141–150 of 171 posts
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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.
We do not need meat.
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Datacenters have a readily available substitute to water if they just make less profit. I'm not giving up my meat so that datacenters can use it for cooling, if that's what you're suggesting.
From the above stats, a 2.3% change to USA meat consumption, up or down, has the same impact as a 100% change to data centre water consumption, up or down. If I read the USDA stats correctly, US red meat and poultry production went up about 5.6% from Jan-Jun 2025 to Jan-Jun 2026, i.e. the increased production of meat led to an increase in water use that was twice as much as the water use of all the data centres combi…
For example, if a person's meat diet is virtually all chicken (reasonable given prices lately), substituting the chicken for almonds is a net neutral change. Almonds use every bit as much water as chickens do.
Granted, that may be an extreme example, as almonds are one of the more water-intensive crops, and chicken is one of the most water-efficient meats. There will likely be decent water savings in many cases, but at the very least, anything a person substitutes for their existing meat diet is going to use some water as well.
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>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.
Of course, because it's not like whole world went crazy after ChatGPT and hundreds of billions of dollars are being constantly invested into many of technology stacks - software, hardware, semiconductor engineering in order to push this technology even further, lol.
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>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.
Are they? What has gotten better because of LLMs?
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We do not need meat.
In fact many humans need meat because the proper plant protein simply cannot grow/exist in their area. This is why we evolved to be omnivores. Basic biology laughs at your poorly-researched position.
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You don't need a law to force people to pay for resources they consume; basic economics already ensures that. If there are externalities not already accounted for by that (increased demand for water/electricity driving up costs for others, noise, "eyesores", etc.) you could pass laws to ensure those costs are paid by the responsible party but that's not a datacenter-specific issue.
How does that work in a market where you are bidding amongst other participants and capacity is constrained? Supply is limited and demand is growing, the market response is to charge more.
People could then either use the futures contracts to keep the price they pay for water the same as it was, or voluntarily reduce their water usage and sell the contracts to the datacenter for a profit. Same deal for power.
This would of course be a bit complicated for most people to manage, so maybe instead of giving consumers the contracts directly you could have some intermediary manage the contracts for them with approximately the same result.
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You have to look at the local level, water isn’t distributed the same way around a country as large as the US. Some regions have no water problems while others have a lot of consumption and competition to get access to it
Yeah that's fair. I haven't seen a single article doing that though (from either side) and I honestly think that nobody would even trust these companies at this point (Meta et al) to give an honest analysis anyways.
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It’s more nuanced, the water consumption can be a real local problem. The evaporated water doesn’t necessarily come back to the original source, and if the water supply was already stressed you’re adding even more pressure to it. You have to look about the actual details, like all arguments about resource consumption
You'd have to look locally at individual datacenter projects then and not be against all of them. If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry. But I just don't see that happening. Noone is goin…
Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them
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…
The problem is that these comparisons do not have equal utility. Trying to compare them to AI datacenter consumption is equivalent to justifying a gambling habit on a fixed income because groceries consume plenty of dollars as well.
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…
> Livestock: ~730 billion gal This is a good illustration how cursed the datacenter topic has become when people go out of their minds on computer cooling while continuing to eat meat which lets be perfectly clear - is mostly for entertainment purposes. I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.
I can imagine raising issues with a specific datacenter in a specific water-constrained location, but I agree that being vocally concerned about the teaspoons of water consumed to produce an AI response while being unconcerned with the thousands of gallons used to produce a cheeseburger seems like innumerate virtue signaling.