Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#161

Post by lukeschlather » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:30 PM UTC

thayne wrote: post #145

lukeschlather wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for a single point of comparison, California's alfalfa consumes 15% of the state's water. All that alfalfa is going to feed cattle. California only produces 9% of the USA's alfalfa so it's easy to say that this is a tremendous amount of water. Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumpti…

World beef production is approx. 60x almond production by mass, and that doesn't include dairy. That isn't the whole story, because cattle use more water than just what is used to grow alfalfa, but you are comparing apples to oranges here.

I was drawing a point of comparison in response to the question about almonds disproportionately using scarce water resources in arid areas, which is a different question from overall water usage. My point was that almond water usage is literally only an issue in California, and that their water usage is not that extreme given the size of the market California serves.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#162

Post by ajkjk » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #152

""It would be better if they could own up to it," said a current Amazon software developer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. "Even if they said it was a low priority, at least that would be honest."" HN commentary on water use by so-called "tech" companies usually includes a number of mindlessly-parroted, bad faith "arguments" One of these is to try to compare the new (additive) water use by non…

no opinion on the rest of the point, but, why do you keep writing "so-called" in front of tech companies? They are called that because they are tech companies; the word's meaning is widely agreed upon.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#163

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #159

imgabe wrote: post #10

> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.

I find this loses the point, because agriculture is essential. If we preserve water it's because we want to keep enough of it for essentials like agriculture and such. Not that agricultural practices shouldn't better conserve water, but it's the usage of water for non-essential things that I think most people find wasteful.

It's not essential that almonds be grown in California.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#164

Post by nzach » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

I find it really odd this recent push for discussions around the development of new datacenters.

There is a plan for constructing a new high-capacity datacenter [edit: near my city]. And a lot of discussions in the media are done through an emotional tone around water and electricity usage.

The media generally frames it as if installing a new datacenter would put the neighbors in risk of not having water or electricity. I'm not arguing that a datacenter doesn't bring any problems, everything has pros and cons.

Both sides seems to be using bad faith/misleading arguments, and I thinks that's really bad because we end up with solutions and agreements that don't improve the lives of the people affected by these new developments.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#165

Post by mossTechnician » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #71

alxmdev wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't agriculture objectively more important and more beneficial to humanity than Big data centers?

yes and no. Most agriculture is not necessary for pure survival, especially water-needing crops in the desert. It's more luxury food products. In addition, increasing human productivity through technological innovation is the only thing that ever let us escape the malthusian trap.

> increasing human productivity through technological innovation is the only thing that ever let us escape the malthusian trap.

How so?

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#166

Post by bryanlarsen » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #153

bryanlarsen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cattle water consumption should be meaningless. If a cow is drinking water from a surface water source and breathing/sweating/peeing it out in a pasture, that's the same process that would be happening if humans didn't exist. It isn't meaningless due to industrial farming. Chickens and pigs are even more likely to be industrially farmed than cattle are. If we lowered our meat consumption by about 90% then we wouldn't…

If humans didn't farm them there'd be far fewer cows alive and drinking water.

And far more bison. Not the same, but similar.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#167

Post by teuobk » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

harddrivereque wrote: post #29

xnx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants? Yes. Not always, but evaporative cooling is much more energy efficient than heat exchange to outside air. That said, stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers like golf courses and agriculture (e.g. to ship alfalfa to the middle east).

The problem with data center water usage is that it is unnecessary from the PR point of view. Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive. For all I know, we could also do just as good without data centers, like we did 20 years ago. With agriculture, water usage is necessary as eating is not something optional and everyone needs to eat to survive. From the PR point of view, of course. We coul…

Golf courses in the USA used about 2.1 billion gallons of water per day circa 2004 [1]. In other words, the annual usage of Amazon's datacenters per the article, 7.7 billion gallons, is less than the amount of water used on just American golf courses in four days.

[1] https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#168

Post by mrguyorama » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

lukeschlather wrote: post #89

marcellus23 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the problem is that that growing almonds is usually done in arid regions, so the issue is not that it uses lots of water, but that it uses lots of water in areas that frequently experience droughts. This is an honest question (I truly don't know, although I suspect I can guess): are dairy farms also common in those areas?

Just for a single point of comparison, California's alfalfa consumes 15% of the state's water. All that alfalfa is going to feed cattle. California only produces 9% of the USA's alfalfa so it's easy to say that this is a tremendous amount of water. Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumpti…

The comparison you are bringing up actually just gets to the heart of the issue.

California agricultural water is so fucking cheap, you can buy foreign land, start a farm, grow a bunch of grass, and ship it over to your country.

And that's cheaper than just growing grass locally.

That's insane

Most problems California has are the same: Systems that were initially designed and built a hundred or more years ago to support a state of like a hundred people, and an utter refusal to update those agreements because it would slightly inconvenience some really wealthy farms.

Growing Almonds and Alfalfa in California would be fine if they paid market rates for the water, and would therefore be more conscientious about using it and not wasting it, and that would dramatically improve the water situation of California and upstream places.

But it's way cheaper to pay for people to run absurd narratives on Fox News to make it a culture war issue so that you never have to care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux22FHTFXQ

The situation is so fucked up. It's a war of the rich against the richer. Wealthy farm corporations all have lobbying groups, and instead of lobbying for a more free market distribution of water, where they could have all they want as long as they pay for it, they run political campaigns to ensure California never reforms it's water rights system and continues to die of thirst while giving away 90% of it's water for rates decided 100 years ago. All the political agitation about water in California is over an absolute minuscule fraction of the water distribution, because actually fixing the problem would mean these farms paying market rates for water, which they do not currently do.

A microcosm of the US problem basically.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#169

Post by chemotaxis » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:41 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #139

LPisGood wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally find criticism of water waste misplaced. Water’s lifecycle is cyclic. The water isn’t lost unless it is being salted or otherwise poisoned. The real waste is the energy required to produce, clean, and transport the water that is being “wasted.”

aquifers deplete, the water table lowers, wells dry up sustainability, availability and maximum marginal price matters, just as with electric power generation

Depletion of local water resources is a good thing to measure. But by and large, this is not what we're measuring. Instead, we're coming up with absurd statistics that imply any water put to beneficial use just disappears forever.

If your tap water comes from a river and flows back to a river, leaving it running mostly just wastes energy.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#170

Post by soulofmischief » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

JuniperMesos wrote: post #131

soulofmischief wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the anti-datacenter hype is not much different than anti-nuclear or anti-vaccine insanity, and uses the same tactics of deception and obfuscation. But there is definitely an impact to pulling too much water out of one place too fast, which must be ethically addressed when building datacenters. Beyond potential impacts to other local residents in terms of reduced access to local water or price increases t…

> We've seen the stories about increased sediment in local residents' water supply after a new datacenter moves in next door, but I'd like to share an example from my own city. If you're talking about the New York Times Article "Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door" described in https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake , that NYT article was so misleading I'd call it basically a deli…

Yes, the materials I have seen have not convinced me, either.

That's why I thought to offer an example from my own backyard that I can verify myself, and has a much clearer story and is also in a non-datacenter industry as to avoid hype and focus on the importance of reasonable water usage restrictions.