Haha, "future historians" is a good one.

I'm as anti-ai as it comes, but this headline kinda flagged my bullshit meter. "Consuming" water is not as simple an equation as consuming things like oil is. The water isn't destroyed in the process, it's just heated. So then it depends on where the water was drawn from, whether the water was evaporated, etc. If they're doing evaporative cooling (which should be banned in my opinion) then it's essentially "consumed", but if it's open loop cooling, sending the heated water back into the body of water it was drawn from, then it's not the same as being "consumed"

We lethally dumb.

Most of these new hyperscaler centers have been doing evaporative because it's cheaper to install and easier to run so as you said it is effectively gone.

They're also being placed in numerous dry areas, such as Phoenix, Arizona, where the water crisis is so bad that even if 90% of the water makes it back immediately into the local water supply, that added draw is large enough to tip things too far.

I'm not sure why people are focused on water for the data centers when that's their smallest issue. The electricity usage is the concerning environmental factor

Water usage by comparison is dominated by agriculture, particularly animal agriculture. Even in water scarce areas, growing cattle feed is a leading source of drought

Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs

Datacenters don't draw water from rivers. They take it from our drinking water supply through the supply network, and then dump it.

That water is as consumed as water flushed down the toilet. It's gone from the community, even if obviously it still exists somewhere.

Future archeologists, maybe.

The water isn’t destroyed in the process, it’s just heated.

I keep telling this to my local water utility but they keep billing me for drawing water from the municipal supply, regardless.

if it’s open loop cooling, sending the heated water back into the body of water it was drawn from

Dumping superheated water into the reservoir won't have any second order consequences, right?

Have you tried saying your house is a data center?

I mean, I've got a homelab with a water-cooled CPU. So... a very, very small one, yes.

Can I tell my water utility this to get some kind of discount?

"future"

Part of it I think is that we can technically live without electricity. We cannot do the same with water.

That is missing my point that they are not major contributors to water overuse. The other uses wildly dwarf them, especially animal agriculture

On electricity, they are delaying fossil fuel plant closures and run backup generators that emit themselves. They're projected to go from 5 to 15% of electricity use in the US

The heated water is released back into the waterways and by extensions kills everything living there. This collapses the ecosystem and changes the water chemistry. This can result in contamination, invasive species taking over, etc... Do that on major water ways like the Great Lakes/Saint Lawrence and you fuck with people's drink water supply.

Only closed loop data centers are remotely feasible.

I keep telling this to my local water utility but they keep billing me for drawing water from the municipal supply, regardless.

You're paying for the filtration and delivery of it. Feel free to stop paying and go collect and clean your own water.

Dumping superheated water into the reservoir won't have any second order consequences, right?

If the water is superheated, something has gone drastically wrong. The effects of that style open loop cooling do exist, and are well understood already from the power generation industry.

Agricultural water use is bad and wasteful, overuse of fertilizers cause toxic algae blooms in critical biomes which devastate ecological balance.

Data centers directly pollute groundwater with heavy metals, glycol, and other biocides poisoning local groundwater making it unusable for people and agriculture.

Agriculture and datacenters aren't the only water consumer/polluter. Mining, industry, and LNG fracking are major polluters as well. Regulations that used to protect the environment and water supply have been gutted by DOGE and the Trump admin so there is no institutional leverage to preserve our natural resources.

Also, data centers are still being built, which means the current water pollution levels will rapidly compound in the next few years. Several Data centers are being built right in my back yard. The amount and kinds of impact these things have on rural communities is devastating; living near farms just means being stuck behind a tractor on your daily commute for a couple weeks a year. Living near datacenters is and ecological and spiritual blight.

Stop splitting hairs. It isn't "data centers aren't as bad as agriculture," the data centers are bring built where there used to be agriculture, and will have a devastating effect on agricultural capacity. Basically there is a mass industrialization that further compromises water supplies in addition to adding all sorts of environmental pollution, on top of rapidly accelerating deterioration of natural environment and resources. It will have a compounding effect that will damage natural infrastructure for agriculture.

The whole framing of your argument is bizarre. You are literally poisoning the well.

The great lakes are already using lake water for cooling nuclear plants. That's what I was referring to when I said we already know the effects. It definitely effects the local ecosystem, but what that effect is depends on the body of water we are talking about. It's definitely nowhere near as simple as "kills everything living there".

Ideally we would just quit building useless data centers all together, and this cooling question would be a moot point.

https://archive.is/Gpibv

Around half of the entire Colorado river goes to animal feed alone and it's barely a part of the conversation. Meat consumption has been rising for decades and only leading to more of it

Agriculture also pollutes ground water, and at a far higher rate and frequency. The toxic algae blooms are from the runoff which means high nitrate levels in the local water level. Cancer rates are elevated nearby animal farms. It's not "just a blight"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935126006286

The pollution from animal farming is not just a US problem either

The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows.

https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806

My point is that it's weird to focus on if we're going to just ignore the way larger contributors of animal agriculture to all of those problems with water. I see at least 5x the amounts of posts around water than electricity which is helping datacenters get away with increasing their emissions with less attention

That archaeologist:

Historians will know it wasn't about anything the general public uses AI for

Yes, and nuclear power plants are built with the strictest oversight and environmental planning. Data centers are just built in industrial zones with minimal supervision.

Do you think people live close enough to them for the noise to be a problem?

Attention on issues does matter. Not all causes are equal and outsized attention leads to bad policy promoted and passed. We can't just focus all our time on datacenters and ignore the biggest water users. I'd argue that it's the other way around that focusing on datacenter water is the "pet gripe". There's a number of other bigger reasons to be concerned about datacenters. We should talk about those instead

Easy to explain actually, greed and stupidity. The late capitalist endgame.

I think explaining all the Lord of The Ring stuff is going to be another weirder piece. Can we jointly add overuse of Bottle Water & Golf Courses to this pushback of useless water excesses?

According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025. That amounts to roughly 264 billion gallons for the year , or the annual water usage of 1.8 million Americans. AI data centers are currently consuming 550 million gallons of water per day. That's roughly the same rate of water consumption as the entirety of the world's bottled water industry .

Wait until you learn how much water animal agriculture uses

we need to eat

Hopefully not eating Alfalfa from arid dry climate.

It's their turn

go collect and clean your own water.

Rainwater Reservoirs Net Jail Time For Oregon Man

Them or the polydactyl kitties.

Read your own article. Wasn't in trouble for collecting rainwater; he got in trouble for damming natural waterways. Massive difference.

I value the outputs of animal agriculture

That's the problem

You're replaceable

electricity can be converted to clean water, and it's at a slightly better rate than some of the non evaporatively cooled datacenters get

and I value cheap cloud compute

eat a plant

I eat plenty of plants