4 ms·

The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?

outside1234 2mo ago
Because they are hitting people's water and electricity bills (and or ability to get either at all) RIGHT NOW
- metalsiliconYT 2mo ago
  Yea decreasing them
tintor 2mo ago
Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.
- duplessitous 2mo ago
  Right, but even then, why would we not discuss noise pollution? The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States. There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
  - Groxx 2mo ago
    Noise pollution is definitely being discussed: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2... There are many reasons to not like these things nearby (anywhere it affects power or water too). And on top of that they've been "somehow" getting massive incentives and tax cuts, despite bringing in very little money or employment, which costs the area even more in future years. It's everything combined, and pushback has been somewhat successful. Success in a protest tends to help bring more success to the same protest elsewhere.
    - duplessitous 2mo ago
      > The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that? Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking generically why no one talks about it But, had I been, it is not all of these things because one of those things is abject misinformation - water usage is not a real problem and touting it as the issue hurts the protests. 30B gallons of water globally for data center cooling is 100x less than the leaky pipes in just the United States If data centers are such a big issue that we must stop them, communicating that without lying is the protestor's responsibility. You'll never have a successful protest if it is motivated by falsifiable information and water usage is still the number one thing I see written about and spoken about my protestors. It is impossible to get on board so long as that misinformation is front and center of most arguments
      - Groxx 2mo ago
        It can be an issue for the community in the same watershed, as well as being affected by what they do with any waste water. There have been quite a lot of extremely-drawn-out lawsuits about them drawing more than claimed, dumping hot water into streams and damaging the ecosystem, and polluting other water sources by dumping dirty water into drinking water affecting areas. I agree the total usage isn't particularly large, and any "they'll use up all the fresh water everywhere" FUD is flat out wrong. But it can be a large jump for an area, and they've broadly shown themselves to be incredibly amoral and willing to fight legal battles with infinite money just because they can. They are not good neighbors.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
api 2mo ago
Industry build-out in the USA? It's raising our energy and water costs. Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese. Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!
jrflo 2mo ago
It's much more tangible for your average person than circular financing deals or chip supply constraints. And unfortunately social media is an amplifier for tangible misinformation.
barbazoo 2mo ago
It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.
stvltvs 2mo ago
The impact is highly geography dependent. For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.
xoa 2mo ago
>but it's all people seem to care about. This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism: >Why is that? The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too. So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?
elictronic 2mo ago
Pretty sure everyone cares about their power bills and water bills going up. The people living next to them care about this other stuff.
BurningFrog 2mo ago
People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons. That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.
doctoboggan 2mo ago
Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers. All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.
bad_username 2mo ago
> it's all people seem to care about. You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.
EdiX 2mo ago
There's a certain group of people (the kind of people who used to spend a lot of time on twitter and now spend a lot of time on bluesky) that's convinced that their environmental activism is what defeated NFT and are trying to repeat that to defeat AI because it's the same "tech bros we hate".
TiredOfLife 2mo ago
When you have no arguments on your side you have to make them up.
testerteert000a 2mo ago
Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest, which includes LA, and LA's water system includes NorCal consequences, and California water issues include all-country impacts due to the farming there. If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
- chasd00 2mo ago
  > Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest no, it's a thing because you can put water in terms that even a hair dresser can be convinced to get scared and angry about. No technical knowledge required.
  - testerteert000a 1mo ago
    Simply untrue, assume you don't live out there
- scarmig 2mo ago
  California and Arizona use literally orders of magnitude more water for alfalfa farming than they do for data centers.
  - xnx 1mo ago
    Maybe we could increase people's outrage if we called them "alfalfa centers"? (I agree with your point.)
  - testerteert000a 1mo ago
    But when datacenter purchases by Meta are buying pre-colorado compact water rights for the DCs, you can tell what you need to know on how the DC builders treat the short term water risk.
- quickthrowman 2mo ago
  Millions of acre-feet of water, far more than all of the data centers use in the United States combined for evaporative cooling, are used to flood irrigate alfalfa crops in California and Arizona to feed cows. 5% of this is exported. It’s orders of magnitude more water. All of the irrigated golf courses combined use more water than all of the US data centers combined.
gazebo2 2mo ago
Noise and increased electricity costs. I feel like the people balking at anti-datacenter rhetoric are just intentionally missing the most obvious and directly impacting complaints from residents.

outside1234 2mo ago

Because they are hitting people's water and electricity bills (and or ability to get either at all) RIGHT NOW

metalsiliconYT 2mo ago
Yea decreasing them

tintor 2mo ago

Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.

duplessitous 2mo ago
Right, but even then, why would we not discuss noise pollution? The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States. There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
- Groxx 2mo ago
  Noise pollution is definitely being discussed: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2... There are many reasons to not like these things nearby (anywhere it affects power or water too). And on top of that they've been "somehow" getting massive incentives and tax cuts, despite bringing in very little money or employment, which costs the area even more in future years. It's everything combined, and pushback has been somewhat successful. Success in a protest tends to help bring more success to the same protest elsewhere.
  - duplessitous 2mo ago
    > The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that? Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking generically why no one talks about it But, had I been, it is not all of these things because one of those things is abject misinformation - water usage is not a real problem and touting it as the issue hurts the protests. 30B gallons of water globally for data center cooling is 100x less than the leaky pipes in just the United States If data centers are such a big issue that we must stop them, communicating that without lying is the protestor's responsibility. You'll never have a successful protest if it is motivated by falsifiable information and water usage is still the number one thing I see written about and spoken about my protestors. It is impossible to get on board so long as that misinformation is front and center of most arguments
    - Groxx 2mo ago
      It can be an issue for the community in the same watershed, as well as being affected by what they do with any waste water. There have been quite a lot of extremely-drawn-out lawsuits about them drawing more than claimed, dumping hot water into streams and damaging the ecosystem, and polluting other water sources by dumping dirty water into drinking water affecting areas. I agree the total usage isn't particularly large, and any "they'll use up all the fresh water everywhere" FUD is flat out wrong. But it can be a large jump for an area, and they've broadly shown themselves to be incredibly amoral and willing to fight legal battles with infinite money just because they can. They are not good neighbors.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

api 2mo ago

Industry build-out in the USA? It's raising our energy and water costs. Lack of industry build-out in the USA? We're losing our industrial base to the Chinese. Social media always promotes the angry take because that's what maximizes engagement, so everything that happens (or doesn't happen) is always bad. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything is bad and we're all gonna die. Better keep scrolling to find out more!

jrflo 2mo ago

It's much more tangible for your average person than circular financing deals or chip supply constraints. And unfortunately social media is an amplifier for tangible misinformation.

barbazoo 2mo ago

It's possible to avoid interacting with AI in every day life but it's impossible not to be affected by second order effects. The impact from a data center boom fuelled by dirty electricity is real.

stvltvs 2mo ago

The impact is highly geography dependent. For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.

xoa 2mo ago

>but it's all people seem to care about. This is a pretty weird assertion to make on HN when we've had constant AI threads about everything from mass surveillance and job threats to bio-warfare agent creation. Or just simple economic debt and risk. People clearly care about all sorts of aspects. Even in mainstream media there is tons of coverage on many aspects. But if you're talking purely in terms of the law and local activism: >Why is that? The way we have things structured (for good and less good reasons) in the judiciary and local politics is heavily biased towards immediate or very short term, concrete, and individualized/divergent harms vs broader societal costs and risks. Water, heat, electrical access/costs, and noise all meet those standards. They can be objectively measured, impose significant immediate burdens on a small population living near the DC while little (and over time) to nothing at all elsewhere, have clearly priceable harms and/or mitigations, and are instantly graspable by everyone regardless of education/research. On a practical level, they also involve a significant degree of local power without diffusion across as many people, including traditional things like zoning. A small motivated group living there can definitely make a difference, and definitely has standing for lawsuits too. So of course those are the first and most immediately loud focuses in that arena. The broader stuff is also under scrutiny, but at a different scale right?

elictronic 2mo ago

Pretty sure everyone cares about their power bills and water bills going up. The people living next to them care about this other stuff.

BurningFrog 2mo ago

People are terrified of AI, for a big number of both silly and serious reasons. That fear and rage needs to be expressed somehow, ang going NIMBY on local data center construction is probably the only real way most people can do anything remotely affecting the AI boom.

doctoboggan 2mo ago

Its a proxy fight - the data centers represent AI in most peoples mind, and any animosity towards a nebulous idea of "AI" can be redirected to these concrete, physical data centers. All that being said, if your actual goal was to hinder AI growth in some way, slowing the data center buildout in the US would probably work towards that end reasonably well.

bad_username 2mo ago

> it's all people seem to care about. You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.

EdiX 2mo ago

There's a certain group of people (the kind of people who used to spend a lot of time on twitter and now spend a lot of time on bluesky) that's convinced that their environmental activism is what defeated NFT and are trying to repeat that to defeat AI because it's the same "tech bros we hate".

TiredOfLife 2mo ago

When you have no arguments on your side you have to make them up.

testerteert000a 2mo ago

Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest, which includes LA, and LA's water system includes NorCal consequences, and California water issues include all-country impacts due to the farming there. If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.

chasd00 2mo ago
> Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest no, it's a thing because you can put water in terms that even a hair dresser can be convinced to get scared and angry about. No technical knowledge required.
- testerteert000a 1mo ago
  Simply untrue, assume you don't live out there
scarmig 2mo ago
California and Arizona use literally orders of magnitude more water for alfalfa farming than they do for data centers.
- xnx 1mo ago
  Maybe we could increase people's outrage if we called them "alfalfa centers"? (I agree with your point.)
- testerteert000a 1mo ago
  But when datacenter purchases by Meta are buying pre-colorado compact water rights for the DCs, you can tell what you need to know on how the DC builders treat the short term water risk.
quickthrowman 2mo ago
Millions of acre-feet of water, far more than all of the data centers use in the United States combined for evaporative cooling, are used to flood irrigate alfalfa crops in California and Arizona to feed cows. 5% of this is exported. It’s orders of magnitude more water. All of the irrigated golf courses combined use more water than all of the US data centers combined.

gazebo2 2mo ago

Noise and increased electricity costs. I feel like the people balking at anti-datacenter rhetoric are just intentionally missing the most obvious and directly impacting complaints from residents.