Data centres can be designed to harvest the steam / evaporated water and reuse it but thats expensive too and they might not choose to do so.
Note that evaporative cooling also produces significant amounts of brine, as it is similar to distillation, producing a brine that is difficult to treat and often not useful for other purposes.
Note that it is quite common for the refrigerant or chilled water to be a closed loop, but still have an evaporative cooling tower etc.
People are trying to use geothermal etc...
Evaporative cooling efficiency in dry climates is hard to beat for capital, energy and space.
I'd assume the water isn't put back into circulation after passing through a data center, so if anything it might be cooled and then reused in the same data center, best case scenario.
The results is the same, farmers who already have to fight to get enough water in Aragon now have to fight more and compete against companies like Amazon and other foreign investors for the water. Aragon isn't exactly wetlands, so hard to not feel the local government is making the wrong choice here.
I still don't understand why more attention is not being paid to oil immersion cooling! https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10101126
It's corporate greed and an unwillingness to face the external consequences of demand for compute. Just because misting is cheaper doesn't make it automatically better.
For these new planned data centers, realistically, what would the "one-time" volume be VS how much they would need per hour/day? And not some straw-man argument like what the guy in the video said.
But those "a million gallons of water" (or whatever it consumes/uses) have to come from somewhere, and cannot go somewhere else at the same time as it goes to the data center, so from the perspective of the Aragon farmers, isn't the water "used up"?
https://www.context.news/ai/thirsty-data-centres-spring-up-i...
Without tech companies and data centres we will just be a theme park for tourists with the poorly paid, precarious hospitality jobs that go along with that.
Data centres are even worse - they need only a handful of staff members while draining incredible amounts of energy and water.
You live in Spain - why not advocate for boosting the energy sector, better grid infrastructure, more renewables, etc.? This would harness a tangible, sustainable strength of your country within the EU and, considering the blackout last month, is definitely something to work on before any tech company or datacentre can settle in Spain ...
Since when was Aragon ever a tourist hotspot? As far as I know (as another "actual" Spain resident), tourists flock to the coastal areas and the islands (and for some reason, Madrid), not to the inner-mainland like Teruel and Zaragoza.
But Zaragoza is quite touristic, although probably mostly domestic tourism.
Maybe. Tech companies might have some good jobs for a while. But they will continue to transfer their profits to their parent companies in the US (and/or some tax shelter somewhere).
> and data centres
Data centres employ very few people. Pretty much exclusively during construction. Once operational, very little actual labour is required. Mostly maintenance.
> we will just be a theme park for tourists with the poorly paid, precarious hospitality jobs that go along with that.
No more poorly paid or precarious than a data centre job for Big Tech, I would imagine.
I agree with the sentiment that Spain (and much of Europe, really) needs a big economic boost beyond tourism. But AI fueled data centres ain't it.
It wants to keep industrial water use away without even having a discussion about water allocation/price. This is because farmers (all around the world tbh) are getting an insanely good deal right now (on water), and any public discussion of water price is only ever gonna make things worse for them.
https://images.app.goo.gl/zYoRKHJsCrLgyf989
Or this one?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
Firstly, they're talking about data centres, not "AI". AI is just the boogeyman now and 100% of usage suddenly is imagined to be ChatGPT exchanges. In reality it is mostly servicing sites like this, ad networks, backing up your iCloud photos, running your bank, etc.
Secondly, price and regulate a resource appropriately and this wouldn't happen. The only data centres that run evaporative cooling do so because it's the least expensive option, and because it's allowed. In every normal place they run a closed circuit and the water usage is basically a rounding error.
Further, articles like this never give a context. 94 million m2 (the 2030 forecast for every data centres across Europe combined, not just "AI") sounds super large. Unfathomably large. Paris uses double this. Of course Paris is a massive city, but then think of every other large city across Europe, every farm, etc. It ends up being a small slice, for something that is very important in people's lives.
In reality, GPUs slurp a lot of energy, and it would be missing the current situation if you don't think new data centers will include a lot more GPUs than they did just 5 years ago. Not saying the new data centers will mostly be GPUs, but current context surely changed the calculations of what a "modern" data center should contain.
> price and regulate a resource appropriately and this wouldn't happen [...] In every normal place they run a closed circuit
Pricing and regulation doesn't suddenly mean foreign investors won't try to get an already scarce resource allocated to them. And regardless of how closed the circuit is, once the water goes to the data center, it cannot also go to other uses, so the farmer ends up with less water.
No, that's precisely the situation where markets work best: when resources are scarce. A single gallon of water isn't worth much to a data center or a farmer; you can't water a field with just one gallon. But it's potentially worth a lot to someone who's thirsty. Prices will go up, demand will drop, and supply will increase to meet demand, unless you kneecap that process by imposing artificial price controls - then you'll have shortages.
> you can have people who need it but are too poor to pay what others will pay for it
You're right, markets are not charities; they're only concerned with efficiency. Caring for people who can't take care of themselves isn't efficient, but it is the right thing to do. Even in this situation though you're better off with markets than without them, because it's way easier for people, organizations, and governments with excess resources to provide for the needy when they're operating in an efficient environment than in an inefficient one.
> If someone [...] buys all the water
That's called a monopoly and I agree that's not good, because if one person owns/controls everything it's no longer a free market; you're essentially back to central planning. Individuals and data centers should be able to buy their water in a competitive market, not one dominated by a single supplier.
> It also doesn't work when the product is common use, like a road or a park
Markets are actually great at allocating things like road space. NYC's congestion pricing is doing wonders for the efficiency of their road system right now, and tolls have been a thing basically forever. But I agree in principle it's hard for markets to allocate resources that there's no practical mechanism of charging for. Thankfully, water generally doesn't fall into that category.
1 gallon might be worth nothing to a datacenter, but the datacenter is built and a company invested in it and it can't go unused. They will pay more to keep that datacenter open than the local who needs it to drink. It doesn't matter how much the local needs or wants the water, if they don't have the money, how are they going to out bid a global corporation?
> You're right, markets are not charities; they're only concerned with efficiency.
Markets aren't concerned with anything, they are a means to an end. And they have appropriate uses and inappropriate uses. Not everything needs to be 'efficient' sometimes things should be 'just' or 'humane' rather than 'efficient'
> Markets are actually great at allocating things like road space. NYC's congestion pricing is doing wonders for the efficiency of their road system right now
That isn't a market, that is a tax.
Look, markets are great, but I don't get this quasi-religious adherence to one mechanism amongst many as the be-all-end-all of solutions. It is good at some things, bad at others. Ayn Rand was just an author.
You ignored the second part of my paragraph. It's far easier to be humane when operating in an efficient system than an inefficient one.
Even a multi-billion dollar datacenter can and will go unused if the price of water to cool it gets high enough. If keeping that datacenter running is somehow so important to larger society that it's actually more efficient to airlift in water from across the country to supply coolant than to shut down the datacenter (extremely doubtful), then that's exactly what should happen, and it's exactly what the market will make happen unless you interfere.
If unstable market prices result in temporary, unacceptably inhumane conditions for other people, then the most efficient solution is certainly going to be to work within the market-based system to help those people (e.g. subsidize the cost of water to residential homes until prices stabilize), not to override the system and prevent that (apparently extremely valuable) datacenter from being constructed in the first place.
> > NYC's congestion pricing
> That isn't a market, that is a tax.
People are freely choosing to exchange their money in return for a service. That's a market. Not a perfectly free market since NYC roads are a local monopoly, but closer to that ideal than the previous system of "free roads".
> Look, markets are great, but I don't get this quasi-religious adherence to one mechanism amongst many as the be-all-end-all of solutions.
Markets are more than just great, they've proven themselves time and time again to be nearly unbeatable in their ability to create wealth and allocate resources efficiently.
Markets are based on the collective decisions of millions of people taking billions of factors into account to create the most efficient outcome for everyone. None of us have any hope of beating that with our own naive takes on what "seems best". Anytime we interfere we're making everyone poorer in the service of whatever other goal we're trying to achieve, so we better be darned sure it's worth it.
Why no reverse it though? First, look out for people, then figure out efficiency.
> If unstable market prices result in temporary, unacceptably inhumane conditions for other people, then the most efficient solution is certainly going to be to work within the market-based system to help those people
Why are you so obsessed with efficiency? What is wrong with being a little inefficient if it means that people aren't even 'temporarily' in inhumane conditions. And if they were 'unacceptable' you wouldn't accept them.
> People are freely choosing to exchange their money in return for a service.
As stated in the wikipedia entry for Congestion pricing in New York City:
"This Pigovian tax, intended to cut down on traffic congestion and pollution, was first proposed in 2007 and included in the 2019 New York State government budget by the New York State Legislature."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
> Markets are based on the collective decisions of millions of people taking billions of factors into account to create the most efficient outcome for everyone.
So what?
Because the empirical result of that sort of thinking every time it's been tried on a national scale is widespread poverty where nobody is able to help anyone because everyone is starving. You need to have wealth in the first place in order to give it out to the needy.
> What is wrong with being a little inefficient if it means that people aren't even 'temporarily' in inhumane conditions.
You're misinterpreting my comment. You'd obviously step in to help people before conditions become temporarily inhumane. All else being equal, the more efficient (read: less wasteful) solution is the better one.
> This Pigovian tax
Taxes and markets aren't mutually exclusive. Carbon credits, for example, are another type of market-based tax.
> > Markets are based on the collective decisions of millions of people taking billions of factors into account to create the most efficient outcome for everyone.
> So what?
So read the rest of the paragraph after that sentence.
Every person should have the right to clean easily accessible drinking water in their homes. We know how to do that, it just costs money but it should be a basic responsibility of every government.
Beyond that if you want to use water for whatever then you should have to compete for it in a market. Maybe the only other exception might be growing sustenance food. But those systems (as they are currently implemented across the world) quickly get political- but no one should starve because water is too expensive either.
The thing is that almost all of the time that's not what's at stake when talking about things like data centers- it's a strawman.
In other words, about two cubic meters per second, a small shallow stream.
People who are trying to organize opposition to particular uses for water have a habit of citing the raw numbers without putting them in context, which works because there's so much water that the numbers are eye-wateringly large.
It's hard to find concrete stats on total water usage (as opposed to percentage changes), but one report I found that helps to put this number in context is this [0]:
> In addition, it takes 17,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of chocolate. According to statistics from 2019, Europe produced 3.7 million tonnes of chocolate, which equates to an eyewatering 63,625,200,000 litres of water.
Since a liter is 1/1000 of a cubic meter, we're looking at 63 million cubic meters for European chocolate alone, which places chocolate in the same ballpark as Europe's data centers.
Obviously data centers can and should work to conserve water (no misting in dry regions would help), but on the surface ~40% more water for data centers than for chocolate doesn't seem like that bad of a balance.
[0] https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/07/09/our-water-footprin...
Seems like this is solvable:
1. Keep rolling out the closed-loop cooling improvements now appearing in new DC designs.
2. Add more desal capacity where it’s cheap (sunny coastlines + renewables) to cover the residual demand.
Sources: - https://aedyr.com/plantas-desaladoras-agua-salobre-espana/
To begin with:
- it's almost certain that there is an over capacity of compute being built, and some kind of bubble.
- money is being wasted being thrown after non-viable ideas
*but*
This is a technology that will fundamentally change the way humans think and do things. There will be plenty of amazing new discoveries that will benefit all of humanity that will come out of all of this. -probably the most purely virtuous will be bio-medical related (alphafold etc.)
Yes, the capitalistic waste of resources is a shame, but any comment saying that the money should/can be used in a more cooperative/communal way are completely disconnected from reality.
The relatively high-waste wheel of capital has been spun up and because moore's law seems to generally apply- if not to model training and inference itself, at least to the underlying hardware, we're going to get efficient systems eventually.
I'm on the left and the environmental AI angle is one of the most regressive and short sighted takes from these people. I put it in the same bucket as anti-immigration left-green policies. Our new political world order is putting greens on the side of conservative, regressive authoritarianism and I don't like it.
From that viewpoint it makes sense why young (optimistic, idealistic) people would want to vote republican.
It's so sad that money and power blind people when there are viable technological alternatives available.
Tech is not immune from abuses of power, but most water scarcity that causes suffering (people being literally thirsty or can't wash their clothes) is not a resource issue (amount of water available)- it's a political/infrastructure issue. Don't build a data center that takes away people's clean drinking water. Build water infrastructure where people live.
But of course that's not the problem described by the article, even though the writer would like to lightly imply that might be the case.
Edit to add: Water and water rights in the western USA is a political issue that politicians would have you believe is not up to them. It's a scam and an advertising campaign that has people buying low flush toilets when a lot of the water is wasted by big Ag companies.
When your own personal livelihood depends on another business playing fair with water, these kinds of stories hit different.
It absolutely is a resource issue. It is also very much also a political issue.
Besides which there are so many other f'ed up dynamics in the profitability of a commodity crop like corn- Gov't subsidies, gmo/pesticides, ethanol, factory animal farming, etc.
You're right that it is tangentially connected. But that doesn't mean we should let them off the hook.
This is lobbying effort directed at policy makers and the public.
As others have pointed out: There is an very simple solution to "solve" water waste/allocation: Just put a price on it.
BUT one big interest group, namely agriculture/farmers, absolutely don't want that, because they historically could pretty much use water for free (and/or underpaid massively)-- any rational discussion about water use/price/allocation is undesirable to them, because it is likely to make the situation worse for them comparatively.
This is also why the whole discussion centers round emotional arguments against allowing industrial water use at all, instead of arguing that small/local farmers should get a better price on it.
They don't even have to use water - there are alternatives. The solve is changing behavior of the leaders in this greedy industry.
I don't think this argument works at all, because bigger datacenter operator does NOT mean "tolerates higher OPEX".
> How is a city [...] supposed to pay more for water than a multi-billion dollar company?
I do not understand this; the city would not compete with the datacenter operator for water-- the farmers would, and both of those would be paying the municipality for the water (ideally), not vice-versa. Residential users already pay much more for water (typically, compared to farming/industry) so any renegotiation is unlikely to affect them much.
I'm lost. How is a bigger business unable to tolerate higher opex in a space that is famous for economies of scale?
But people don't realize that residential water use is usually a tiny fraction of the total available supply.
Just price the rest of the non-residential supply at market prices.
When I drive around my town, I can't drive more than a few blocks without seeing a sign about Stage 3 water restrictions. For residents. Just doesn't seem fair.
> AWS has the same target, while Google has pledged to “replenish 120 percent of the freshwater volume we consume, on average, across our offices and data centers by 2030.”
How is that supposed to work?
The cynic in me can’t help thinking of an high-energy or production-externalities-imported system, but I’d be glad to ear about a sustainable local water creation.
By 2030, AI will make revolutionary advancements in water management which will reduce our total water consumption, reduce waste, improve the wastewater treatment efficiency by 15x, so that, overall, the industry is not consuming but producing water.
resource_waste•6h ago
Its obvious from an economic standpoint, so I looked up from a security standpoint what crops Spain produces and it seems to be non-essentials. So its purely for export purposes.
Tech will win if all is rational, but people have a soft heart for the status quo. Those poor farmers, what a sad story. I imagine they can probably rally the population against their own interests with the correct moral coating and maybe create a faux crisis of raising the prices of food by hoarding for a few months.
lopis•5h ago
I'd love to hear what non-essential food is less important that fricking AI data centers.
> its purely for export purposes.
Erm, yes? Spain is one of the main food producers of the EU, so that tracks. How is that an argument for anything?
padjo•5h ago