US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

https://forgeeks.net/us-data-centers-water-use-17-billion-gallons/

34•kuuuzya•47m ago

Comments

bell-cot•17m ago

Context: 1 acre-foot, a usual unit of measure for agricultural water, is a bit under 1/3 of a million gallons. 17B gallons is about 52k acre-feet.

Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert.

The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A.

Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no.

thedougd•14m ago

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?

WarmWash•10m ago

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.

RajT88•13m ago

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.

zug_zug•9m ago

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.

otterley•3m ago

How many homes could mothballing a misplaced farm provide water for?

cma•11m ago

Golf courses use about 1.63 million acre feet, about 32X more, some of that probably reenters watersheds and aquifers, not necessarily great with fertilizer runoff. But they pose lower risk of human extinction, so have that going for them.

myrmidon•8m ago

Completely agree. Specifically:

If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns.

So don't push it.

dgellow•4m ago

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

whycome•14m ago

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?

ziofill•12m ago

Exactly. Is that figure about the water 'flowing' through the datacenter? I want to believe they would not just dump it after use.

elil17•12m ago

This refers to water that is evaporated for cooling of both the datacenters themselves and the power plants that give them electricity. The remaining water after evaporation is so full of minerals that it has to be discharged as sewage.

This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.

zug_zug•11m ago

"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.

dgellow•8m ago

There is also the issue that evaporated water doesn’t necessarily go back to the original water source

quickthrowman

fridental•14m ago

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

elil17•9m ago

Well it is primarily evaporated into the air. It rains down somewhere, often over the ocean.

avalys•14m ago

This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people.

However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.

RajT88•12m ago

Newer DC's mostly are doing this.

The planned DC's by me all together (and there will be a couple dozen) are said to use less than a million gallons per month.

dgellow•10m ago

They use closed loop systems. That reduces the water consumption on-site, but you still need to move the energy out of the DC, which requires a lot of energy. That extra energy itself is likely produced by upstream power plants evaporating water. In practice you mostly move the consumption upstream.

sokoloff•8m ago

With regards to evaporative cooled DCs (either primarily cooled that way or assisted some of the time): Imagine an air conditioner that instead of requiring energy to drive the compressor to make the phase change work, all the phase change was provided by taking in liquid water and boiling it off to vapor.

elil17•6m ago

People have always used a closed loop to move heat in and out of the data hall - but something has to keep that closed loop cool. That's often a cooling tower which uses evaporating water to reject heat into the air in a way that's very energy efficient.

Additionally, the power plants which supply electricity to the data centers have the same cooling problem. They also typically use cooling towers.

It's not dishonest at all. Datacenters and fossil fuel power plants are absolutely evaporating fresh water for cooling. The piece that's missing from that discussion is that it helps them use less electricity.

thevinter•11m ago

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 trillion gal

- Mining: ~1.46 trillion gal

- Livestock: ~730 billion gal

- Total: ~117.5 trillion gal (322 Bgal/day)

Source: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015: U.S. Geological Survey Circular - https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441

paxys•7m ago

Almond farming - ~1.5 trillion gal (1.1 gal per almond)

shimman•3m ago

I value almonds more than LLM slop.

zachwill•10m ago

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 one’s anti-AI point.

The Info War Stack: The three layers states are building to win an info war

AI Coding Has Erased the Supposed Advantage of Statically Typed Languages

Show HN: MyPRs – your open-source resume, built from your merged pull requests

SubCost – See what your subscriptions cost over 10 years

Exploring 1-Bit LLMs

Munich Court Proposes €1.05 Monthly Codec Royalty for Netflix Premium Users

What 219 AI evals job postings that publish a salary pay

Show HN: Open-source AMDGCN kernels for optimizing LLM inference

Canada can save Americans and defeat America

AI Can See Optical Illusions

What you won't code, you pay for in tokens

Cryptographic Context Injection

Share your verified subscriber count for free

PingParrot – alerts that repeat until someone acknowledges them

Sammons Distances Itself from Guggenheim in Call with Lenders

BitTime: The only solution that replaces currency to restrain AI

A year of Org Social, my social network

Shein targets a $27B IPO after its peak valuation

Luffu Link – health and safety band from Fitbit founders

Show HN: A distributed agent runtime with SWIM mesh and zero-trust keys

Motherduck Acquires Tower

Show HN: MIT Beer Game free in the browser

Paradise, California, leader says utility group 'duped' him into wildfire ad

EPA aims to exempt datacenters from disclosing air pollution, advocates warn

Confidential tokens: Routing is coming for the Frontier AI Labs

Show HN: Zoetrope – Watch a Claude Code session as a live flow graph

Key takeaways from investigation into Edison's role in the deadly Eaton fire

Sablejs 2.0 – An AOT sandbox for AI-generated JavaScript

Resolving Energy Bottlenecks

Show HN: Candlebar – crypto and stock prices in the Mac menu bar