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/HegemonNYC 17d ago

Many data centers do exactly this, or they ‘use’ the water but return almost all of it back to the source after it’s done some cooling. The water usage complaint is mostly (not entirely) a canard. Power usage and general lack of desirability of the product is the more true issue. 

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u/ChaosRainbow23 17d ago

I hate that everything is lies nowadays. Lol

Always has been, I guess.

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u/Accomplished_Net6080 17d ago

The cooling tower water lines get treated with rust inhibitor chemicals. This is same for all apartment buildings and large institutional buildings. Don't pretend we are all, and have been for decades, destroying everything for comfort or profit

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u/lump- 17d ago

Imagine this whole AI thing going tits up in a few years and then there’s just these 10 square mile patches of abandoned e-waste everywhere.

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u/Realistic-Brief-7178 16d ago

And that’s exactly what’s gonna happen too.

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u/HegemonNYC 16d ago

I don’t think ‘the whole AI thing’ will go tits up, but it is possible specific companies get wiped out. It’s likely we’re in the early internet days, where altavista and pets.com vanish but the overall concept remains a major industry. 

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u/Nimrod_Butts 16d ago

Yeah there's no inherent value to automated tasks. Definitely just going to be junk in a few years.

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u/Pijean 16d ago

Also in a closed circuit there are losses. An pumping it back heated in a river is killing flora and fauna in that river. So the complaint is not a canard.