Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
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Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
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Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#42> after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus Hey where’s that person from yesterday who argued with me over the 1m vs 1cm hole in the boat? Everyone saying stop talking about data center water use is missing the entire point as this article shows.
Data center water use is a fairly separate topic from what this article covers. Related of course but the conversation on USE centers around actual volume use, not contaminants.
It’s not a separate topic though, as this article shows. A closed loop system can still mess up the water supply, because (in this case) it wasn’t fully closed.
Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#43Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently. -------- "Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging a…
This closed loop system needs to be filled and flushed, which is the operation discussed in the article. The bacterium was described as a possible airborne hazard if used for irrigation, it's not a regulated substance though so dump and dilute might be perfectly safe.
Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#44Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
Testing for an extremely
rare bacterium is not the bare minimum. In fact even the water treatment plants rarely do it. They admit in the article we don’t even know whether or not the bacteria originated from the water supplied by the city that entered the pipes in the first place.
DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#45[fnord]
People would love to build their own servers (and run AI or other workloads on them) and kids would love to build their first PC, but big tech is buying all the hardware and stuffing it into data centers. You make it sound like they asked for it.
Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
'regular people' use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc. Even you use HN. Not everything can be local. My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
I always imagined the HN server running on a single machine in some basement, running a magically efficient Lisp program that easily handles millions of requests per second.
HN supposedly currently runs via M5 Hosting according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750668 (comment from late 2025), though I think it ran on a single server over a decade ago.
Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#47[deleted]
Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#48Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
Not do what? Not discharge the water with bacterium? But the data center claims that their independent testing shows that they didn’t even discharge the bacterium. It seems that neither the city nor Meta knew where the bacterium came from.
Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#49Omen AI just got $31m to solve this problem... https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/omen-ais-plan-to-optimize-...
Interesting I’ve been waiting for something like this on our rivers. Hopefully.
Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those workers pay quite a lot of federal taxes
Meta takes more in than whatever it pays back¹ > Meta Platforms reported annual income taxes of $25.474 billion for 2025, driven by massive profit margins and a major one-time tax charge stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Despite massive recorded U.S. income, Meta's effective federal tax cash rate dropped to just over 3.5% due to extensive research and development (R&D) credits, stock option tax br…
3.5% is criminal.