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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/2025/1

by 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
  - belter 1y ago
    I am surprised by your analytical mistake of comparing irrigation water with data-center water usage... They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to misleading conclusions on the impact.
    - simonw 1y ago
      That's a really good point - you're right, comparing data center usage to potable water usage by towns is a different and more valid comparison than comparing with water for irrigation.
      - wasabi991011 1y ago
        They made a good point, but keep in mind that they're doing a "rules for thee, not for me" sometimes. The same person who mentioned potable water being an important distinction also cited a report on data center water consumption that did not make the distinction (where the 628M number came from).
      - belter 1y ago
jonas21 1y ago
The other reason water usage is a bad thing to focus on is that datacenters don't inherently have to use water. It's not like servers have a spigot where you pour water in and it gets consumed. Water is used in modern datacenters for evaporative cooling, and the reason it's used is to save energy -- it's typically around 10% more energy efficient overall than normal air conditioning. These datacenters often have a PUE of under 1.1, meaning they're over 90% efficient at using power for compute, and evaporative cooling is one of the reasons they're able to achieve such high efficiency. If governments wanted to, they could mandate that datacenters use air conditioning instead of evaporative cooling, and water usage would drop to near zero (just enough for the restrooms, watering the plants, etc). But nobody would ever seriously suggest doing this because it would be using more of a valuable resource (electricity / CO2 emissions) to save a small amount of a cheap and relatively plentiful resource (water).

by simonw 1y ago

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
- belter 1y ago
  I am surprised by your analytical mistake of comparing irrigation water with data-center water usage... They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to misleading conclusions on the impact.
  - simonw 1y ago
    That's a really good point - you're right, comparing data center usage to potable water usage by towns is a different and more valid comparison than comparing with water for irrigation.
    - wasabi991011 1y ago
      They made a good point, but keep in mind that they're doing a "rules for thee, not for me" sometimes. The same person who mentioned potable water being an important distinction also cited a report on data center water consumption that did not make the distinction (where the 628M number came from).
    - belter 1y ago

jonas21 1y ago

The other reason water usage is a bad thing to focus on is that datacenters don't inherently have to use water. It's not like servers have a spigot where you pour water in and it gets consumed. Water is used in modern datacenters for evaporative cooling, and the reason it's used is to save energy -- it's typically around 10% more energy efficient overall than normal air conditioning. These datacenters often have a PUE of under 1.1, meaning they're over 90% efficient at using power for compute, and evaporative cooling is one of the reasons they're able to achieve such high efficiency. If governments wanted to, they could mandate that datacenters use air conditioning instead of evaporative cooling, and water usage would drop to near zero (just enough for the restrooms, watering the plants, etc). But nobody would ever seriously suggest doing this because it would be using more of a valuable resource (electricity / CO2 emissions) to save a small amount of a cheap and relatively plentiful resource (water).