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US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

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Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#121

Post by naasking »

stonogo wrote: post #44
zachwill wrote: post #16

One 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.

Because nutritional value is not the only thing of value. We invented this clever way of uniformly valuing things called "money" that abstracts over all of those differences though.

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#122

Post by [deleted] »

theultdev wrote: post #64
fridental wrote: post #4

What happens with the water in the DC after it has been consumed?

a little evaps, goes back into the water cycle. non-issue, chinese propaganda to get us to slow down. unfortunately some people parrot it, but most are smart enough to know it's bs. you'd think they would want to shutdown golf courses first, it's pure leisure and much more water, but it's not about that :)

[deleted]

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#123

Post by whycome »

zug_zug wrote: post #12
whycome wrote: post #3

What does it mean to be consumed in this context? After used for cooling isn’t it clean enough for drink and other uses? Can’t it go back into other systems? Can’t it be used for agriculture?

"consumed" means it was used for evaporated cooling and let off into the atmosphere. It's obviously a resource that replenishes, but wells replenish at a limited rate [and can run dry] so it's not a negligible issue. Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.

Can that vapor be captured and condensed again? The energy transfer of evaporation happens before it reaches the cooling tower exit. It's a conservation of energy thing for sure but condensation is doable.

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#124

Post by jcranmer »

zug_zug wrote: post #37
thevinter wrote: post #13

Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless. Annual withdrawals (2015) - Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal - Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal - Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal - Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal - Aquaculture: ~2.76…

Good context, but aren't many of your examples simply putting that water back into the ground? Also, where the water is taken from is the key issue. If this was ocean water nobody would care, but if it's Reston, VA that's a local issue.

For perspective, the total annual water consumption of all US data centers is about 100 days' water production of the nearby water treatment plant to Reston, VA. Or put differently, all of the US data centers can be comfortably supplied solely with the water from the next phase of expansion of said treatment plant (an upgrade of 75MGD).

"17 billion gallons of water a year" sounds like a lot of water, but it's really not.

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#125

Post by lightedman »

tester756 wrote: post #49
shimman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Meanwhile LLMs aren't that easy to replace"

A BBS chatbot from the 80s (LISA) was almost as good as modern LLMs and that was just based on key words.

So, uh, yea, chatbots are very, VERY easy to replace.

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#126

Post by simonw »

thevinter wrote: post #13

Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless. Annual withdrawals (2015) - Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal - Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal - Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal - Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal - Aquaculture: ~2.76…

US golf courses hit 531 billion gallons in 2024 (1.63 million acre-feet) https://www.gcsaa.org/who-we-are/media/news-release/2025-new...

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#128

Post by thawawaycold »

wraptile wrote: post #115
thawawaycold wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah people should just accept starting to feed on AI slop for sustenance instead of actual food! How dare they have a preference

calling it "actual food" is clearly misleading when majority of meat is used purely for entertainment not for survival sustenance. By that logic compute is "actual medicine" because some of compute is used for medicine?

> majority of meat is used purely for entertainment

Source of that inane statement?

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#129

Post by otterley »

RajT88 wrote: post #50
zug_zug wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Colorado water system is a disaster that long predates the invention of computers. The way water rights are implemented in the western US (doctrine of prior appropriation) meant that anyone who owned land through which the river flowed could take enough of it to plant lettuce in the desert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma_Lettuce_Days

That's nuts. These practices took so much water that native populations could no longer sustain themselves from the river. Complaints about the relatively low use of water by data centers seems pretty weak in comparison, although I still wouldn't locate them in the desert; the desert is a better place to load up with solar and wind farms.

https://coloradoriverscience.org/Water_law_and_policy if you're interested.

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#130

Post by jandrewrogers »

citrin_ru wrote: post #93
zug_zug wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the thing with the livestock is that you have to give a cow water. Datacenters do not need water . It is just slightly cheaper for them than cooling with electricity. Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption, and ideally in a way where it isn't a ghastly eyesore.

> Datacenters do not need water. It is just slightly cheaper for them than cooling with electricity. As long as electricity at least partially produced using fossil fuel I would prefer data-centers to use as little electricity as possible. There are regions which are getting plenty of rainfall on average (which can be collected and stored) or were getting some water from rivers will have negligible ecological impact.…

> there are plenty of DCs in hot and arid regions

Differences in air temperature are largely below the noise floor in terms of impact on data center cost. Slightly lower energy prices and other operational or capital costs are more than enough to offset significantly hotter climate. Arid climates improve evaporative cooling efficiency.

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