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adjejmxbdjdn 20 minutes ago [-]
You can go millions of prompts before you use up as much water as it took to make a single beef burger.
You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.
There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2
Emissions many thousands of times over.
SecretDreams 17 minutes ago [-]
Water I agree. C02 (which is really a tangential metric if energy consumption which will vary by energy mix) I'd want some citations.
Also agree there are other ways we should pursue in parallel regarding emissions.
bee_rider 7 minutes ago [-]
I don’t really get the water concerns in datacenter cooling. Even if a lot of water was used for cooling with every prompt (which he argues against here, but, even if)… water “used up” by cooling just comes out a little hotter, right? Maybe evaporated. Then it’ll come back in the form of rain. This isn’t an industrial chemistry process that leaves some toxic waste in the water. Or an agricultural one that puts water in plants and then ships it off to some other region. It just becomes another path through the water cycle.
I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?
loeg 5 minutes ago [-]
The absolute strongest complaint is that DCs consume treated, potable water, which is less abundant / easily re-created than any old non-potable source. (Of course the easy solution here is DCs just ingest / treat their own non-potable source. Or utilities charge rates sufficient to price in the externality of drawing down more potable water. The economics still work for DCs if they need to treat their own water -- the fundamental problem is that utilities are underpricing their potable water, so DCs prefer it all else being equal.)
bigmadshoe 2 minutes ago [-]
By that argument water use is never a bad thing since all water comes back as rain. The problem is that data centers need to use clean water, which has to be treated. On a local scale, a large data center could starve a community of potable water, even if the state-wide water use is very small.
pier25 3 minutes ago [-]
Just 30 mins from where I live data centers are having an impact on water used for farming.
Because they're taking water from already parched regions, often pumping it out of the ground. Even if the water did come back locally as rain (it doesn't), it still makes it impossible for people to live off the same aquifer sustainably.
echoangle 4 minutes ago [-]
The water isn’t gone but if it comes back as rain, it at least has to be cleaned again, since data centers probably don’t use raw rainwater for cooling.
It’s probably still not too bad but there’s at least some work done that’s „used up“ by letting tap water (or probably demineralized water used for cooling) evaporate.
Brendinooo 22 minutes ago [-]
Usually when people compare data center water usage to golf course water usage I feel a lot better about the whole thing.
quickthrowman 3 minutes ago [-]
Compare it to alfalfa and you’ll be laughing your ass off at how much water alfalfa consumes.
~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.
That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.
One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.
therobots927 16 minutes ago [-]
I’d recommend you read the following report: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease
Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…
Did you read the paper carefully? It's about pesticide use. (It's not especially plausible as epidemiological studies go, though I'm unsurprised if a better study finds a firmer correlation between pesticides and PD.)
JimDabell 5 minutes ago [-]
A much more comprehensive article on this subject is here:
This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0]
That's populism for ya, and it's sadly extremely effective.
Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1].
Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3].
It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the same way.
Edit: can't reply
> AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid
Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on.
Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats. AI is currently driving yet another extreme wealth inequality inflection point. Founded just five years ago, Anthropic is going to be a trillion dollar private company maybe this year! This is a staggering outcome and will further divide the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.
So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.
loeg 3 minutes ago [-]
Slopulism is effective because people are idiots. Nothing to do with material conditions.
bluGill 6 minutes ago [-]
The economy is down, and the fad is blame AI so that is what everyone is doing. The last downturn there was a different fad that people blamed it on - but the real root cause was always the economy and not the fad.
cphoover 4 minutes ago [-]
AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid...
easterncalculus 2 minutes ago [-]
The Empire of AI book seriously did permanent damage on this talking point.
bluGill 4 minutes ago [-]
As my friends in Agriculture like to point out, most of the water isn't used at all, it goes right on down the river to the ocean. Ag is second, but less than 50%.
Aeroi 12 minutes ago [-]
I ran 8 internal audits against my agent stack end-to-end, to figure out if I was destroying the planet. Turns out it uses 12x less energy over a 10minute snapshot when compared to youtube, instagram, facebook ect.
If data center water use is such a concern, why not require that data centers invest in closed-loop cooling systems? By closed-loop, I'm talking about re-condensing evaporated water and allowing the water to cool. Cooling the water would be more expensive in hotter environments, but still achievable. These data centers seem to have wild amounts of money for investment, why not just mandate conservation requirements?
tptacek 12 minutes ago [-]
Data center water use is in fact not a valid concern.
quickthrowman 1 minutes ago [-]
COP of evaporative cooling is almost double that of a closed-loop. If we had an abundance of solar power, it would be more economical to run closed-loop systems.
throwatdem12311 26 minutes ago [-]
Regulating AI? America would never!
cleverpotato479 26 minutes ago [-]
A lot of confusion around AI water usage might stem from whether it's an open-loop or a closed-loop cooling system.
e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.
So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
shimman 16 minutes ago [-]
A lot o the confusion around data centers is that these companies purposely hide this information from the public. We already know how damaging normal data centers are:
Citizens had to sue their town to force them to give up water usage, something Google was adamant about hiding from the public.
When there is no accountability, trust plummets. There is no reason to trust anything from these corpos or their pro-corpo rags.
selectodude 22 minutes ago [-]
Open loop cooling can work fine if they use greywater. The water isn’t potable anymore, but it goes into the sky and becomes clean again.
It’s all just a lack of imagination.
loeg 8 minutes ago [-]
Most of the confusion just stems from anti-DC advocates lying about water usage, not any specific technical details.
tumult 17 minutes ago [-]
This is an AI generated article, with AI generated images, claiming that AI isn't a resource problem.
siliconc0w 14 minutes ago [-]
The bigger concern is more around the pollution of the gas turbines. Populations around the DC are going to see higher rates of Asthma, Respiratory diseases, Heart problems, and certain cancers.
KingMachiavelli 16 minutes ago [-]
I often get side tracked into commenting on regular social media like Instagram and I'm somehow surprised over and over how poor critical thinking skills in the greater population. The zeitgeist of US politics is "this doesn't directly benefit me so this must be bad". According to the Instagram demographic, ALL industrial uses of water and electricity are bad because they "compete" with household use. The massive Agricultural industrial complex is actually OK because I like meat, almonds, etc. AI is bad because it doesn't make my job easier.
Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.
What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.
hiddencost 6 minutes ago [-]
Asking chatbots for estimates of water usage and then taking their average is a great way to alienate your audience. It's embarrassing, as well.
JohnMakin 12 minutes ago [-]
> Jay Lund is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geography at the University of California – Davis. He is also a Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
therobots927 18 minutes ago [-]
What they don’t mention is that the water is being polluted by the datacenters. It’s not as simple as “water go into datacenter, water come out of datacenter”
Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
For perspective, 28 million gallons of water per day is roughly equivalent to what 93,000 households consume per day. There are ~130,000,000 households in the United States.
munk-a 23 minutes ago [-]
To be fair to people's objections - agriculture is significantly more important than AI model training when it comes to improving the average standard of living - and to be fair to model training a lot of the water usage in agriculture is used on extremely water inefficient crops.
Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord.
There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.
peyton 15 minutes ago [-]
I’m actually surprised it’s so low. That’s about 7 seconds of the Mississippi River at its exit per day. Maybe a week or two of alfalfa farming per year, or even less?
You could imagine running way more water, but I guess these racks are extremely dense.
munk-a 34 minutes ago [-]
As a more complete title...
AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.
Both sides have dishonest reporting
everdrive 19 minutes ago [-]
Does it use more than zero? Then I hate it. Maybe we should try to calculate how much water online advertisements take.
cdrnsf 16 minutes ago [-]
Greater than $0 in cost of living increases for people living near these things is too much.
loeg 9 minutes ago [-]
Are you saying any industry that brings in net new jobs with above median wages is bad? Or just ones with few employees and high additional property tax revenue?
easterncalculus 4 minutes ago [-]
When the new jobs number increases to four (or even three) digits people will take that more seriously.
cdrnsf 4 minutes ago [-]
I'm concerned with the ones that create temporary jobs, few permanent ones, drive up water and electrical rates and then help deskill other industries.
bell-cot 5 minutes ago [-]
If we could magically guarantee that our [starry-eyes|gullible|treacherous] political leaders didn't give back most of those property taxes before the DC even broke ground...
Zigurd 13 minutes ago [-]
Look over here! Not over there at grid infrastructure and generating capacity, or noise and pollution from on-site generators.
The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.
nostrebored 11 minutes ago [-]
wouldn't it be great if we hadn't actively sabotaged grid capacity and development at every turn
You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.
There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.
Also agree there are other ways we should pursue in parallel regarding emissions.
I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/25/m...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo
It’s probably still not too bad but there’s at least some work done that’s „used up“ by letting tap water (or probably demineralized water used for cooling) evaporate.
~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.
That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.
One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.
Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
Discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45946966
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s
Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1].
Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3].
It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the same way.
Edit: can't reply
> AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid
Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-tech...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-gives-20-year-tax-...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afr...
[3] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...
So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-int...
e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.
So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
Citizens had to sue their town to force them to give up water usage, something Google was adamant about hiding from the public.
When there is no accountability, trust plummets. There is no reason to trust anything from these corpos or their pro-corpo rags.
It’s all just a lack of imagination.
Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.
What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
>Using the broader initial AI water use estimate of 32,000 acre-ft/year to 290,000 acre-ft/year
Note : 1 acre-foot is approximately equal to 325,851 gallons.
AI : That estimate converts to approximately 10.4 billion to 94.5 billion gallons per year.
Ya 10 billion gallons of water (low estimate) is totally nothing. Thx for this informative blog post.
28.6 million gallons per day.
Golf courses use nearly 100x more water per day than datacenters, nearly 2b gallons per day. [1]
Residential lawn water usage is ~9b gallons per day. [0]
0 - https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/docs/f...
1 - https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...
Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord.
There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.
You could imagine running way more water, but I guess these racks are extremely dense.
AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.
Both sides have dishonest reporting
The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.