus and videos of Trump shitbombing people who dare oppose him.
  - lukeschlather 1y ago
    It's not a lot of water for AI weather modeling to ensure the soybean crops throughout the country are adequately watered and maximize yield.
- Etherlord87 1y ago
  Yes, a 24 acre soybean field uses a lot of water.
  - 1y ago

fny 1y ago

I'm personally excited for when the AGI-nauts start trotting out figures like... > An H100 on low-carbon grid is only about 1–2% of one US person’s total daily footprint! The real culprit is humans after all.

AndrewKemendo 1y ago
Humans have been measuring between human only vs augmented labor for literal centuries. Frederick Taylor literally invented the process you describe in his “principles of scientific management” This is the entire focus of the Toyota automation model. The consistent empirical pattern is: Machine-only systems outperform humans on narrow, formalizable tasks. Human-machine hybrid systems outperform both on robustness, yieldjng higher success probability Good enough?
- fny 1y ago
  I was making a joke.

dimitrios1 1y ago

> sound scary when presented without context It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at this point and creating the demand for all these datacenters. If it was just for us devs and researchers, you wouldn't need this many.

simonw 1y ago
Whether it's a "gigantic" waste of water depends on what those figures mean. It's very important to understand if 25 million liters of water per year is a gigantic number or not.
- jstanley 1y ago
  For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough utility? And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else, it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.
  - Etherlord87 1y ago
    If only millions of people suffering from lack of water knew this.
    - danielbln 1y ago
      Would we be sending that water to those millions of people instead?
    - jjk166 1y ago
      If you redistributed this water to a million people suffering from lack of water, they'ed get about 2 shot glasses worth per day.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

buellerbueller 1y ago

Fine, fine: get rid of golf courses too. As for food production; that might be important? IDK, I am not a silicon "intelligence" so what do I know? Also, I have to "eat". Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if we can just replace ourselves, so that agriculture is unnecessary, and we can devote all that water to AGI. TIL that the true arc of humanity is to replace itself!

simonw 1y ago
See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268 Given the difference in water usage, more data centers does not mean less water for agriculture in any meaningful way. If you genuinely want to save water you should celebrate any time an acre of farm land is converted into an acre of data center - all the more water for the other farms!
- buellerbueller 1y ago
  the value of datacenters is dubious. the value of agriculture, less so.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Once again, the key thing here is to ask how MUCH value we get per liter of water used. If data centers and farms used the same amount of water we should absolutely be talking about their comparative value to society, and farms would win. Farms use thousands of times more water than data centers.
    - danaris 1y ago
      Yes, it is worthwhile to ask how much value we get. And a whole bunch of us are saying we don't see the value in all these datacenters being built and run at full power to do training and inference 24/7, but you just keep ignoring or dismissing that. It is absolutely possible that generative AI provides some value. That is not the same thing as saying that it provides enough value to justify all of the resources being expended on it. The fact that the amount of water it uses is a fraction of what is used by agriculture—which is both one of the most important uses humans can put water to, as well as, AIUI, by far the single largest use of water in the world—is not a strong argument that its water usage should be ignored.

slightwinder 1y ago

> but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. People are critical of farmland and golf courses, too. But Farmland at least has more benefit for society, so they are more vocal on how it's used.

randallsquared 1y ago
The problem is more one of scale: a million liters of water is less than half of a single Olympic-sized swimming pool. A single acre of alfalfa typically requires 4.9 - 7.6 million liters a year for irrigation. Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool and be sent back, but the irrigation water is lost to transpiration and the recycling-by-weather process. So, even if there's no recycling, a data center that is said to consume "millions" rather than tens or hundreds of millions is probably using less than 5 acres of alfalfa in consumption, and in absolute terms, this requires only a swimming-pool or two of water per years. It's trivial.
- slightwinder 1y ago
  > The problem is more one of scale: I think the source is the bigger problem. If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. There probably wouldn't be any complaints if they would use sewerage or saltwater from the ocean. > Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool Cooling and returning the water is not always that simple. I don't know specifically about datacentres, but I know about wasting clean water in other areas, cooling in power plants, industry, etc. and there it can have a significant impact on the cycle. At the end it's a resource which is used at least temporary, which has impact on the whole system.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. Surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this mentioned. The water use argument is highly local and depends on where we are building these data centers. Are you building in the great lakes region with plenty of fresh water and no water scarcity issues (yet)? Ok fine. But we aren't building there. We're building in Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa putting further stress in an area that water scarcity is already an issue, or soon going to become one due to long term drought conditions. Or Texas, which already has problems with their power grid. We're building in these locations because they're cheap. If we're going do to this, we need to not let the bottom line be the sole driving decision of data center locations. If it's not profitable to build elsewhere, don't build it until you've figured out how to make it efficient enough to where it is profitable.

the__alchemist 1y ago

I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reaction to the hype promoted by tech CEOs and media outlets. People are seeing through their lies and exaggerations, and taking positions like "AI/LLMs have no values or uses", then using every argument they hear as a reason why it is bad in a broad sense. For example: Energy and water concerns. That's my best guess about the concern you're braced against.

techblueberry 1y ago
I mean, it is intellectually honest to point out that the AI debate at the point is much more a religious or political than strictly technical really. Especially the way tech CEOs hype this as the end of everything.
HardCodedBias 1y ago
It seems like there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and "AI skepticism." I have no idea why. I don't think that the correlation is 1, but it seems weirdly high.
- pimeys 1y ago
  Yep. Same for the other direction: there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and praising AI on Twitter. Then there's us who are mildly disappointed on the agents and how they don't live their promise, and the tech CEOs destroying the economy and our savings. Still using the agents for things that work better, but being burned out for spending days of our time fixing the issues the they created to our code.
- tech_ken 1y ago
  The adoption and use of technology frequently (even typically) has a political axis, it's kind of just this weird world of consumer tech/personal computers that's nominally "apolitical" because it's instead aligned to the axis of taste/self-identity so it'll generate more economic activity.

turtlesdown11 1y ago

Your context is a little lacking. Golf courses almost universally have retention ponds/wells/etc at the facility and recycle their water. Only 14% use municipal water systems to draw water. https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...

simonw 1y ago
"Presented by the USGA" (the United States Golf Association) gave me a wry chuckle there. That said, here are the relevant numbers from that 2012 article in full: > Most 18-hole golf facilities utilize surface waters (ponds, lakes) or on-site irrigation wells. Approximately 14 percent of golf facilities use water from a public municipal source and approximately 12 percent use recycled water as a source for irrigation. > Specific water sources for 18-hole courses as indicated by participants are noted below: > 52 percent use water from ponds or lakes. > 46 percent use water from on-site wells. > 17 percent use water from rivers, streams and creeks. > 14 percent use water from municipal water systems. > 12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  It depends on the region. In dryer regions most golf courses are already on greywater system. Irrigation mainly targets fairways, teeboxes, and greens, while the rough is allowed to go to hell in the dryer months. Some golf courses also are designed to spread floodwater and protect surrounding development. Golf is sort of a happy bonus on top of that. Private courses are usually far better irrigated than their public counterparts where even the fairway is liable to be left to dry out.

efsavage 1y ago

The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable to our initial position whatever that is. Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people than not will assume that using water means it's not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer, untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation. Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it seems then some education is in order.

leoedin 1y ago
If water is just used for cooling, and the output is hotter water, then it's not really "used" at all. Maybe it needs to be cooled to ambient and filtered before someone can use it, but it's still there. If it was being used for evaporative cooling then the argument would be stronger. But I don't think it is - not least because most data centres don't have massive evaporative cooling towers. Even then, whether we consider it a bad thing or not depends on the location. If the data centre was located in an area with lots of water, it's not some great loss that it's being evaporated. If it's located in a desert then it obviously is.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  If it was evaporative, the amounts would be much less.
  - Blackcatmaxy 1y ago
    Imnot sure why you're saying it would be less? All sources I can find say that evaporative cooling is a tradeoff of more water for less power.

overgard 1y ago

I suppose instead we can talk about people's 401k's being risked in a market propped up by the AI bubble.

simonw 1y ago
Absolutely.
thewebguyd 1y ago
We really need to stop tying people's retirement to the market. I've already lost ground due to 2008, and COVID, and while I was young, I lived through my parents suffering through dotcom as well. It's long past time we have a universal public pension, funded at least in part with a progressive wealth tax, or least go back to private defined benefit pensions to where the employer or pension fund bears the risk rather than the individual. Supplement it with market speculation if you want, but we need something guaranteed for everyone that's a little more robust and provides a better living than the paltry social security we have now.

tomwphillips 1y ago

Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption. If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe. It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view. I really recommend the book.

AndrewKemendo 1y ago
None of which have to do with AI or AGI. Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer. It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case. What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.
- tharne 1y ago
  Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"? God help us.
  - keeda 1y ago
    My interpretation was "If an industry that actively works to harm the global health of humanity through their addictive and unhealthy food products is using way more water and we're OK with it, maybe we should give a pass to the industry using a fraction of that water to improve human productivity." Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries, of course, but to a first approximation they are accurate.

snowwrestler 1y ago

Water and power are local issues. And data center use of water and power is already, currently having local impact on politics. I saw ads about it during the election cycle that just concluded. Candidates had to answer questions about it at debates and in interviews. People are using these arguments for the simple reason that they demonstrably resonate with average people who live near data centers. They probably don’t resonate with people who have plenty of income and/or do not compete with data centers locally for resources.

cesarb 1y ago

Some time ago, I read the environmental impact assessment for a proposed natural gas thermal power plant, and in it they emphasized that their water usage was very low (to the point that it fit within the unused part of the water usage allowance for an already existing natural gas thermal power plant on the same site) because they used non-evaporative cooling. What prevents data centers from using non-evaporative cooling to keep their water usage low? The water usage argument loses a lot of its relevant in that case.

josefx 1y ago
Does it route the hot water back into a river? In europe several power plants get shut down each summer because the heated water from those plants would have significant impact on the local wildlife.
- cesarb 1y ago
  > Does it route the hot water back into a river? That particular one routed the hot water to a set of fan-cooled radiators (rejecting most of the heat into the air).

swyx 1y ago

> data centers often use potable drinking water hmm why exactly? mineral content?

simonw 1y ago
Yeah I think it's to avoid mineral buildup on the cooling equipment which would then need to be replaced more often.

cruffle_duffle 1y ago

I went down that “water use” rabbit hole a month ago and basically… it’s just a bunch of circular reporting that was based on some paper published in 2023[1]. For ChatGPT 3.5 they claimed “500ml for 10-50 responses”. In 2024, Washington Post published an article that took their claim and said “519 milliliters per email”[2] but didn’t source that from the original paper… that “shocking headline” took off and got widely circulated and cited directly, treating the WaPo calculation as if it were the original research finding. Then tech blogs and advocacy sites ran with it even harder, citing each other instead of any actual research[3]. If you look at the original paper they are quite upfront with the difficulty of estimating water use. It’s not public data—in fact it’s usually a closely held trade secret, plus it’s got all kinds of other issues like you don’t know where the training happened, when it happened, what the actual cooling efficiency was, etc. The researchers were pretty clear about these limitations in the actual paper. Basically, it’s urban legend at this point. When OpenAI’s CEO later said ChatGPT uses ~0.3ml per query, that’s roughly 100x less than the viral claims. [1] <https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271> [2] <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-...> [3] <https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai>/

netdevphoenix 1y ago

>Tip for AI skeptics Assumptions you are making: - AI = transformer ANNs - People sceptical of transformer ANNs directly leading to AGI within any reasonable period are also sceptical of transformer ANNs directly leading to AGI any time in the far future This kind of generalisations don't help you as the huge number of comments underneath yours likely shows

simonw 1y ago
I don't think anyone who read my comment here misunderstood my usage of the term "AI skeptic" as applying to any form of machine learning as opposed to modern generative AI.
- netdevphoenix 1y ago
  What you think it is and what it is are 2 different things. You are once more making assumptions.
  - simonw 1y ago
    What assumption did I make here?

gloomyday 1y ago

One of the biggest problems in environmental education (imo) is the lack of notion regarding the footprint of products and services we consume daily; from the water and CO2 costs of a meal, of a heated pool, of a car, etc. It is eye-opening. I first came across this type of info with the book "How Bad Are Bananas", from Mike Berners-Lee. I really enjoyed it, and I just saw that the new edition even includes stuff like hosting a World Cup, data centers, and space tourism! It should give a good foundation to start talking about it.

bwhiting2356 1y ago

Water location matters. Is the data center in a desert with scarce potable water for locals? Or is next to a large Canadian lake, plenty of potable water, with people who want to trade something for currency so they can put avocados in their salad?

hadlock 1y ago
A lot of data centers are near the Columbia river, as power is cheap there thanks to hydroelectric; which flows through an arid desert-like region, but is also the largest river in the western US and it's simply impossible to pump too much water out of it.

runarberg 1y ago

Arguments in isolation are usually poor. The water usage arguments usually (always?) comes along with a bunch of other arguments, including power consumption, workers rights, consumer protection, public safety, enshittifcation, etc. When evaluating the economical cost or morality of a thing, (just like when training a machine learning model) the more data you consider the more accurate the result (although just like statistical modelling it is worth to be wary of overfitting).

seemaze 1y ago

On the water front, in my area agriculture flood irrigates with pristine aquifer water, while surface water gets treated and dumped into the drinking supply. This is due to the economics of historic water rights.

lsy 1y ago

It's disheartening that a potentially worthwhile discussion — should we invest engineering resources in LLMs as a normal technology rather than as a millenarian fantasy? — has been hijacked by a (at this writing) 177-comment discussion on a small component of the author's argument. The author's argument is an important one that hardly hinges at all on water usage specifically, given the vast human and financial capital invested in LLM buildout so far.

john01dav 1y ago

Another issue is that you could, in principle, build data centers in places where you don't need to evaporate water to cool them. For example, you could use a closed loop water cooling system and then sink that heat into the air or into a nearby body of water. OVH's datacenter outside Montreal¹ does this, for example. You can also use low carbon energy sources to power the data center (nuclear or hydro are probably the best because their production is reliable and predictable). Unlike most datacenters, AI datacenters being far away from the user is okay since it takes on the order of seconds to minutes for the code to run and generate a response. So, a few hundred milliseconds of latency is much more tolerable. For this reason, I think that we should pick a small number of ideal locations that have a combination of weather that permits non-sub-ambient cooling and have usable low carbon resources (either hydropower is available and plentiful, or you can build or otherwise access nuclear reactors there), and then put the bulk of this new boom there. If you pick a place with both population and a cold climate, you could even look into using the data center's waste heat for district heating to get a small new revenue stream and offset some environmental impact. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzirpvTiOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzirpvTiOo

quickthrowman 1y ago

I did some napkin math on data center water usage for a 500MW data center in the Columbia River valley. It uses as much water per year as 200 acres of alfalfa in California’s Central Valley. There are around 1M acres of alfalfa growing in California. 2.5MW of data center capacity is roughly equal to 1 acre of irrigated alfalfa in water usage. If you’re pulling fossil aquifer water, open loop evaporative cooling may not be the best idea, but there are plenty of places east of 100 degrees west in the US that have virtually ‘unlimited’ water where cooling towers are a great idea since they almost double the COP of a chilled water system.

thatoneengineer 1y ago

The nice thing about the data center water usage panic is that whenever someone appeals to it, I immediately know that either they haven't done their homework or they're arguing in bad faith.

jmccaf 1y ago

I think the water use arguments are relevant, particularly in regions of the world and US (CA) where potable water is scarce, but land and electricity are available . NYT article gift link where people reported wells ran dry after data centers moved in. : 'From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy' https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center-backlash-mexico-ireland.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1E8.sQsh.904mwEZGukJN&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center... From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... , I understand there are two types of cooling with water in DCs, open-loop that's simple but water-intensive, and closed-loop that's expensive but efficient. >> This can be achieved through air cooling using water evaporation, which is an open-loop and more water-intensive method, or through server liquid cooling.

AgentME 1y ago
The reported case about water wells running dry had to do with issues in construction rather than anything about the data center's regular operation: > But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater from construction. It had nothing to do with the data center’s normal operations (it hadn’t begun operating yet, and doesn’t even draw from local groundwater). The residents were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this is not an example of a data center’s water demand harming a local population. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake#%C2%A7local https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...

keeda 1y ago

This article goes into an ungodly amount of detail -- with receipts -- making the case that the AI water issue is fake: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

kragen 1y ago

Data center cooling towers have to use fresh rather than salt water, but they don't care about bacterial contamination or toxic traces of arsenic, antimony, and fluorine. Agriculture also has to use fresh rather than salt water. I can't think of any circumstances where water that was usable for agriculture wouldn't also be usable for cooling data centers—except when the farmer owns the water and the data center operator doesn't. I also think the energy usage stuff is kind of nonsense. If energy usage is a major part of your operating expenses, you're probably going to locate your data center where energy is cheap, and cheap energy is always renewable. I'm sure you can find data centers that run off coal plants or other thermal power, but thermal power costs in the neighborhood of 100¢ per peak watt, while solar cells cost 12¢ per peak watt, so thermal power won't be competitive for very long.

buu700 1y ago
Not to mention that this is likely a very short-term debate. Modern AI/ML/compute has been a huge boost to fusion R&D, and tons of AI/tech capital is flowing into companies like Helion and CFS. Necessity is the mother of invention and all. It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first few plants go live and mass production begins within the next decade. Knock on wood.
- kragen 1y ago
  I'm skeptical about that. Helion in particular might work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI) but all the other fusion-energy companies' plans are to convert fusion energy to thermal energy and then convert the thermal energy to electrical energy in the usual way, using steam engines. That's never going to be cheaper than thermal energy powering steam engines, because thermal energy powering steam engines is part of it. But solar energy is. Helion's strategy is to directly convert the hot plasma's expansion into electrical energy by, basically, pushing against a powerful magnetic field. This is potentially higher efficiency than steam engines (because it's working at a higher temperature) and potentially higher power density and reliability. So it could at least theoretically get to be cheaper than steam engines. But I think it's more likely to be far more expensive for the next several decades.

ineedasername 1y ago

>that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or for many other industrial purposes. I think you're still good on your original assertion, it seems many/most of the biggest players are using non potable in new facilities and also retrofitting some old ones to avoid potable water as well [1] I think you'd be good either way: The distinction sounds like an important point until you realize that the cost of turning raw water potable is so vanishly small compared to the cost of these data centers. Some rough estimates place it as less than one single rack of a GB200 NVL72 to build enough-- or more economically, bolster the local existing plants for raw water processing. Even if they had to go to brackish water desalination the cost there looks to be mostly in ongoing electricity costs which amount to ~$3k per day such that their existing power plant build outs for these would easily cover it, or a few such new desalination plants to cover many many data centers. I'm not unsympathetic to aspects of these overall concerns either, but critics have to do a lot better than concerns that are less hyperbolically expressed as the much less catchy "No AI!... without small and reasonable policies for covering proportional infrastructure cost increases!". [1] https://datacentremagazine.com/articles/reclaimed-wastewater-to-be-used-at-20-aws-locations https://datacentremagazine.com/articles/reclaimed-wastewater...

SomaticPirate 1y ago

The AI water usage aspect is pretty clearly a lie and a gross misunderstanding at best https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?r=66lqc&selection=62ba8d88-8f8a-4abd-819c-bf215c96d265 https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/the-ai-water-issu... There are dozens of other things that use we use everyday that have a larger impact. I think there a real concerns here but the water usage argument is a poor one

lfkjfliejlfijal 1y ago

[flagged]

simonw 1y ago

Update on the update: I asked Andy Masley (author of this piece https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake) about the potable water issue and he dug into it, here's his initial take about it not being a big deal: https://bsky.app/profile/andymasley.bsky.social/post/3m5mqcegcps2z https://bsky.app/profile/andymasley.bsky.social/post/3m5mqce... Key quote: > If any region has a lot of freshwater and little potable water, the best way to make potable water more available and cheaper is to introduce a new large buyer, which will give the local utility enough revenue to upgrade and expand their treatment facilities. Saying that my data is misleading because Al "only uses valuable potable water" actually gets the issue backwards: adding demand for more potable water in regions with lots of freshwater makes potable water cheaper and more abundant for everyone else per unit.

pastel8739 1y ago
This feels like it makes a lot of assumptions: 1. That just because a region doesn’t have enough potable water to support humans and data centers, it also doesn’t have enough potable water to support the humans alone. 2. That the temporary increase in water prices due to the new demand of the data centers will provide enough revenue to upgrade its facilities 3. Even given enough revenue to upgrade its facilities, that the utility will choose to upgrade its facilities and increase demand 4. That the downsides of a temporary increase in water prices while new facilities are built is acceptable and will not cause suffering 5. Even after new facilities are built, that the cost of those facilities will be low enough and the increase in supply large enough that water prices for humans will be lower than they were originally, even with a large and wealthy new buyer on the market. It doesn’t feel like a very strong argument to me.
- andymasley 1y ago
  Just as an example, Loudoun County has the most data center concentration in the world by a wide margin, and also has significantly lower water prices than the Virginia average. Seems like they've been able to build out huge new water capacity for data centers and that hasn't raised househould prices, or even kept them low. https://andymasley.substack.com/i/171855599/the-county-with-the-most-data-centers-in-the-country https://andymasley.substack.com/i/171855599/the-county-with-...

jamesoofou 1y ago

skip water discussion because it's just irrelevant. If you can debunk AGI then of course we should stop spending trillions on it. If you can't debunk AGI then water usage is just a nonfactor.

codyb 1y ago

Why can't we use non-potable water for these data centers too?