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Who is "we"?? Some places do have water shortages. And regardless of whether the power goes out or not, more power consumption = higher prices + more pollution.
We the people. In places where there are significant water shortages, water hungry data centers are not being built.
https://www.newsweek.com/map-data-centers-built-drought-hit-...
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You're conflating AI and AI Data centres. What kind of "jobs" does AI data centre creates? More jobs for factory workers who assemble video cards to be shipped and installed in a rack?
Data centers require lots of technicians to install, maintain, and decommission servers. Who do you think installs those video cards?
One reason is that politicians have vilified them for their own political means. Creating false narratives like they use huge amounts of water, when in fact the cooling is a closed loop system and use less water than a single busy restaurant. They are being used as yet another pawn piece to push inequity and climate change agendas. It’s been quite a successful strategy.
My understanding was that often multiple cooling methods are employed and the ratio of use shifts seasonally; however, that evaporative cooling was still primary method, especially in hotter climates like CA and AZ.
Can you help me understand what type of data center (size, location, etc) uses less water than a busy restaurant?
In fact as late as Jan 2026 Google was proudly presenting their new data centers in Bangkok: https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-01-21-Google-Clo...
Disclaimer: Google Cloud employee
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This is false. Evaporative cooling systems consume significant amounts of water and do not reuse it. They can't anyway, recondensing the water would release all the heat they removed by evaporating it.
You don't have to evaporatively cool a data center. You can make a direct trade between energy efficiency and water consumption.
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Source on that water claim? Everything I've seen suggests the opposite.
You believe lies, 99% of data shows that data centers do not use appreciable amounts of water compared to almond farms, or gold courses, or bog standard lawns. https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/data-centers-less-wa...
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Why are they bunk science? I’m not an environmental expert, but the research papers and policies I’ve read don’t seem to be egregiously wrong. I’m asking genuinely, I’m open to changing my mind here.
Regarding water usage, in general data centers do not use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing > The Georgia data center is only using ~2% of the county’s water. For comparison, a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is using ~4% of the county’s water. A construction plant for Rivian cars is using about the same amount of water as Meta’s data center. The data center is functioning like any other normal in…
Are the claims really that "Data centers use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing"? I dont think so.
Even if thats true, that doesn't mean they cant have a disastrous effect on the local water supply. This isnt a good rebuttal.
Frankly I tend to think the anti-datacenter crowd is overreacting. But I don't think you've addressed the real criticisms being levied.
In some passing research I saw the datacenters do continuously consume water (its not a one time cost like some claims I've read). And smaller size ones may use water equivalent to around 1000 households, and larger ones may consume closer to the equivalent of around 20,000 households. Evidently the massive one in Utah will at least double the state's entire consumption of water.
Can all of these places handle it?
I dont know. But that's the question, not if other types of heavy manufacturing have higher demands. And frankly it's inevitable that at least some locations cannot handle it. Which doens't mean you should be anti-datacenter in general. It means you can't just blanket dismiss the water concern for all locations.
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But it’s not just ideological. The facts are, even with great strides in efficiency, datacenters use a TON of water and electricity. And without fail that results in increased prices for the local communities who see almost no benefit from these datacenters. Ironically the very same people profiting most off of them are the ones saying they’re going to leave the country if they’re forced to pay anything resembling a…
> datacenters use a TON of water and electricity We have a shortage of neither.
But that’s really the problem - “we” don’t get any say in these decisions. A bunch of corrupt politicians and rich oligarchs make these decisions that screw over the rest of us.
And yes, for the record, I’m not uniquely against “AI” data centers. I’m opposed to a lot of other environmentally harmful and wasteful developments. They don’t get hyped up like “AI” does, though.
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Source on that water claim? Everything I've seen suggests the opposite.
Most people who believe that data centers use a lot of water aren't mislead about how much water data centers use, but they are unaware of how much water everything else uses. In the great scheme of things data centers simply do not evaporate that much water. They are too small and too few. As a comparative example, all the data centers in Arizona combined use less than 1/50th of the water evaporated by Arizona's own…