13 ms·

AI uses less water than the public thinks

• hirpslop 5mo ago
  c/o Jay Lund, Vice Director, Center for Watershed Engineering Distinguished Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
• dado3212 5mo ago
  This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s
  • alephnerd 5mo ago
    That's populism for ya, and it's sadly extremely effective. Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1]. Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3]. It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the exact same way. Edit: can't reply > AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad. You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on. Same with nuclear power in Germany and GreenTech in much of the America. [0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-tech-giants-cheap-power-boost-domestic-ai-chips-ft-reports-2025-11-04/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-tech... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-gives-20-year-tax-holiday-foreign-firms-using-local-data-centres-2026-02-01/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-gives-20-year-tax-... [2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afraid-for-their-employment-than-lower-income-as-ai-threat-increases.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afr... [3] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u-s-workers-are-more-exposed-to-ai-on-their-jobs/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...
    • testfoobar 5mo ago
      Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats. AI is currently driving yet another extreme wealth inequality inflection point. Founded just five years ago, Anthropic is going to be a trillion dollar private company maybe this year! This is a staggering outcome and will further divide the gap between the wealthy and everyone else. So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.
      • bluGill 5mo ago
        The economy is down, and the fad is blame AI so that is what everyone is doing. The last downturn there was a different fad that people blamed it on - but the real root cause was always the economy and not the fad.
        • teamonkey 5mo ago
          It’s understandable that people blame AI for economic issues when so may CEOs are publicly stating that “increased efficiencies due to AI” is the reason for laying off staff.
          • bluGill 5mo ago
            They blamed the latest fad for layoffs in the last one as well. Every company and project I know of has a long list of things they want to do that they believe would be good for customers - but they cannot afford the people needed, and the risk is too high to borrow. That is if AI was really increasing efficiency in a good economy they would be keeping everyone and getting more work done with them. Of course in reality we cannot know if AI has really increased efficiency - we only have short term measures at best which we know from experience are often wrong. (most often because there are many ways you can make a shortcut today that will kill your long term)
            • deleted 5mo ago
              [deleted]
  • msla 5mo ago
    The other part of this problem is the idea that if you disagree with someone about the facts you're interpreted as disagreeing with them about the thing they're mad about: You disagree that AI somehow destroys fifty billion-trillion gallons of pure water every time someone asks Claude something, therefore you're fully in favor of Grok making nudes of underage girls. Some people get an Angry. They love their Angry, and nobody will take it from them.
  • gensym 5mo ago
    Honestly, it's weird to me how fixated both sides are on water. People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.
    • JuniperMesos 5mo ago
      What are the real issues with them in your estimation? Anti-data-center people bring up water use as a reason why the government should legally prevent data centers from being built, and pro-data-center people bring up water use to argue against the anti-data-center position. I agree that the anti-data-center people are overestimating water usage, as well as the degree to which the amount of water data centers do use is a problem; and that they're doing so because they have some other objection to data centers that doesn't sound as convincing. It would be better to talk about those issues.
      • deleted 5mo ago
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    • conductr 5mo ago
      Water is pretty scarce in some of the places they want to build these things. I know people in West Texas that own ranches that have been approached by the datacenter people and it’s basically a desert, oil industry consumes a lot of their water, and the public water they get in the city smells toxic, the well water is flammable. So water use is concerning and I don’t think there’s any reliable or trustworthy source for them to use as a gauge for what to expect so they have to ask.
    • anubistheta 5mo ago
      Because it is an easy concrete way to stir up reactionary sentiment. The real issues are debatable but complex. But the common folk can all visualize a gallon of water.
• mooiedingen 5mo ago
  [dead]
• cyanydeez 5mo ago
  one environmental concern down, hundreds to go! keep up guys!
• htx80nerd 5mo ago
  The author uses a measurement I'm not familiar with so I used AI to translate it. >Using the broader initial AI water use estimate of 32,000 acre-ft/year to 290,000 acre-ft/year Note : 1 acre-foot is approximately equal to 325,851 gallons. AI : That estimate converts to approximately 10.4 billion to 94.5 billion gallons per year. Ya 10 billion gallons of water (low estimate) is totally nothing. Thx for this informative blog post. 28.6 million gallons per day.
  • munk-a 5mo ago
    To be fair to people's objections - agriculture is significantly more important than AI model training when it comes to improving the average standard of living - and to be fair to model training a lot of the water usage in agriculture is used on extremely water inefficient crops. Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord. There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.
    • loeg 5mo ago
      Marginal agricultural water use is alfalfa / nut farming in the desert and ethanol corn, not products consumers actually care about. Consumers aren't clamoring for E15 fuel over E10.
      • tzs 5mo ago
        Consumers care greatly about the products that alfalfa is used to make.
  • gdhkgdhkvff 5mo ago
    For perspective, 28 million gallons of water per day is roughly equivalent to what 93,000 households consume per day. There are ~130,000,000 households in the United States.
• munk-a 5mo ago
  As a more complete title... AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report. Both sides have dishonest reporting
• mrinterweb 5mo ago
  If data center water use is such a concern, why not require that data centers invest in closed-loop cooling systems? By closed-loop, I'm talking about re-condensing evaporated water and allowing the water to cool. Cooling the water would be more expensive in hotter environments, but still achievable. These data centers seem to have wild amounts of money for investment, why not just mandate conservation requirements?
  • throwatdem12311 5mo ago
    Regulating AI? America would never!
  • tptacek 5mo ago
    Data center water use is in fact not a valid concern.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • hnav 5mo ago
    The tradeoff is power vs water. Water is currently cheaper.
  • mbesto 5mo ago
    > These data centers seem to have wild amounts of money for investment, why not just mandate conservation requirements This IS the complaint.
  • p_stuart82 5mo ago
    imo this is a pricing problem more than a cooling-design problem. datacenters get cheap clean water while locals pay for the pipes and grid upgrades.
  • SoftTalker 5mo ago
    Condensing/cooling the water takes even more electricity though. So you're trading water savings for increased energy use. Maybe OK if it's all renewable, but in most areas it's not.
  • 5mo ago
• cleverpotato479 5mo ago
  A lot of confusion around AI water usage might stem from whether it's an open-loop or a closed-loop cooling system. e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality. So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
  • selectodude 5mo ago
    Open loop cooling can work fine if they use greywater. The water isn’t potable anymore, but it goes into the sky and becomes clean again. It’s all just a lack of imagination.
    • gus_massa 5mo ago
      Only (mostly) water evaporate, salt and most contamination don't, so you get a brine that you must manage because otherwise it clog your heat exchangers and evaporation towers. Also, it must be returner to a river carefully to not kill all fish and life forms there.
  • shimman 5mo ago
    A lot o the confusion around data centers is that these companies purposely hide this information from the public. We already know how damaging normal data centers are: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles-settles-public-records-lawsuit-over-googles-data-centers-will-disclose-water-use.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles... Citizens had to sue their town to force them to give up water usage, something Google was adamant about hiding from the public. When there is no accountability, trust plummets. There is no reason to trust anything from these corpos or their pro-corpo rags.
    • ssl-3 5mo ago
• Brendinooo 5mo ago
  Usually when people compare data center water usage to golf course water usage I feel a lot better about the whole thing.
  • therobots927 5mo ago
    I’d recommend you read the following report: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses… https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2833716 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
    • tptacek 5mo ago
      Did you read the paper carefully? It's about pesticide use. (It's not especially plausible as epidemiological studies go, though I'm unsurprised if a better study finds a firmer correlation between pesticides and PD.)
      • therobots927 5mo ago
        Did you not read that the effect was directly tied to “Individuals living within water service areas” in my original comment? Yeah no shit it’s pesticides. They’re seeping into the water supply from the golf course runoff. Datacenters expel water filled with all kinds of heavy metals and other kinds of toxic sludge. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strategies-for-eliminating-data-center-water-pollution https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg... It should be pretty obvious the parallel I’m drawing here. Where’d you get your epidemiology PhD?
        • tptacek 5mo ago
          It is in fact not obvious what parallel you're drawing here. What parts of this study do you find especially credible, methodologically?
• adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
  You can go millions of prompts before you use up as much water as it took to make a single beef burger. You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions. There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.
  • SecretDreams 5mo ago
    Water I agree. C02 (which is really a tangential metric if energy consumption which will vary by energy mix) I'd want some citations. Also agree there are other ways we should pursue in parallel regarding emissions.
    • LinXitoW 5mo ago
      Obviously, there's different options and variables and bla bla bla, but considering how consolidated and highly industrialized and standardized meat production is, this data is very likely close enough to true for the wast majority of beef burgers eaten by the people complaining about AI resource consumption: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
      • SecretDreams 5mo ago
        I was moreso asking you about your data on how much AI is tied to CO2...
        • Matticus_Rex 5mo ago
          Andy Masley does some plausible estimates here based on the data we have that puts 50 prompts per day at around 5kg CO2e/year: https://www.andymasley.com/writing/whats-the-full-hidden-climate-cost/ https://www.andymasley.com/writing/whats-the-full-hidden-cli... The difference between an average diet and a vegan diet via Scarborough et al. 2023/Poore & Nemecek 2018 is in the realm of 1450kg CO2e/year. Assuming those numbers, that difference is around 14,500 prompts per day, or ~5.3M prompts per year. So unless the prompt estimates are off by more than two orders of magnitude...
• everdrive 5mo ago
  Does it use more than zero? Then I hate it. Maybe we should try to calculate how much water online advertisements take.
• therobots927 5mo ago
  What they don’t mention is that the water is being polluted by the datacenters. It’s not as simple as “water go into datacenter, water come out of datacenter” Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strategies-for-eliminating-data-center-water-pollution https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
  • frm88 5mo ago
    Upvoted. What makes me sad is that I had to read hundreds of comments on all kinds of arguments until you pointed to the contamination issue. Not that the AI statistics in the AI thread submitted helped critical investigation.
    • therobots927 5mo ago
      Even people who are against data centers have a misconception around the data center water problem. It leaves us vulnerable to counter arguments like those found in this article and makes the movement look bad. That being said, I’m not too worried about it. I think it’s okay if your average person has this misconception, because at the end of the day they are correct that datacenters threaten their water supply. They might not have the mechanism right. The resultant skepticism might force hyperscalers to commit to water preservation. If republicans and centrist dems didn’t run the show right now I would say regulation should be passed forcing datacenters to treat all water prior to expelling it back into the water supply, with a state funded test facility located on premise to make sure they’re doing it right. And not to mention - and this is for the AI cheerleaders that actually read this far - the air pollution. Musk’s datacenter in Memphis is running on GAS GENERATORS. So in many cases the DCs are actually polluting the air as well as the water. In a poor and predominantly black neighborhood of course. It’s just absolutely disgusting and the backlash against this will be swift and harsh. Honest to God us tech people are no different from those at Dow chemical that dump(ed) metric shit tons of highly carcinogenic PFAS into countless rivers. I work in this industry. But I don’t have the ability to fool myself the way most of HN seems to.
• tcp_handshaker 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• tumult 5mo ago
  This is an AI generated article, with AI generated images, claiming that AI isn't a resource problem.
• KingMachiavelli 5mo ago
  I often get side tracked into commenting on regular social media like Instagram and I'm somehow surprised over and over how poor critical thinking skills in the greater population. The zeitgeist of US politics is "this doesn't directly benefit me so this must be bad". According to the Instagram demographic, ALL industrial uses of water and electricity are bad because they "compete" with household use. The massive Agricultural industrial complex is actually OK because I like meat, almonds, etc. AI is bad because it doesn't make my job easier. Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees. What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.
  • rondini 5mo ago
    I find it deeply ironic that you accuse the public of lacking critical thinking about the externalities of agriculture but claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever. Demand for compute hardware has skyrocketed, and producing that hardware creates massive pollution from factories and mining. I shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe. To borrow your expression, you’d be more accurate in saying “this doesn’t directly harm me so it must be good”.
    • KingMachiavelli 5mo ago
      > claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever While running. Incurring a pollution penalty once in fungible location (i.e where mines are approved and "hopefully" managed responsibly) is better than incurring pollution proportional to the output (e.g. plastic and chemical waste). > shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe. Is rare earth mining specifically for semiconductor manufacturing actually a significant driver? My intuition is that rare earth and most raw material mining would be driven much more by EV car motors and batteries. Certainly you can say all energy use is indirectly responsible for the pollution of the oil, solar, wind, etc. I don't disagree at all! I'm say in-addition to the pollution of raw inputs like energy - contemporary industries have additional and unavoidable side products. > are earth mining harms millions around the globe. Those mines are going to operate day after day because it's unfortunately the best economic opportunity in those areas. Those areas deserve our support to improve their socioeconomic realities but opposition to data centers in rich countries does not suddenly provide better opportunities to those regions.
• cdrnsf 5mo ago
  Greater than $0 in cost of living increases for people living near these things is too much.
  • loeg 5mo ago
    Are you saying any industry that brings in net new jobs with above median wages is bad? Or just ones with few employees and high additional property tax revenue?
    • bell-cot 5mo ago
      If we could magically guarantee that our [starry-eyed|gullible|treacherous] political leaders didn't give back most of those property taxes before the DC even broke ground...
    • easterncalculus 5mo ago
      When the new jobs number increases to four (or even three) digits people will take that more seriously.
      • simianwords 5mo ago
        Loudoun county generates ~1B USD from taxes annually from data centers. That's equivalent to 30k jobs paying 40k usd annually. Is that enough?
    • cdrnsf 5mo ago
      I'm concerned with the ones that create temporary jobs, few permanent ones, drive up water and electrical rates and then help deskill other industries.
    • hansmayer 5mo ago
      > that brings in net new jobs Ah yes, those invaluable tens of jobs created by DCs....
      • simianwords 5mo ago
• siliconc0w 5mo ago
  The bigger concern is more around the pollution of the gas turbines. Populations around the DC are going to see higher rates of Asthma, Respiratory diseases, Heart problems, and certain cancers.
• Zigurd 5mo ago
  Look over here! Not over there at grid infrastructure and generating capacity, or noise and pollution from on-site generators. The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.
  • nostrebored 5mo ago
    wouldn't it be great if we hadn't actively sabotaged grid capacity and development at every turn
    • Zigurd 5mo ago
      Wouldn't it be great if residential rate payers didn't end up holding the bag for botched nuclear plant construction and cost over runs.
  • loeg 5mo ago
    You can be against lying about water use and for being honest about additional electricity demand at the same time. You can't smear someone for rejecting falsehoods just because you have an unrelated complaint.
• JohnMakin 5mo ago
  > Jay Lund is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geography at the University of California – Davis. He is also a Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
• Aeroi 5mo ago
  I ran 8 internal audits against my agent stack end-to-end, to figure out if I was destroying the planet. Turns out it uses 12x less energy over a 10minute snapshot when compared to youtube, instagram, facebook ect. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-internal-audits-to-give-camera-search-ugcPost-7449465685195296769--83b?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAlFefABQAnEPUGU0U2Qc4KrFZ_rUYHr6so https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-int...
• bee_rider 5mo ago
  I don’t really get the water concerns in datacenter cooling. Even if a lot of water was used for cooling with every prompt (which he argues against here, but, even if)… water “used up” by cooling just comes out a little hotter, right? Maybe evaporated. Then it’ll come back in the form of rain. This isn’t an industrial chemistry process that leaves some toxic waste in the water. Or an agricultural one that puts water in plants and then ships it off to some other region. It just becomes another path through the water cycle. I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?
  • loeg 5mo ago
    The absolute strongest complaint is that DCs consume treated, potable water, which is less abundant / easily re-created than any old non-potable source. (Of course the easy solution here is DCs just ingest / treat their own non-potable source. Or utilities charge rates sufficient to price in the externality of drawing down more potable water. The economics still work for DCs if they need to treat their own water -- the fundamental problem is that utilities are underpricing their potable water, so DCs prefer it all else being equal.)
    • AustinDev 5mo ago
      Why don’t data centers use gray water more often? Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone? My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out. But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/industrial users, in a way that pushes them toward non-potable sources wherever possible. A fun Texas water fact I always bring up: the entire state’s monthly freshwater use is roughly a week of freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay. Texas would be the 8th-largest GDP in the world if it were a country, and its whole monthly freshwater demand is basically a few months of water that the Chesapeake just dumps into the ocean. (Of course, estuaries make use of the water so it's not just wasted but it's illustrative imo) Another fun comparison point is yearly Texas uses 0.08% the volume of the Great Lakes in freshwater but ~ 30-50% of the volume of all the lakes in Texas. We've got a lot of water but it's not distributed evenly and we should probably build some sort of water pipeline eventually so water rich states can sell to water poor states. Again, this is all just speculation by someone who knows not a damn thing about municipal water management.
• hiddencost 5mo ago
  Asking chatbots for estimates of water usage and then taking their average is a great way to alienate your audience. It's embarrassing, as well.
• JimDabell 5mo ago
  A much more comprehensive article on this subject is here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45946966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45946966
  • eleventen 5mo ago
    I was really into Andy's blog when it first came out, but he might be doing the same motivated reasoning he complains about everyone else doing. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-not https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-n... > The one remaining question: why the clean step change? In the middle of this piece, he runs into a critical flaw in his reasoning and just shrugs it off.
• bluGill 5mo ago
  As my friends in Agriculture like to point out, most of the water isn't used at all, it goes right on down the river to the ocean. Ag is second, but less than 50%.
  • gus_massa 5mo ago
    It depends on the river. IIRC the water of the Colorado is stolen 100%, mostly for agriculture. A few years ago I think a small leftover was let, so a tiny part of the river can reach the sea.
• easterncalculus 5mo ago
  The Empire of AI book seriously did permanent damage on this talking point.
• bigmadshoe 5mo ago
  Did anyone find it weird that the author uses AI itself to perform the calculations? Seems like a very poor quality piece
  • traderj0e 5mo ago
    I stopped reading at the crappy ChatGPT comic that shows "water usage" as some pipes pouring water and others pumping it in. How trustworthy is the text going to be after that?
  • pesus 5mo ago
    I don't find it weird, it's about what I'd expect from AI sycophants. They don't seem to realize that it comes off as not even being able to defend their own ideas.
    • traderj0e 5mo ago
      It's intellectual inbreeding. Like people who put very little real input into AI doc generation then generate code from that without supervision, and the result doesn't even try to do what it's supposed to, but they don't find out for a few weeks.
  • morley 5mo ago
    For a more informed deep dive into data center water usage (albeit many months old): https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
  • diabllicseagull 5mo ago
    > Alas, despite modern technologies and institutions, our human societies, technology, and understanding ultimately rely on 50,000-year old hardware (our brains!), which evolves slowly and mysteriously. Unavoidably, we work with individual and collective neural hardware limits. this bit especially tells me the reader needs a pile of salt.
• parsimo2010 5mo ago
  Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.
  • senko 5mo ago
    > we have to eat to live You don't have to eat a burger. Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).
  • catlikesshrimp 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  • adammarples 5mo ago
    Loads of agricultural water usage in the western states is on totally optional stuff like beef and almonds
    • deejaaymac 5mo ago
      Where's the beef?!
    • singpolyma3 5mo ago
      And corn for putting in gas tanks
  • wahnfrieden 5mo ago
    Agricultural water usage distribution prioritizes luxury consumption and drought areas are subsidized
• legitster 5mo ago
  > Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions. Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap. People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.
  • kitsune1 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • da_chicken 5mo ago
    Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona. Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.
    • laxmena 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    • somewhatgoated 5mo ago
      How is it legal? Shouldn’t water be the most regulated (as in protected) substance of all?
      • xvedejas 5mo ago
        It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
• heliumtera 5mo ago
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• arjie 5mo ago
  > So much of our public discourse on water and other subjects is choked by chatter, untamed by reasoned evidence, data, and quantification. Today, with AI, we have little excuse for not attempting and using honest estimates to inform our discussions and tame our fears and hopes. Are these things usually convincing? The general pattern is that people take a position on something and then find one paper with a DOI identifier that backs the position. The Elephant and The Rider and so on. Trying to provide someone with evidence of the falsehood of their claims rarely makes them reconsider and often makes them dig their heels in while they search for a new paper with a DOI identifier. We're in an unprecedented time in the information age when people can rapidly achieve basic competency at many things using Wikipedia, Google, and LLMs critically. If information availability and search were the constraint, one would expect us to reach greater alignment with facts. The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality. In practice, I think the social psychologists are right. For the most part, we form the model of reality and then we seek information that supports it. So if you increase the total amount of information what you do is increase the ability for someone to select out that which supports their model. That's not to say I don't appreciate these things. It's just that I don't think facts move public opinion very much. The interesting thing that more information and better search provides is that it accelerates the divide between truth-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily falsifying information) and confirmation-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily supporting information). In general, one can imagine that the former will be more successful at modeling the world ex humanity at least. But if others believe something is true, often a direct approach at their facts is not the best approach to get the outcome.
  • rdevilla 5mo ago
    > The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality. You should read Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus. He calls this "the naive view of information," which is ignorant of the existence of what he astutely identifies as "intersubjective" realities (see also Angela Cooper-White's entry on "intersubjectivism" in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion): [...] its deepest and most complex usage is related to the postmodern philosophical concept of constructivism or, in social psychology, social constructionism – the notion that reality is co- constructed by participants in a relationship and in society. This is the endgame of postmodernist and constructivist thinking that exalts narrative and story as the ground source of truth. In some ways what we are seeing is a return to religious and superstitious thinking where sufficient belief in a dogma or a pantheon is enough to reify those narratives into consensus reality. Historically Jungian psychology and indeed religion (a form of proto-psychology, from which Jung inherits by way of the alchemical tradition; see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) was humanity's collective storehouse of wisdom and techniques for managing intersubjective realities and group "information hygiene." Such techniques are now being lost to antiquity with the late 20th and 21st century focus on only objectively verifiable, quantitative measurements (as opposed to the private subjective, qualitative phenomena experienced as the inner ruminations, contemplations, and dream life of the individual). White Rose: Do you ever think that if you imagined or believed in something, it could come true... Simply by will? Angela: Yes. Actually, I did believe that. But I'm slowly having to admit that's just not the real world... Even if I want it to be. White Rose: Well, I guess it all depends on what your definition of real is. https://vimeo.com/387207936 https://vimeo.com/387207936
• aschla 5mo ago
  My conspiracy theory is the whole AI datacenter water consumption outrage is a psyop by state actors to worsen public sentiment around AI, so China and others can catch up. Obviously we should lessen the environmental impact of our technology, while considering it's relative impact vs benefit, especially compared to other technology, in this case in particular to other datacenter usage. But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters. Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?
• Geee 5mo ago
  One good way to save water is to use treated wastewater for cooling. xAI is building this kind of system in Memphis.[0] It'll connect to a nearby wastewater treatment plant and they'll need to build an additional treatment plant before the water can be used for cooling. It's a closed-loop system inside the data center, where they use clean water, and it connects to open-loop evaporative cooling towers with heat exchangers. [0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-memphis-supercomputer-wastewater-treatment/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-mem...
• lwansbrough 5mo ago
  This image really helped me put it into perspective. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2032858292184117748 https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2032858292184117748
• softfalcon 5mo ago
  The data coming from the University of Calgary about the data centres they're building in Alberta, Canada seems to indicate that they're using evaporative cooling, which is very expensive water wise. The bigger concern though, is the power requirements. Which are set to double or triple the energy use of the entire Province (analogous to a State in the US). https://ucalgary.ca/sustainability/mobilizing-alberta/climate-action-blogs/will-ai-data-centres-raise-water-and-power-use-alberta https://ucalgary.ca/sustainability/mobilizing-alberta/climat...
  • badc0ffee 5mo ago
    There are data centre projects underway that use their own natural gas generators: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/olds-mihta-askiy-data-centres-environmental-assessments-9.7167537 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/olds-mihta-askiy-data... Air pollution, GHG and water use are concerns, but these projects will not dramatically increase the load on the electric grid. Natural gas is cheap and abundant in Alberta, and the province (actually the whole country, via transfer payments) benefits financially from resource revenues from extracting the gas. So, these projects are generally an easy sell to the public.
    • softfalcon 5mo ago
      I keep hearing about natural gas and on-site power for these data centres. I'll believe it when I see it. There are already have a couple in Calgary and they're hooked directly to the grid. The cost of electricity for the city shot up at the same time. Also, there have been a few brownouts caused by them not being ready to handle late night draws from those data centres. That's at least what I'm seeing. Though, admittedly, it's from older project articles. Maybe something has changed in recent months? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ai-data-centre-alberta-electricity-9.6977136 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ai-data-centre-albert...
• feverzsj 5mo ago
  What about all the water used to generate electricity? You know human still boils water for electricity.
• AndyNemmity 5mo ago
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• Rapzid 5mo ago
  If AI used as much water as the public "think"(lets say as much as the hysteria suggests the public thinks) then governments would have raised rates on them and they would have reduced usage...
• 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
  > But AI will bring more important concerns, such as the end of human civilization Who are these people who think AI will end civilization? Ya'll know it's just autocomplete and deepfakes, right? Maybe they need to read a book about the industrial revolution? It changed the world entirely, but it didn't end it.
• butterlesstoast 5mo ago
  I appreciate the data driven approach. The article is spot on, it's really hard to distinguish all the discourse with the reality. Things most people grew up with in the 70s had years of propaganda convincing the public they were a net positive to society. Sidebar, I'm very curious to see where AI goes. Definitely not on the hype train. More curious than anything. This article was a breath of fresh air.
• didibus 5mo ago
  From what I understand water usage critics are: 1. Tallying the total water consumption impact, embodied water (construction), operational water (cooling), indirect water (electricity generation), supply chain water, etc. 2. Mapping current water intensity onto AI growth forecasts through 2030+ And if you look at those things in combination, there are reasons to be alarmed.
• Springtime 5mo ago
  While a couple months back an article[1] discussed how Google was keeping the water requirements a secret from locals who wanted transparency, claiming it was proprietary knowledge. So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials. > 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’ > If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source. So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it? [1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-dat... [2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-center-water-estimates-go-public-residents-in-roanoke-and-botetourt-react/ https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-cente...
  • davidgerard 5mo ago
    author of Pivot to AI here. The impacts are local, but real bad for those localities. Also, the fact that the AI hyperscalers will sue to keep the usage secret isn't something they're doing 'cos the usage looks good.
• c0rruptbytes 5mo ago
  i believe it was like amount of water gold uses in the USA alone is 10x more than water used by AI globally
• awkward 5mo ago
  I’ve seen a tremendous amount of content about AI water usage, mostly from pro AI sources. The most common type is comparing AI to particularly water intensive agriculture. The result is that now I think water usage should be taken into account when siting data centers. Great Lakes and eastern seaboard fine, maybe not as much in California or Arizona.
• skywhopper 5mo ago
  So tired of these articles. Yes, it’s possible for them to use very little water. But naive comparisons to non-potable agricultural or other irrigation use or comparisons that don’t take into account growth rates of specific uses or local bottlenecks are useless.
• stonogo 5mo ago
  This article conflates agricultural use, which is not treated and is drawn directly from groundwater, rainfall, and rivers, with urban use, which is treated and much more expensive. I find it baffling that the person who put their name on this article would fail to make this critical distinction, given their credentials.
• AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
  I really love how he ends his bio: “His 68-year-old hardware with 50,000-year-old architecture is enjoying and struggling with the promise, threats, and turbulence of the AI revolution.”
• laxmena 5mo ago
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• fuzzy_biscuit 5mo ago
  Whether it is or isn't happens to be beside the point. It's water being removed from the system en masse for a non-essential function, i.e. other than sustaining life, while driving up the cost of other utilities. If we're trying to deny the usage "tier," I'd argue we're being intentionally obtuse at worst and foolish at best.
• jzer0cool 5mo ago
  Most people don't know AI uses water.
• juliusceasar 5mo ago
  What does the public actually think?
• jimrandomh 5mo ago
  I think people are giving the AI-water-use claims too much credibility. The idea that AI datacenters are heavy water users is trivial to refute, and was trivial to refute when it was first introduced. It should be written about in the same tone as one writes about ridiculous conspiracy theories.
• legulere 5mo ago
  > Their water use is mostly for cooling needs from the heat produced from their electricity use. You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US: > The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-states https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-...
• black_13 5mo ago
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• briandw 5mo ago
  Ok how about golf courses? This AI is evil look at the water use, is obvious propaganda. It makes no sense to call out data center water use when something that’s purely an optional recreational use consumes 25 times the amount.
• sackfield 5mo ago
  I've always found it quite sad and cringeworthy when people talk about AI's water usage. The first thought that comes to my head is whether its even worth trying to talk the person out of their delusion, or just accept that they are lost and can't be helped.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• MagicMoonlight 5mo ago
  This whole meme never made sense. Data centres are cooled with AC. Where the fuck is water supposed to be going?
• jackpirate 5mo ago
  I "like" how in their graphic agriculture and cities are both putting water into the lake, and only data centers are removing water from the lake. The prompter should have redone this image a couple of times until they had all three actually draining the lake.
• semiquaver 5mo ago
  > 6. Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. Is this what passes for a citation nowadays? I’m sympathetic to the message but this ain’t it.
• dangus 5mo ago
  Agriculture feeds people, including people outside of California (California being a huge agricultural exporter to all the other states: find me a grocery store that doesn’t have California agricultural products on the shelves and I’ll Venmo you $5). Cities are…people. Literally the most important use of water. So far, AI seems to just put people out of work and enrich a small group of oligarchs who own the technology. If tech companies want people to change their view away from my above statements above maybe they should spend less time moving to the far right and being hostile to regular people. We already see that the public perceptions of AI is collapsing: https://www.highereddive.com/news/gen-z-ai-gallup-poll-negative-sentiment/817133/ https://www.highereddive.com/news/gen-z-ai-gallup-poll-negat... Peter Thiel is out there building a military AI surveillance state and basically all the tech billionaires are turning MAGA and anti-democracy. I don’t really care how much water AI uses, I’m not going to sit back and make excuses for billionaire assholes and their revenue toys. I don’t benefit from AI being embraced by society outside of stuff like cancer research (which was happening before LLMs took over the mainstream). In reality, the most likely outcome is that I’ll be harmed by AI. I will be replaced by software and the billionaires who replaced me won’t exactly create a utopia, will they?
• _heimdall 5mo ago
  My understanding so far is that water use in LLM data centers ranges from not much at all to more than a medium sized city. It always comes down to how one chooses to calculate it, and more fundamentally what story they're wanting to tell. Gotta love statistics.
• ArchieScrivener 5mo ago
  >Machines that Drink How has no one titled their article this? Baffled.
• marshray 5mo ago
  He really saves the best bit for last, doesn't he? > my breathing in making the blog post above might well have evaporated more water than occurred (incrementally) from all four AI estimates. Clearly his continued breathing is not as much of an "economically effective use of water" as AI. If clean water ever becomes a scarce resource in California, thankfully he's already done the ChatGPT queries needed to justify cutting back on 68-year-old Emeritus Distinguished Professors.
• ant6n 5mo ago
  This sounds like being concerned about the adverse health effects of a steak due to sugar.
• atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  The water use problem is like maybe the 100th biggest risk due to AI, it's weird that in the minds of the most vocal anti-AI activists (with the exception of the Lighthaven/EA crowd) it's like the #1-#4 issue. Is it because water use is one of those morality sinks which is easy to understand compared to some of the other more subtle issues regarding AI proliferation?
• yyyk 5mo ago
  While the argument is probably right, the author may notice he's asking AI websites on AI water usage. Perhaps he should consult more neutral sources, at least to introduce the habit of critical thinking.
• byronic 5mo ago
  what an incredible slop political cartoon around the first paragraph
• noahgolmant 5mo ago
  I would not extrapolate California results to the rest of the country. Other regions like Northern Virginia or Dallas-Forth Worth dominate current and future data center load. They have significantly different water and land use trends. Of course agricultural water usage is higher in California- it's the top agricultural state in the country. And energy prices are much higher, resulting in a smaller data center presence. State regulations also determine water usage efficiency requirements. So it might differ in less regulated states like Texas.
• themafia 5mo ago
  Cool. Except. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas.
• pveierland 5mo ago
  Annoying to see slop like this on the front page taking up people's attention. Resource utilization connected to new infrastructure that is planned to be scaled exponentially is clearly important to analyze. Instead of research and insight this post just facilitates ignorance on the topic.
• janpeuker 5mo ago
  > AI concerns are speculative There is ample evidence around the world of data centers causing extreme water crises [1]. Not a water expert but I find the focus on evaporation very confusing. Draining ground water and aquifers causes environmental degradation in itself and waste water from data centers can’t just be fed back into the water cycle? 1) https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-08-17/ais-backyard-a-map-of-the-21st-century-gold-rush.html https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-08-17/ais-backyar...
• nyota_jiashu 5mo ago
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• ozgrakkurt 5mo ago
  Is it too much work to look-up some real numbers and enter them into a calculator?
• coalstartprob 5mo ago
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• thelastgallon 5mo ago
  This only considers water for cooling the DC. A LOT of water is needed for power generation. U.S. power generation is the largest industrial user of water, withdrawing approximately 47.7 trillion gallons in 2021, mostly for cooling thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, natural gas).
• shantanu_p 5mo ago
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• dhruv3006 5mo ago
  Just what I think can solve a problem in my hometown after reading this - I live in Kolkata,India - I dont think we will ever have a data centre here - we still have a lot of water issues - but if building data centers somehow equates to economic prosperity and such stats are shown - probably the city of joy will again regain its glory.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
  This blog post raises an interesting follow-up question: Why does it matter what the public thinks about "AI" water consumption