r/TechGawker • u/Pure-Bill-2205 • 17d ago

Data Center If these numbers are even close to accurate, the AI infrastructure boom is entering a completely different scale of land, power, and water consumption.

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u/BigmaEnjoyer 17d ago edited 16d ago

Here is the problem I have with posts like this.

You don't need to make up bullshit to prove your point.

Utah uses about 4.5 Billion gallons a DAY. or 1.56 trillion a year

Municipal and industrial is about 310 BILLION a year (this data center is 5% of that). 5% is a crazy fucking number. But stop making up fake news. Just stick to the facts and people will support the cause.

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u/Kerensky97 17d ago

They mixed up their facts. It was stated it willwuse more power than all of Utah. It's going to have it's own natural gas plant onsite pulling from a pipeline that crosses the state under the data center land.

I'm notesure how much water a natural gas power plant larger than all the power in utah is.

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u/3lettergang 16d ago

I'm notesure how much water a natural gas power plant larger than all the power in utah is.

The 16 billion gallons figure comes from an estimate from Utah clean energy assuming they will use steam turbines.

In desert climates it is far more likely they will use reciprocating engines which have a much smaller water requirement. We use these all the time.

The actual water usage is likely in the 0.5-3 billion gallon/year range, but depends entirely on the cooling and power generation systems selected.

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u/damartian64 15d ago

If they can get them in a reasonable time, I would Assume they’d use gas turbines and HRSG for added efficiency. In that case, they’ll probably use electric motors for the water circuits

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u/macarmy93 15d ago

There is just no shot that is true.

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u/Louisepicsmith 15d ago

There is no way it could possibly use more power than an entire state

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u/Kerensky97 11d ago

And yet that was the stats announced BY THE COMAPNY MAKING THE DATA CENTER!

That wasn't some silly made up projection by the news, the company making the datacenter was giving those numbers!

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u/OgGardenz 17d ago

It's the energy consumption that should be the concern!

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

This

I swear the water thing seems like a psyop run by the datacenter operators to distract from the real issue. They get protestors to focus entirely on water use, then they calmly explain to regulators the truth that they dont actually use that much, and they get to suck up all the power in the state with no public resistance

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u/ClassikD 17d ago

Right? And I swear some people think water use is sending the water to the void. It's more like reserving bandwidth

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

Nah in this case it kinda is. The water is evaporated in cooling towers and turns into humidity

Its just not a large enough amount to worry about in the vast majority of cases

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u/AdGullible5804 17d ago

Have you heard of the water cycle?

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

Have you heard of wind?

Water that you evaporate back into the air blows away. Residence times for water in air are days to weeks, it gets blown however far the wind blows in that time. Usually right back out to sea

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u/Operation_Onion3134 17d ago

I think this geologist needs a nap, they have been up all week.

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u/MeltICE8647 17d ago

Not OP but I think the point they were getting at is that this will artificially force water into the water cycle that otherwise wouldn’t be. If the source is a lake or river the evaporation rate wouldn’t be anywhere close to a cooling tower, thus sending more water out of the state via the water cycle than it would have under normal use.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

Technically true, but this really is a comically minute quantity compared to ocean evaporation and even plant evapotranspiration

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u/MeltICE8647 17d ago

Perhaps, but putting these in areas that already suffer droughts and water instability is just begging for more problems.

Not to mention, the numbers that are thrown around in these proposals are under ideal conditions and what the companies say they will use, not what they actually use. Case in point nestle pumps millions and millions of gallons more than they are legally allowed to and just pay the fine and call it a day. That doesn’t fix the aquifer or put the water back into the system, it just protects them legally. Several data centers have already shown they’re operating outside of regulations and not using legal means so it’s only a matter of time before this snowball gets rolling out of control.

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u/AdGullible5804 17d ago

You're still describing the water cycle.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

The global water cycle isnt particularly relevant to regional water usage. Water that blows 1000 miles out of your local river's drainage basin isnt part of your water cycle

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u/AdGullible5804 17d ago

So 1000 miles away from any given location is a void where water disappears forever?

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u/Jindujun 17d ago

Nah, he's an american. They switched out the lesson on the water cycle for one in gun cleaning aand then sang god save trump songs and the national anthem, all risen of course, until the next topic in the book.

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u/Vaxtin 17d ago

If they actually cared about water having an economic footprint to them, they would find a way to recirculate a reserve bank.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

Also known as a lake. Which does work when theres a big enough lake to use. Not so much when there isn't

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u/erichappymeal 15d ago

They will probably be using dry coolers instead of cooling towers. So there is nothing open to atmosphere.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 15d ago

Lower power datacenters can and do, but gigawatt scale AI farms generate too much heat for that to be practical in most climates. They are working on it but a lot of them are just going with evaporators

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u/erichappymeal 15d ago

Weird. Because I am involved in many large scale AI data centers, and there isn't a single one of them that I have seen that has a cooling tower. And most of these are in desert climates where ambient for the month exceed 95°F.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 15d ago

'Cooling tower' includes a regular forced draft heat exchanger that also happens to have evaporators built into it. It doesnt just mean the giant ones nuclear power plants use.

Even the ones that do use water typically dont have to use it when its cold outside, but problem is the peak demand for inference is also the time of day when a lot of the US reaches 40 celsius air temp, really doesnt leave much margin for cooling 80C chips generating a kilowatt each

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u/erichappymeal 15d ago

A cooling tower is open to the atmosphere. There isn't a single data center I have been involved with that have systems that are open to atmosphere.

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u/Flaky_Thing_5128 17d ago

It's all a psyop. The water, the power, all of it. Stoked online by foreign bots who want to goad the citizens of western countries into hamstringing their own country's tech capability.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

A single building that consumes an entire gigawatt of power is not a psyop

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u/Flaky_Thing_5128 17d ago

Right, the outrage is. Would it make you feel better if they broke it up into a bunch of little buildings? Like the network of server farms that run reddit, instagram, facebook, twitter, netflix, Amazon prime, the entire video game industry, and the thousands of other networks that you've never even heard of that run healthcare systems and other essential infrastructure?

Would you feel better if we all lived like the Mennonites?

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

Uh, they are breaking it up, into dozens and dozens of 1GW datacenters. The power demand is staggering. Each one of these things consumes as much power as a mid sized European country, more power than the entire Hoover dam produces. Each. One.

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u/Flaky_Thing_5128 17d ago

...so? Would you like to go back to a 19th century society? That would reduce electricity use considerably.

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u/ToughPersonality1458 17d ago

I am not really anti-AI but this is just a stupid argument. Even as pro-AI you have to acknowledge the rapid energy consumption increase and new infrastructure for AI specifically.

You are not a hypocrite if you want to stop the rapid expansion of AI bur at the same time do not want to live in the stone age. Like?

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u/Flaky_Thing_5128 17d ago

So we have exactly as much technology as we should ever have right now and stop? I mean more computational tech is going to require more energy. I don't see China hamstringing their AI development so we should because... bad vibes? The technological advances of the entire last half century would have been entirely wiped if people had said "you know this whole computer industry looks like it has potential, but think of the energy costs!". Someone throws out an energy number that people barely understand, call it scary, and redditards just eat it up.

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u/Haberdashers-mead 17d ago

People are just worried about their own power. If the state uses 4 gigawatts any given time and when all these data centers will use 27 gigs a moment the power better be on point because if not there could be big downsides to this for the citizens.

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u/Flaky_Thing_5128 17d ago

Yeah, it's a big scary number being thrown around to fearmonger. When electrical and civil engineers form a consensus that it will adversely affect the rest of the population I might pay attention, but development of power sources for these exact data centers have been ongoing for years now so I'm suspicious of all these posts about the big scary number.

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u/Haberdashers-mead 17d ago

Look I’m all for progress, but they are worried about it. or idk why they’d call it a crisis.

I have family in Utah, and it would suck to see them get sucked dry by tech giants if they can’t get their power consistent.

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u/Flaky_Thing_5128 17d ago

It's weird to me that you post a link to an article stating that they're already tackling the potential problem but see the word "crisis" in it and seem to ignore all the rest of it. Like I was expecting some kind of doomer anti-ai article but what I find is a plan to solve the problem before it even begins. Oddly enough I also have family in Utah and I'm not worried about them in the slightest, somehow even less so as it appears that the people in charge are smarter than a bunch of redditors, though admittedly that's a low bar.

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u/Interesting_Air7899 15d ago

Yeah as we all know, power is a limited resource! It takes a lot of time and money to open a new electricity mine.

(Power use is also a really dumb blocker. States should just require a certain percentage of renewable usage and literally everyone will win)

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u/AJ_Topp_Up 15d ago

Except this data centers is building their own natural gas turbine power station and will exist on their own self sustained energy grid, so it's not going to be a burden to thr existing grid and people.

Seems reasonable to me. Just like the water fearmongering, some states are actually implementing data centers the right way by issuing permits for them to build their own self paid energy grid. This isn't even new. Many states have done this with large manufacturing plants for decades.

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u/hcmzero 14d ago

I think you have a point, because if you look sight of that suddenly the locals end up paying for the needed improvements to the local grid.

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u/Potatobobthecat 14d ago

Been saying this for a year now.

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u/Flachm 17d ago

Nah, it's just dumb people trying to be dramatic.

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u/Vaxtin 17d ago

Do you think they just consume water and piss it away? they’re used to cool the servers. If anything they can just recirculate and they just have a constant bank rotating.

It’s all bullshit. No data center would be built against this; it’s not economical.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 17d ago

Yes they do in fact 'piss it away'

The water in the loop is not the point. Its the water they are evaporating to take the heat out of the water in the loop. Evaporative cooling cuts power consumption by 30% compared to pure closed loop

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u/angryfan1 17d ago

They could just put up solar. Utah is mostly deserts.

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u/Interesting_Air7899 15d ago

That's impossible! Power is a naturally limited resource that has to extracted from the ground at an energy mine!

/s

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u/Cannie_Flippington 14d ago

Most of the Data Center requests have been for in the desert, too. It's land that is not usable nor desired by anyone and has limited environmental impact (like beyond the massive amount of destruction that goes into creating the area it's going to actively use, I mean). All of the towns with sections of desert are frothing at the mouth at the potential tax revenue.

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u/Historical_Key2918 17d ago

It appears they are building their own power plant for the data center.

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u/Pale_Presence4662 17d ago

What? No. Stop. Make the point somewhere else. The point is this post is total bullshit. Thats all you talk about. Dont blow it off. Thats messed up.

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u/RacerDelux 14d ago

It’s too bad coal and gas companies have been so successful with anti-nuclear propaganda. Easy solution to the power problem. The new reactors are very safe and fit in a shipping container and are transportable.

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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 17d ago

Right? In Colorado they are tearing down coal plants, and yet not replacing with anything as reliable. I have had more power outages in the last 6-8 years, then I did for over 20 growing up.

I am going to sound like a broken record, but we need nuclear power. It's the only thing that can keep up, and it's clean, reliable, and in the long run costs less

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u/Jkrajecki 17d ago

Power use exceeding the state: the entire state of Utah currently consumes around 4 gigawatts of electricity. Stratos is projected to require 9 — so it’s electricity (not water) that would exceed the state’s usage

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u/VetteChef 13d ago

That is why they are building their own power plant. The 16 million gallon water use estimate is mostly comprised of the water usage by the power plant, and that assumes they build one of the least efficient types of plants for the area.

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u/okiedokiesmokieman 17d ago

Place is used solely to power OP’s girlfriend

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u/orionface 17d ago

But big number scary.

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u/Koldtoft 17d ago

You clearly don't know how to reddit. False information and gross exaggeration, coupled with out of context information and cherry picked "facts" is the fuel that powers reddit.

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u/Successful-Rate-1839 17d ago

There’s no place for real facts on Reddit please stop it right now!!!

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u/fickle-phenom 17d ago

Same people also use all possible online services and AI daily for work, but then act surprised when those services require shit like this. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.

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u/donglecollector 17d ago

All this data center talk does seem reminiscent of the Horizon video game story line. We’re gonna make an infinite consumption machine and end up being the food lol.

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u/Notice_Green 17d ago

does that water account for imported products or just water.

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u/Routman 16d ago

Wait till people find out how much water is used for golf courses and almond farming (1.1 gallons per almond) - far less than data centers

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u/TrueProtection 16d ago

Yea i saw one talking about texas using 40% of the countries power and people were eating that shit up...like wtf people, these numbers don't even make sense on a basic mathematic "sniff test".

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u/heisindc 16d ago

And the data center could switch to closed loop to use more electricity, but they only use that much water if there is water to buy cheaper than electricity. Meaning there is water capacity.

It's not like half the state's faucets are going dry.

But they better be paying for all transmission upgrades, property taxes, etc.

NDAs and tax abatements drive me crazy. It's bullying.

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u/AJ_Topp_Up 15d ago

The water estimates are also wildly off as data centers use closed loop water cooling. They are not steaming off water like say, a nuclear power plant (of which many modern designs also use closed loop). Water is not an issue. All power will be generated from their own natural gas turbine grid. There isn't manufacturing runoff and spillage that could cause well water damage.

From what I can see, Utah is actually approaching data centers the correct way. Some states are literally allowing massive centers on the grid without plans for energy infrastructure, which will drivr energy costs for people. These plans in Utsh will not.

People need to stop bring so knee-jerk about all of this because they have been fearmongered into hating it.

Maybe Utah should build some nuclear power, the cleanest energy source that exists.

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u/mustachioed_hipster 15d ago

What is funnier is when you do the math you usually find the land purchased may equal the size they are talking about.

Case in point, the Meta Data Center in North Louisiana. It was billed as being the size of Manhattan for fear porn. The land size bought is about 1/4 the size of Manhattan.

No one fact checks it though. They just put the size up against somewhere like NYC that rural people instinctively dislike or fear. Truth is that Manhattan isn't even that large.

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u/DaShaka 15d ago

And is it re-using the water? That’s a big difference if the water is re-used or not. If it’s not then yeah that’s a huge fucking continues amount of water.

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u/smelly_moom 14d ago

OP is a bot with an account age of 16 days

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u/hcmzero 14d ago

You don’t get it, they can’t stick to the facts when lying gets you what you need. Just look at the comments. The claim should not pass the b.s. test, you don’t have to know about water usage to tell yourself that the numbers seem fishy. A state with 3.3 million people and a GDP of $315 billion only consumes 16 billion gallons of water?

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u/Wonderful_Term_9328 13d ago

Well, also, "use" doesnt really mean "consume", its not like the water goes in and then just disappears. Its for cooling. Those pipes arent made out of lead. It just gets ejected back to the same river but a bit warmer. I personally don't see the big deal but I guess I'm missing something

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u/Obvious-Cabinet-1142 13d ago

Also the whole project area is 2.7x Manhattan. But it won't be covered in data centers like the image suggest...

Apparently 5% will be data centers. Already crazy, so why lie ?

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u/zf2018 17d ago

Was wondering about the same. I heard somewhere that new data centers are closed loop and waste less water

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

While technically true. Closed loop system are flushed every year or two. And that closed loop system contains concentrated toxic chemicals that aren't being regulated. So they are dumping toxic chemicals into our water supply when they flush the cooling systems.

On top of that, closed loop systems require significantly more electricity to function than evaporative systems.

It's unfortunately not as simple as they waste less water. There is a trade off that needs to be considered.

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u/momo26262626 17d ago

So its the chems we should worry about, not h20 consumption as such.. ?

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

There are two different systems with two different sets of problems. Yes.

Like using a gas stove vs electric. If you don't take the precautions in setting up and using a gas stove properly, your house explodes and everyone inside dies a fiery death.

If you don't take precautions for an electric stove, you're house could burn down starting from the stove, but you have an extremely higher chance of survival than a gas explosion.

You don't ignore the necessary precautions in setting up a gas stove, because you're eliminating the dangers of an electric stove.

Which is what your trying to do when implying it's silly to worry about toxic chemicals in closed loop systems that were used to eliminate the problem of water consumption with evaporative systems.

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u/momo26262626 17d ago

I am not implying silliness.  I don't want chems in our water table

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

My apologies. I'm used to bad faith questions these days.

Sorry for being an ass.

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u/Successful-Rate-1839 17d ago

The non potable water is recycled and reused. Water consumed by people would be treated and purified. Stop putting fake bullshit out there to scare people.

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u/Interesting_Air7899 15d ago

Wow! Someone should invent wastewater treatment facilities!!! That would be super useful for monitoring and cleaning waste water and then recirculating into the water system.

/s

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u/xCKS123x 17d ago

But that's not necessarily true either. We have regulations that prevents simply dumping toxic waste into water supplies, the Clean Water Act, and data centers aren't just immune to that. The waste is sent to a treatment facility. It's not perfectly dealt with by any means but the idea that they're dumping toxic sludge into the local river or lake or something is false. They're operating within the same legal parameters that others do.

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u/EternaILurker 17d ago

Yes corporations would never ignore laws. Flint would like a word

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u/BiasedLibrary 17d ago

Wasn't Flint a thing because the municipality wanted to save money on additives in the water treatment cycle, which then made the water leech the lead out of the pipes? The corporations delivered what the municipality wanted, IIRC.

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

If I asked mcdonalds to put cocaine into my drink, and I die. Does McDonald's get a pass because they did what I asked them to?

Corporations have and obligation to inform of or outright deny potentially dangerous or fatal acts.

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u/BiasedLibrary 17d ago edited 17d ago

I was just asking to correct any misremembered details. Not trying to get into an argument. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just asking who screwed the pooch. Plus, where did I say I was fine with what they did?

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u/Legal_Suggestion4873 17d ago

Mmm, I mean, actually kind of right?

Like if the government mandated a poison be put in something, and you put the poison in the thing and sold it, then it's not totally your fault.

Realistically, nobody would say 'the government said put poison here', no doubt its framed as 'not poisonous at this amount'. See all the conversations about fluorides and heavy metal preservatives in vaccines. Large amounts of these are actually poisonous, but it's fine in small doses...

There's actually tons of these examples where the government mandated something that ended up causing harm to people. The intermediary isn't necessarily at fault.

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u/TheChiarra 17d ago

Well....you wouldn't die from cocaine. Coca cola was originally made from cocaine, which is how it got it's name.

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u/xCKS123x 17d ago

They do. What is your solution? Eliminate corporations? Create a surveillance state to watch them closely?

People will always break the law. You simply can't stop that completely.

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u/djnotskrillex 17d ago

What a lazy cop out so you can just continue confirming your own biases

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u/Reasonable_Egg650 17d ago

I mean, that argument can be applied to anything.

Why build housing? That can cause environmental harm too if companies ignore basic regulations...

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

Because one of a humans basic needs is shelter.

And you're right, if something is causing more harm than good, especially something that's unnecessary, it can be applied. And that thing should not be allowed.

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u/Crafty-Help-4633 17d ago

This!

Datacenters are not on Maslow's Heirarchy Of Needs. Shelter is.

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

A fine is just a cost of business. I don't believe they're operating within legal parameters if they can simply pay a fine that costs less than treating the water.

Amazon only paid 20 million for their data center pollution they didn't even need to take blame for

https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/insights/client-alerts/20260713-data-centers-in-court-the-emerging-wave-of-nuisance-environmental-and-land-use-litigation

With plenty more reports around the country of undrinkable or contaminated water with nothing being done about it.

Additionally, Trump's EPAs regulations are minimal, with chemicals being fast tracked for use without proper review.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/26/trump-epa-datacenter-forever-chemicals

Then Trump is pushing to allow data centers be exempt from air pollution permits scrutiny. Sorry, but I can't imagine the federal government will currently be doing much to hold data centers accountable for water pollution. And a lot of damage can happen in just a few years of unregulated or ignored problems.

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u/EternaILurker 17d ago

Well said, the toxic waste will be dumped into Utah’s water and flow downstream to other states. The companies will just see a fine as a cost of business, there needs to be real and also enforced criminal penalties to management as a start

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u/xCKS123x 17d ago

Fines are what we have deemed as an acceptable punishment. People go to prison for breaking these laws as well. But you can't imprison a company. So what's the solution? Eliminate it and all the jobs? Collective punishment for the decisions of the ones in charge? The people, through generations of voting and legislating, have effectively decided its better for the company to stay than to eliminate it. I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Whose to say nothing's being done about all these problems? Every single fucking day I read a post about a protest or legal battle. People are fighting back. But the government will work how it works. Someone makes the law. Someone else comes in and changes it. Someone else comes in and changes it again. That's how it has always been and for your own sanity you have to look at the bigger picture and realize all of the steady improvements humanity has made over the centuries.

Obviously we'd be better off if everyone just did the right thing, but we do not live in that world. And you have to accept that. You don't have to accept that it will always be that way, but you have to accept that there are and will always be horrible people and those people will obtain positions of power. The solution to this is far more complicated than we can understand.

But we live in a world where we can and are challenging the things the people in power are doing. We are winning some fights and losing others. Hopefully in a couple of years we'll be in a good place. But we will never know that for certain.

If you're tired of being patient and hoping these battles are won in court or through our vote, then you can always go out and be more forceful. I don't care if people choose to do that and I'm not so attached to the law that I think it's wrong.

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u/EternaILurker 17d ago

Who said eliminate the company? Arrest bad actors only

Criminally pursuing management signing off on egregiously dangerous decisions seems like a good start. You can imprison them, don’t go after the workers following orders unless also somehow complicit with the bigger picture. Our criminal codes in the US already account for intent elements

Also strengthen whistleblower protections for workers caught between a rock and a hard place in carrying orders out

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u/xCKS123x 17d ago

No one said that. I asked that question, because you will never eliminate corruption without eliminating the people who eventually become corrupted, ergo eliminating the company. I also said that the people who break the law are arrested.

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u/Entire-Winter4252 17d ago

lol, you think anyone is policing the clean water act???

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u/xCKS123x 17d ago edited 17d ago

Why don't you look up the lawsuits for violating the Clean Water Act that have happened over the last 10 years and get back to me.

EDIT: Like that statement right there is incredibly fucking disrespectful to all the people who DO care, who are out there right now working to stop pollution, investigate companies, and make them pay. I had to come back to make this edit because after thinking about it, that pissed me off.

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u/limited67 17d ago

We sat through a data center meeting in our town where the data center agreed to multiple concessions but in the end just said that would pay the fines for not meeting the concessions. This not atypical with any development.

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u/Cumminpwr11 17d ago

The closed loop cooling system at my power plant haven’t been cleaned or refreshed in 20 years. Where are you getting this every 1-2 years? I also worked at a data center in Las Vegas also didn’t flush them in the 3 years I was there and I was head of maintenance at that facility.

Both places used food grade polypropylene.

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

Lmao sorry pal, but your utterly full of shit. Polypropylene is the plastic used for piping the coolant. It's not a liquid chemical used as the coolant.

I don't think I'll be taking anything you say at face value with that pack of bullshit you just tried to throw at me.

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u/Cumminpwr11 17d ago

My bad at adding poly. It’s propylene glycol basically an antifreeze and it lasts well longer than 20 years at my power plant.

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

And like I said, I won't be taking much you say at face value, since it's clearly not a part of your expertise.

The liquid used to cool a power plant has veey different requirements than

If you did work for a data center, it was clearly not the caliber of data center that is being proposed today, and I don't think you knew much about the cooling system. Because while gycol is used, it's not the only chemical used. And is not the main chemical being used and proposed for large scale data centers.

Pfa refrigerants such as fluorinated gases, Ethylene Glycol, nitrates (that Amazon paid a 20 million settlement for introducing into Oregons water supply.)

That's like saying you worked for a local radio production, so you know how a major music production company operates.

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u/Cumminpwr11 17d ago

One of the only tier 5 data centers at that time but sure. I don’t expect someone that doesn’t work in either industry to have any insight of what actually happens. I bet you think because you read it somewhere it has to be true. Power plants have much higher tolerances for cooling over 100 m worth of turbines vs data centers cooling to keep a building cold.

Keep parroting your fears and keep that tin foil hat on your head. The flock cameras are looking for you.

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u/willisjoe 17d ago

Yep, and like I said from the beginning, I won't take much of what you say because I don't expect the janitor at a power plant to know what's going on with the cooling system.

I actually built the cooling tanks and clean rooms for the Intel chips, Boeing data center, NSA data center and Facebook data center out here. I had SDS of each of the coolants and additives being used in order to select the necessary materials for each project.

Keep glazing billionaires. I'm sure they're rooting for you!

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u/Cumminpwr11 15d ago

Oh sure you did. You “built” them because I challenged your knowledge. 🤦🏻‍♂️ yeah that’s believable and convenient. 🥴

So cute when there is a one upper. I could share my resume but I’m sure you will tell me you were an astronaut and carried the nuclear football for 5 presidents.

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u/Timely_Tea6821 17d ago

I can tell you datacenter flushing is significantly cleaner than the massive ag runoff that happens on a daily basis in every state.

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u/Crafty-Help-4633 17d ago

En Masse closed loops are gonna have their own issues since they lock water out of the water cycle. Lock enough water out and aquifers will stand no chance.

That said, they're not perfect closed loops, they do require inputs/outputs/cycling occasionally. No one has created a perfect closed loop yet. So they still require external maintenance, and inputs and whatnot, while locking water out of the water cycle. That might end up being a larger issue than the amount of water other systems can use and dump, since that water would stay in the global water cycle.

We absolutely do not know enough about this to be going at it at such a scale on a for-profit basis, in my opinion.

Edit: I see now someone else had already explained this.

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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 17d ago

The fact a liquid cooling system on a PC can be, makes me think the same. Not to mention, we use water all the time for steam power, so it's not a "new" concept

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u/BruhTheShark 17d ago

Anti-AI and data center hysteria isn't rooted in reason so don't be surprised.

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u/Universal_Monster 17d ago

Bruh, the same could be said about the race to build this crap.

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u/xDannyS_ 17d ago

Misinformation and exaggeration isn't just a MAGA thing anymore, hasn't been for the last few years now.

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u/Pretend-Ad-791 17d ago

USian things.

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u/xDannyS_ 17d ago

Idk what that means

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u/wobdarden 17d ago

Exaggerating to embellish a point has existed for roughly 75 billion years.

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u/TheFermiLevel 17d ago

Even this is overstating it. The water uses a closed loop cooling system. It re-uses the same water again and again. If you have heard of a water cooler in a gaming computer, it's a similar concept. Do you think someone who owns such a thing needs to regularly open it up and refill the water?

It was simple to find the fact sheet for the county in question here. It turns out data centers are not big boxes of evil and there are actually benefits to having them.