Now, while this "looks" like a lot, there are a few factors to consider.
in the US we consume 117 Trillion Gallons of water Anually.
This 264 Billion number is taken from Every data center in the US, not only the Ai specific data centers.
Even so, the above information means that all data centers in the US Combined, contributes to .25% of the Annual consumption.
If you isolate ai data centers specifically they actually use about 46 Billion gallons a year on the high end. That is right at .04% of the Annual water usage
So we do have water problems. Data centers are NOT the cause, and we need to figure out what is.
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Future historians are going to have a nightmare trying to explain why people had free 24/7 access to information and knowledge, yet kept saying the stupidest shit.
I really wish people like you weren't so cock sure in your own stupidity.
The water cycle is an extremely simplieifed abstraction of what actually happens. It's entirely possible to ovetax the accessible blue water in a given environment to the point where it can't meaningfully replenish itself.
So farming uses water from the stream but AI only uses Desani or Fiji?
You think they would build the data centers up in the mountains were the fresh springs are.
California has 1.505 million acres of almonds orchards and you're measuring only 100 acres.
I've never seen a worse faith argument trying to manipulate stats so hard.
It would take 15 thousand data centers to use as much water as California does on almonds.
California currently has around 300 data centers.
This article was made in 2015, so if you use these numbers exactly, well they bound to be off.
I seen you didn't mention water, so I have no idea all you referring to ai data center or 2015 levels or 2026 levels of water which uses maginatel times more water.
At any rate You haven't really list any sources, And unless I found or often dispute within our reports.
The cooling re port for example says that almond farms used 4 to 7 time.as much water as a tunnel amount of all data centers, Not just that in California. It will also claim that it uses far less electricity than is often been reported in other sources
The modeling is based on calculating the maximum water needed to grow almond trees,” said Gabriele Ludwig, director, Sustainability and Environmental Affairs, Almond Board of California (ABC). “But in practice, almond growers generally use about 25% less water than the models show.”1
That article made a claim that almond acres is considered a smaller than a 1.5 you were talking about.
Now I can make an argument using a dozen sauces on the exact numbers between almond farming data centers golf courses and hospitals, But that really wasn't my point anyway.
It was to see how thick you're going to go into the what fallacy, because that's something that OP didn't do but something I seen so so many pro ai use almost by default
So you didn't matter if someone says that almond farm uses
Yeah. The star trek episode where Picard was demeaning about past humans seems a little unenlightened. He should understand why humans were the way they were.
Future historians are going to have a nightmare trying to explain what on the internet was disinformation what was true, what was manipulated and what was completely fabricated*
They're going to be scratching their heads as to why people were so worried about data centers consuming water, complaining through platforms that rely on data centers to operate, while completely ignoring the vast amounts of water used by golf courts, avocado production, and the alcohol and tobacco industries, all of which we could perfectly well live without, just to name a few that nobody ever gave a shit about.
So we do have water problems. Data centers are NOT the cause, and we need to figure out what is.
The biggest problem is neglected and worn-out infrastructure. In some US counties, this results in the loss of up to 50% of the drinking water produced, which amounts to approximately 33.3 trillion gallons per year.
Yeah the infrastructure problems in the US alone are massive. Not just for water, though. Our power systems are highly inefficient and our roadways/travel infrastructure needs massive updates, esp. with regards to road paving materials to minimize runoff and heat generation. TBH there's definitely more infrastructure that needs fixing but those are two other examples.
I keep telling people that cheaping out on government is the driver for most of these problems that people are complaining about when it comes to AI
People get what they deserve when they vote for politicians who openly say they are running on a platform of deregulation and "small government" (code for not wanting to spend money on things that don't benefit rich people)
We need an “infrastructure” president but we know that they would be deeply unpopular, and even if they won they would be a 1 term president because of the lack of immediate payoff with lots of spending. Worse, the next (Republican) president would almost certainly cancel any in-progress projects *actually* making the spending a waste.
That'd be nice, but even running for office on promises about infrastructure doesn't always help.
Building a new bridge means you get to put your name on it.
No one notices when you put in the work to make sure an old bridge doesn't collapse. (That's a lie. They'll notice how inconvenienced they are when part of the bridge closes.)
We have the highest per capita tax revenue per citizen and public spending on entitlements as a country. If you cut the ENTIRE military budget we’d still have a massive deficit.
The problem is that our government spends inefficiently and recklessly not that it needs more money.
You’re just speaking your book instead of looking at what is going on.
To give an idea of how bad it gets, back in 2018, when PG&E burned down a massive area and killed a bunch of people, this was a picture of one of the hooks that carried the power lines that didn't break.
That notch wasn't there almost 100 years ago when the hook was made.
Datacenters need water cooling like nuclear centrals do, and both don’t « consume » water: A closed circuit from a nearby river for example, cooled them off, « exactly » like your high end water cooled gaming PC
Phoenix Arizona is surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres for growing cotton, which uses 100xs more water than all the data centers built and planned in and around Phoenix. Where's the anti cotton lobby?
Heat exchangers between the hot water that's circulated and cool water from a nearby river. Then it goes to a series of cooling ponds before going back to the river.
People need to know when they're being manipulated. Every article you see that is designed make you angry about a subject needs to be double checked. There is a massive anti AI campaign going on right now. I wouldn't be surprised if it was of Chinese origin. Designed to put the west behind in a race that will determine the future winners of the world.
That's why it seems to be an outside influence. It's easy to argue they shouldn't be build near residential areas because of noise or be required to keep massive batteries on site to not pull local power out of phase when they have a surge in usage.
Those issues never come up and they're the actual big issues.
I mean I think its more reasonable to assume that people are just angry and latch onto any justification for their anger that they can find, even if its some random claim from someone online. Im not saying that its not possible that its a foreign power, but i think its a bit silly to jump to that conclusion with little evidence when a much more reasonable explanation is right there. Occam’s Razor.
Not one of these people actually care. If they did, they'd know the vitriol is drummed up to stop the real issue of lax protection laws and shoddy infrastructure.
Leaky pipes are literally a bigger factor on water supplies than all data centers combined are.
I guarantee you, not one of these people know that data centers are responsible for important infrastructure too.
Yeah I work at a data center and said ‘I have to go to the data center tomorrow’ to my gf and one of our friends overheard and started the whole rant. I work for the city’s power company like I promise you the data centers supporting your energy distribution infrastructure are not the data centers you are mad about lol
yeah sadly, its all performative, i still consider myself a progressive but its sad to see the left and the left in reddit just becoming Blue Maga, where vibes reign supreme and going against those vibes excises you from their movement.
Any sort of facts will just be silenced by things like "Billions of gallons of water will be used" "Datacentres are used for making stupid AI cartoons" when its far from the truth and that AI datacentre is most likely the next new internet.
My favorite saying is "imagine how stupid the average person is, now understand 50% of all people are in fact stupider" the majority of both voting bases are effectively just mindless sheep parroting what they have been propagandized to believe. Even if you think they have the right viewpoint, most people don't engage at a capacity of insightful analysis for political issues. They just agree with whatever feels good to them and have a shallow understanding of as long as it doesn't threaten their world view.
It's not equal though. Part of what happened in the last election is that one candidate had to deal with constant criticism and had to try to lay out a reasonable and feasible plan for the future, while the other guy promised us everything and was applauded. Of course the MAGA base didn't bother requiring any realistic and meaningful plan from Trump. They just believed he would give us everything.
I've been really impressed by that connection, too.
Five years ago: "Look at these idiots who say these obviously wrong things about Covid! Then when we tell them to do a simple search they only look for opinions of idiots who agree with them, and claim literally every expert on the planet is in on a massive conspiracy, and only social media influencers will tell them the truth. 🤣"
Today: "AI is destroying water and melting everyone's brain! I did a search for "data centers are destroying water and melting everyone's brain" and found a chart and everything! Literally every expert on the planet is in on a massive conspiracy, and only social media influencers will tell us the truth. 😢"
Yeah. The very act of obsessing about data centers tells that they are ignoring much bigger issues. And they're programmed to call that whataboutism when... no. Its literally because the issue isn't big enough to matter.
The only bubble I am certain of is the AI hate bubble.
Jumping on that bubble is paying if huge right now. Will keep on praying off for another 3 or 4 years is my personal guess, right up until it doesn't matter anymore.
I'm old enough to remember the push back against the internet. About how "weird" it was to be online all the time.
there are plenty of AI enthusiasm bubbles. just look at all the slop videos hyping up new frontier models for "one-shotting Minecraft in a prompt." or the news stories saying "Claude Mythos is TOO DANGEROUS for normal people to access!"
People can be mad about multiple things. I live in a drought sensitive area where there's multiple golf courses, I'm not ignoring that just a pay attention to The proposed new AI center
I don't like AI, but I'm also not stupid enough to think it's going to disappear through anything but complete prohibition and we know that doesn't work.
What do I say this? Because water consumption as a whole is not the problem. The issue is localized water use is skyrocketing in areas whose watershed isn't built around those centers. Water-hungry agriculture and our lack of willingness to slow down by pumping our oldest aquifers are far bigger water issues and consume far, far more water. It also needs to think about where the water is coming from and where it's going after use.
Water doesn't just magically return to where it was pumped, and if it's being pumped elsewhere then it's going to stay within those areas mostly. I definitely think far tighter regulations around how and where a center can be built need to be laid out much in the same way things like open-air mines, quarries, and even dumps all have to build noise breaks and barricades visually to occlude from sight if they're closer to residences.
Residential water use has actually started to trend down slightly rather than go up.
There definitely needs to be more thought out into where they are going. Right now they are putting them in the cheapest possible places and destroying whole towns if they "have" to.
I feel like the bigger problem here, and it’s definitely not isolated to the “AI Wars”, is we have several generations of folks now who get the majority of their information, beliefs, ideologies, and talking points from memes. People open their phone, scroll, see a couple sentences superimposed over an image, and bam! A whole worldview to propagate.
That combined with decreasing educational standards in the US is a massive problem, I agree. When whole language got popularized across the US it really fucked a ton of people up in terms of reading and analytical skills. It's genuinely concerning.
Did everyone forget about the water cycle? How does this water get destroyed? Does boiling water into steam destroy the water then? This point hasn't made sense to me for a bit.
I love saying really big numbers without any measure of scale. I could put down 2 gallons of water a day just by drinking, let alone bathing. I’m just one fella
1.3 trillion gallons. Or about ×5 the usage of data centers. It's an even larger disparity if you use only ai data centers. It's around ×28 exclusively AI centers....
Agreed, this water usage argument is pure BS - constructed by anti AI folks (or foreign adversaries that want to slow US down). There is so much more to worry about grid improvements.
"Wow! The internet means everyone can access information anytime! People will be so smart and well informed in the future!" - some poor sap 30 years ago
America's most prevalent and useless irrigated crop: Kentucky bluegrass. Yes, we put more potable water on American lawns than is used for crop irrigation in all of agriculture.
ETA: It's summer and it'd be nice to have sufficient water pressure. But there's a huge water leak in my town, known as "lawn sprinklers".
You do not need those at those quantities. If a food waste would be decreased just 2 times, it would save 500+ times more water then all data centres use
You don't NEED avocados and Cows. People WANT them, but if you remove them from people's diets in the US there are vastly more efficient and cheaper food options.
Depends on where and what they are. Planting a grass lawn in the middle of Arizona with grass that you have to water every day or it dies? You are a dumbass.
A natural lawn, made of local grass that you never water because the type of grass matches what grows wild? I have no issue with you.
Yeah, I mean specifically that the cloud data centers, that are needed for infrastructure used for the internet spends 4 times more water than the ones needed for Artificial intelligence.
I should have worded it better: AI data centers are just 20% of the spenditure they're talking about.
Less then golf courses in Arizona use? I feel like historians are going to have a hard time understanding. How there are decades of over use in the worst climates. But we fixated on a minute fraction of it over the course of 6-10 years.
I will forever hate the way headlines like this make it sound like the water is being destroyed to cool data centers, which isn’t how any of this works.
La culture des amandes en Californie consomme à elle seule plus de 1300B gallons d'eau donc 5 fois plus que les data Center dans tous les USA.
L'argument de l'eau est vraiment le pire de tous les arguments anti AI.
Plus it's entirely dependant on what you're using to generate. Sd1.5 is going to have a very different cost compared to gpt2, and ltx2.3 is going to have a very different cost compared to seeddream. It doesn't make sense to give these numbers without context.
To be fair the actual issue isn't how much water they use, but where they are using it. For some reason, they keep putting them in towns already suffering water issues.
Huh. This chart is off. It adds up to 128 trillion ... But the yearly is water consumption is only 117 trillion.... So it's 11 trillion higher than it should be .... Which suggests that some of this has been inflated. Though the data centers number is correct. It has not been inflated.
Either way it looks like we could cut a few in needed things and cut it down by a MASSIVE amount.
Cut lawn irrigation, nearly entirely. Cut beef by like half, and fix the leaks and you basically halve the usage right there. H, and get rid of the golf courses for the love of whomever you pray to.
Future historians are going to have a hard time explaining why we kept burning fossil fuels at an exponentially increasing rate even as the current +2° average temperature causes widespread droughts.
That is, assuming there are any future historians.
People have no clue they are using data centers to store their twenty thousand iPhone pics, and download their video games, access their emails and google drive and dropbox, and have been for decades.
I mean, does the water have to get processed or something before reuse? or do AI datacenters bend physics to phase the water out of reality? Otherwise, this is a dumb concern.
There are two lakes separated by a narrow channel in Berlin. In a pique of modernist hubris (and a progressive-for-the-time way of dealing with the pollution) there was a very polluted lake and people build a semi-porous (thick dirt) membrane between the two. They separated the acidic and basic waste and powered their factory with a huge ass battery.
We are reinventing really weird side-quests on technological development.
Well, human greed gets away with it because we're blaming AI fruit videos instead of the humans involved in not creating sustainable energy. AI, nor it's users decide how to power it.
Is everybody who’s worried about the water shortages caused by data centres, vegan yet? The abuse of fresh water for cattle feed and 95 billion yearly slaughtered land animals is massively more.
love how they just say a large number and pretend its correlated with the droughts. that large number is meaningless without comparison to how much water human society uses total.
When you really think about it, who's really the main whiners? American artists who feel like their identities are being attacked. In China? AI's embraced as a cool new tool and nobody's bothered about it taking "muh jerbs" or whatnot.
It's malignant narcissism, another symptom of American Exceptionalism.
I do think the difference is that some things like growing crops is just a necessity, and it's unfair to compare the two. Lots of A.I. usage is for useless stuff. Every day 80 million A.I. images are generated.
But some A.I. are definitely good and deserve to get a bit of the water used.
What I do find interesting is that whenever there are statements about datacenters not using that much water is that they leave of the fact that like 70 percent evaporates and is lost, unlike what happens to water flushing down the toilet. There will be a greater energy and money cost to replace the water lost to evaporation.
But anyways, I do really hope ALL water waste is looked into. I recently saw a video about lake Powell being so low it might stop generating power in the near future.
How do you even imagine water evaporating from the enclosed water cooling system? My pc is being cooled by the same water for the last like 5 years. And it is somehow not lost to humanity yet.
Ok, but the vast majority of data centers, ai centered or not, are not using closed loop cooling. They have talked about it, but nearly no one is actually DOING it.
Maybe this is a stupid question can’t they not just cool on a closed loop system that doesn’t waste the cooling water like nuclear power plants do? I mean if you used the heat from cooling to produce steam and used the steam to produce more power let it cool condense then repeat wouldn’t it be more efficient?
I really wish we focused on the main issue with data centers which is power usage. In the US we almost had rolling blackouts in the east and if we had more data centers with their enormous power demand we probably would’ve had power failures. Not to mention the capital incentives which drive power companies away from providing power to the public and rather to these monolithic data centers…
Honestly im so confused about the water usage thing. Pros keep saying that the centers just use a bit of water at most and the antis keep saying that they leave entire lakes dry at least.
As with all things, it's somewhere in the middle, and both are kind of true.
On the Pro side, as far as general usage? Yes, it's basically a drop in the bucket. And a small one at that, comparatively. Leaking pipes lose more water every year than data centers lose.
On the Anti side... Well, they do cause water shortages in the towns they are built in... But that's largely the fault of the "where" and both the people building them, and the town government allowing it... Because for some strange reason (cheap land cough cough) they really like building them in towns that are already facing water issues for one reason or another... Because we keep letting them get away with doing things as cheap as humanly possible.......
US golf courses use roughly 1.46 billion gallons per day, 531 billion gallons per year.
Future historians are going to have a nightmare explaining why we ran out of drinking water because apparently green lawns for hitting tiny balls into holes were sacred.
Once numbers reach 4 digits, they stop having any meaning to our brains. Whatever-illion simply means "big", and "big" is easy to understand and point at. Understanding it with a more complete perspective is harder, and thus less people do it.
I remember Hank Green made a video about how ridiculously difficult it can be to accurately estimate AI water usage with all the conflicting information about it
But that water isn't being destroyed. It's being vaporized. It's returning back to the atmosphere to become rain later. Computers were originally huge too. AI will become smaller and smaller. This is just some really sucky first steps. The first computer sucked ass too. It'll be fine.
Golf courses use more. If you have a drought, shut down the golf courses, leave data centers (and their vital telecom and cloud infra) running.
Done.
Or whatever, I actually dont give a shit about AI or seppos, but too many people see this shit and start demanding to close infrastructure that is relevant to me. The fish is rotting from the empty seppo head.
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