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Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
- bix6 4mo ago> after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus Hey where’s that person from yesterday who argued with me over the 1m vs 1cm hole in the boat? Everyone saying stop talking about data center water use is missing the entire point as this article shows.
- jatora 4mo agoData center water use is a fairly separate topic from what this article covers. Related of course but the conversation on USE centers around actual volume use, not contaminants.
- theyreallhere 4mo agoDischarge, is part of "water usage". Arguing otherwise is embarrassing.
- jcheng 4mo agoAccording to the article this is a closed loop cooling system, once it’s up and running it doesn’t use any water. They run water through it during installation and that’s the discharge that they found bacteria in.
- jazzyjackson 4mo agoYou can have a “closed loop system” but you need to shed heat somewhere and that is either by air cooling drawing tons of electricity, or evaporation that draws tons of water.
- techbro92 4mo agoI’m pretty sure that “closed loop” in this context would mean that the water is recirculated and not evaporated.
- wiml 4mo agoFrom the links in the article, it looks like this DC runs giant heat exchangers to dump the heat to air.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nomel 4mo ago> air cooling drawing tons of electricity Reference? What's the efficiency of the systems like used here?
- quickthrowman 4mo agoAir cooled chillers are generally used in a closed loop system. A coefficient of performance (COP) of 4 is reasonable to expect, which means 1 watt of electricity to remove 4 watts of heat.
- jatora 4mo agoI could vibe code 1:6
- jatora 4mo agoNot sure if you're being purposely intellectually dishonest or just unaware, but the common thread on the water usage argument is literally about quantity of usage and rising prices for local areas. So as I said, somewhat related, but still two completely separate discussion topics.
- lostlogin 4mo agoIt’s not a separate topic though, as this article shows. A closed loop system can still mess up the water supply, because (in this case) it wasn’t fully closed.
- theyreallhere 4mo ago[flagged]
- delegate 4mo agoA bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle: Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities. This is gold for a comedy sketch :)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nine_k 4mo agoOften life doesn't just imitate a movie, but imitates a goofy movie.
- ButlerianJihad 4mo ago[fnord]
- measurablefunc 4mo agoHow do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks. I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources. ¹https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
- rahimnathwani 4mo ago'regular people' use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc. Even you use HN. Not everything can be local. My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
- littlestymaar 4mo ago> Even you use HN. A website that runs on an infra that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs serving hundreds of thousands of users with very small loading time. > My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house > (where I pay $0.35/kWh). Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that.
- rahimnathwani 4mo agoDoes dang run HN on a single server? Why does HN use Algolia for search and Firebase for its API? "Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that." The largest possible single digit annual electricity bill would be $9. That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
- mertleee 4mo agoThis is why datacenters in central texas are desperate to build anywhere in the edwards aquifer... so they can get "free" water from natural springs (already stressed by draught) and dump the effluent into city wastewater systems.
- latchkey 4mo agoOmen AI just got $31m to solve this problem... https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/omen-ais-plan-to-optimize-data-centers-is-all-wet/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/omen-ais-plan-to-optimize-...
- Catloafdev 4mo agoIs it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
- beloch 4mo agoThis is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently. -------- "Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite" -------- Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
- andrew_lettuce 4mo agoThis closed loop system needs to be filled and flushed, which is the operation discussed in the article. The bacterium was described as a possible airborne hazard if used for irrigation, it's not a regulated substance though so dump and dilute might be perfectly safe.
- beloch 4mo agoMight be. Might not be. To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?
- anon7000 4mo agoNot sure why you got downloaded, but you’re right. Polluting public (and even private!) spaces is philosophically speaking a property rights violation, which is a core libertarian/free market value. So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works. So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak. And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
- jmyeet 4mo agoSince the article doesn't make this clear, let me explain. The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad. But nobody really does this because you don't want to keep adding additives to water you're constantly discharging. The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered. Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water. I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped. So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear. I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.
- stogot 4mo ago> But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water. Maybe but there are citywide chlorine flushes of their water supply. some worse than others Erin Brockovich tracks this
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- stephenlf 4mo agoAs a former microbiologist, this news is important but not too concerning. It’s good that we found detected this and can respond accordingly. It doesn’t mean indicate an immediate, critical issue.
- bentt 4mo agoMove fast and break things is back.
- luciana1u 4mo ago[flagged]