Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almond farming - ~1.5 trillion gal (1.1 gal per almond)
I value almonds more than LLM slop.
I hate almonds and love LLMs.
US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
41–50 of 171 posts
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#42Potable well water should NEVER be used for such purposes. Aquifers recharge at a rate far lower than industry wants to pull from them. At some point potable water for humans will run out.
If you're using water just to evaporate it for cooling then use surface water.
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#43One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water. It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists. There’s better metrics to make o…
As a reference, one gallon of cow milk requires about 250 gallons of water.
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#44One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water. It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists. There’s better metrics to make o…
It's really weird to me that datacenter fans all have detailed knowledge of almond farming, but never seem to notice that the nutritional value of ChatGPT is not on par with your average box of almond milk.
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?
Well in agriculture the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of chemical runoff. In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.
heat, too.
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?
Well in agriculture the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of chemical runoff. In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.
The question is how much is returned to the original source. Given that the water is ~100% evaporated in the case of DCs it’s a genuine and reasonable question to ask
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#47I’ll not dance around it. It seems like most people don’t like the inputs or outputs to this massive generational endeavour.
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?
Well in agriculture the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of chemical runoff. In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.
No, the water is extremely hot. It takes a massive amount of infrastructure before this water can be "released." Unless you are one of those massive polluters that think discharging extremely hot water into the ground is safe and not something that immediately kills the life it's dumped into.
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#49One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water. It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists. There’s better metrics to make o…
If you want to play these stupid games how much water did you think was used to make the concrete for the data centers? Or how much water was used to cool the steel? How much water did all the workers drink while building the data center? How much water did they use to build all those GPUs? Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the del…
>Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food.
Let's do not act as if there wasnt other food, a lot of it actually.
Meanwhile LLMs aren't that easy to replace, they're biggest human achievement up to date.
Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of those partisans have no idea what other sources of water consumption are by magnitude. They seem to quote any number as if it is a lot. A billion gallons is a lot. 500000 gallons is not a lot.
Each datacenter uses as much water as 1,000 homes. You're welcome to put such resource constraints in your own local community if you don't care about the increased demand.
That is a number that gets quoted, but I just ran the latest numbers for my local city.
A couple of dozen planned data centers, with an estimated combined use of 160k gallons per day.
Apparently the average household uses 300 gallons a day, which seems insane to me. I guess a lot of people water their lawns. That gets us to a mere 23 households per data center. Even with 100 gallons per day per household or less, the local data centers are not at 1000 households per data center.
And where I live, water is not a concern. They are building a pipe out from Lake Michigan, which has been in the works now for 10 years. That primarily gets the tri-city area off of the aquifers which have been drained at an unsustainable rate for the last 100 years.
If I lived along the Colorado river system, that's a different discussion.