Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1].
Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3].
It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the exact same way.
Edit: can't reply
> AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid
Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on.
Same with nuclear power in Germany and GreenTech in much of the America.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-tech...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-gives-20-year-tax-...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afr...
[3] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...
So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.
Every company and project I know of has a long list of things they want to do that they believe would be good for customers - but they cannot afford the people needed, and the risk is too high to borrow. That is if AI was really increasing efficiency in a good economy they would be keeping everyone and getting more work done with them.
Of course in reality we cannot know if AI has really increased efficiency - we only have short term measures at best which we know from experience are often wrong. (most often because there are many ways you can make a shortcut today that will kill your long term)
Humans have some repeatable bugs in our wetware, and it can be predictably exploited in a way that is hard to correct. It isn't "some people" - it's all of us, and the moment we think we're immune is the moment that we are most easily affected.
Yes, even the smartest of us are idiots in some very predictable ways.
AI is also:
- Boosting existing small businesses and enabling the creation of new small businesses by making previously expensive resources like market research, accounting/legal advice, etc. available for $20/month.
- Helping the world progress towards cheaper healthcare: https://www.vox.com/health/487425/open-ai-chatgpt-diagnosis-...
- Allowing lower income communities to access legal advice that would previously have been prohibitively expensive: https://www.probonoinst.org/2026/02/06/ai-and-technology-hel...
If Anthropic can allow millions of people from all around the world to access these benefits, why shouldn't it be worth a trillion dollars?
Wealth in the modern world is not a zero sum game. Wealth is created, not allocated. The fact that Anthropic is worth a trillion does not prevent you from making money.
This is naive and shows lack of understanding of second order effects. Technology has been so far one of the only things to lift all boats. The last 100 years almost eliminated extreme poverty, hunger and improved material life for everyone. How? Technology - agricultural, industrial.
Of course AI is going to be a rising tide but there will be a blip where people can lose jobs.
Wealth inequality is just a proxy issue or jealousy. Industrial revolution also increased inequality (just in narrow terms).
Can you provide any evidence for the supposed rising tide? So far I've seen nothing that indicates that anyone besides the people directly invested in AI companies will benefit from it. Even the best case scenario right now - software developers becoming more productive - doesn't actually benefit anyone not invested in AI companies.
People losing their jobs (and in many cases, their livelihoods/lives as a result) are also not the only negative effects.
>Using the broader initial AI water use estimate of 32,000 acre-ft/year to 290,000 acre-ft/year
Note : 1 acre-foot is approximately equal to 325,851 gallons.
AI : That estimate converts to approximately 10.4 billion to 94.5 billion gallons per year.
Ya 10 billion gallons of water (low estimate) is totally nothing. Thx for this informative blog post.
28.6 million gallons per day.
Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord.
There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.
Golf courses use nearly 100x more water per day than datacenters, nearly 2b gallons per day. [1]
Residential lawn water usage is ~9b gallons per day. [0]
0 - https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/docs/f...
1 - https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...
You could imagine running way more water, but I guess these racks are extremely dense.
AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.
Both sides have dishonest reporting
This IS the complaint.
e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.
So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
It’s all just a lack of imagination.
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
Citizens had to sue their town to force them to give up water usage, something Google was adamant about hiding from the public.
When there is no accountability, trust plummets. There is no reason to trust anything from these corpos or their pro-corpo rags.
So you could have a closed-loop water system cooling your machines or chips, but still be consuming water to cool the coolant.
Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.
That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.
One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.
You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.
There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.
Also agree there are other ways we should pursue in parallel regarding emissions.
This source says that a 100 prompt spends half a liter of water https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
I remember this year google reported one google search spend a drop of water (or 5 drops, around that)
Doubly so when they use such innocuous and authoritative titling as "Our World in Data" which implies some collectivist, community-based outlook that this website is indeed not.
To wit, this page is produced in part by the Global Change Data Lab which is a team of economists, and YCombinator.
> U.S. specific estimates put beef water use at 317, 441 and 808 gallons per pound of boneless beef when precipitation water is not accounted for in calculations.
So, let's just say around 400 gallons of water per pound of beef if you don't include rainfall use.
For for thousands of pounds of beef, I’ve barely used any water at all. Don’t notice the extra consumption on my well at all, and I have a very low producing spring fed well (1 gallon per minute).
“Vegan” crops on the other hand line corn which are irrigated in many parts of the country use a great deal of water and often very inefficiently so.
In other words, bringing up some anecdotal, hyper specific (how many meat eaters just "have a few cows"?) information says absolutely nothing about the truth of the matter, but a lot about what you believe constitutes an argument.
Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.
What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.
Ah yes, those invaluable tens of jobs created by DCs....
Do you really not consider taxes before repeating this tired argument?
[1] https://www.loudoun.gov/DocumentCenter/View/219184/General-F...
The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-int...
I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?
My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out.
But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/industrial users, in a way that pushes them toward non-potable sources wherever possible.
A fun Texas water fact I always bring up: the entire state’s monthly freshwater use is roughly a week of freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay. Texas would be the 8th-largest GDP in the world if it were a country, and its whole monthly freshwater demand is basically a few months of water that the Chesapeake just dumps into the ocean. (Of course, estuaries make use of the water so it's not just wasted but it's illustrative imo)
Another fun comparison point is yearly Texas uses 0.08% the volume of the Great Lakes in freshwater but ~ 30-50% of the volume of all the lakes in Texas.
We've got a lot of water but it's not distributed evenly and we should probably build some sort of water pipeline eventually so water rich states can sell to water poor states.
Again, this is all just speculation by someone who knows not a damn thing about municipal water management.
I live near the Potomac and always figured the region was wet enough that water was not a concern. You have me rethinking that somewhat.
Export an abundant resource for a scarcer one seems win/win to me. Kind of the point of interstate commerce.
It’s probably still not too bad but there’s at least some work done that’s „used up“ by letting tap water (or probably demineralized water used for cooling) evaporate.
https://www.fao.org/in-action/enteric-methane/en/
While methane isn't CO2, what I believe we are talking is greenhouse gas :
>Methane is more than 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
When that water source is underground wells, this can take years (on the fast end) or decades (on the moderate end) to get back down. Look at California's water issue -- so many wells extracting water for farming has changed the land topography.
Also, when water 'comes back', it might come back in the ocean and not on land... reducing the available fresh water without desalination.
Data centers need the water to cool... but maybe there's room to find incentives for them to do so while making sure our water bills don't go up like our electric bills are because of the extra load they are putting on utilities.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/virginia_datacenter_w...
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/25/m...
In a far science fiction future, I could e.g. imagine connecting LLM inference data centers to a global data network instead of always having to drive up to them to ask my prompts.
Just like an agriculture, data center puts water to cool chips and ships token to some other reason?
For a pre-chewed eli5 overview, check this: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
A responsible human must always verify information. I DW as "secondary l" information source. For instance https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-ai-need-so-much-energy/video-...
tldr: chip immersion uses less water but is more expensive. Water evaporation is the opposite. Datacenters will use the cheapest they can get away with. Water is scarse; evaporated water is as unavailable as contaminated water. Read the information sources.
FWIW the comment is just at +2 at the moment, I think it is just at the top of the thread because it is recent and has discussion.
This suggests a simple fix: charge more to the datacenters (not people) for the water, to make the other option competitive.
No need to throw baby with the ... erm, bathwater.
Anyway agricultural water usage is way worse in California.
This whole time I've been wondering how it's possible that people don't realize how common evaporative cooling is for much larger buildings that are far more numerous than these data centers, and especially in dry climates where drought is common.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
Discussed here:
Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.
You don't have to eat a burger.
Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).
(Not I. I disagree with both)
Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
This comment could have been someone's hamburger!
Based in Colorado.
Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...
Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.
Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.
Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans.
It's a strawman.
But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?
Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.
If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.
The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.
Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap.
People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.
Very insightful bullet points, ordered lists and grok tables! Articles like this are certainly a net benefit to society
Are these things usually convincing? The general pattern is that people take a position on something and then find one paper with a DOI identifier that backs the position. The Elephant and The Rider and so on. Trying to provide someone with evidence of the falsehood of their claims rarely makes them reconsider and often makes them dig their heels in while they search for a new paper with a DOI identifier.
We're in an unprecedented time in the information age when people can rapidly achieve basic competency at many things using Wikipedia, Google, and LLMs critically. If information availability and search were the constraint, one would expect us to reach greater alignment with facts.
The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality. In practice, I think the social psychologists are right. For the most part, we form the model of reality and then we seek information that supports it. So if you increase the total amount of information what you do is increase the ability for someone to select out that which supports their model.
That's not to say I don't appreciate these things. It's just that I don't think facts move public opinion very much.
The interesting thing that more information and better search provides is that it accelerates the divide between truth-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily falsifying information) and confirmation-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily supporting information). In general, one can imagine that the former will be more successful at modeling the world ex humanity at least. But if others believe something is true, often a direct approach at their facts is not the best approach to get the outcome.
But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters.
Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-mem...
The bigger concern though, is the power requirements. Which are set to double or triple the energy use of the entire Province (analogous to a State in the US).
https://ucalgary.ca/sustainability/mobilizing-alberta/climat...
Air pollution, GHG and water use are concerns, but these projects will not dramatically increase the load on the electric grid.
Natural gas is cheap and abundant in Alberta, and the province (actually the whole country, via transfer payments) benefits financially from resource revenues from extracting the gas. So, these projects are generally an easy sell to the public.
Who are these people who think AI will end civilization? Ya'll know it's just autocomplete and deepfakes, right? Maybe they need to read a book about the industrial revolution? It changed the world entirely, but it didn't end it.
Sidebar, I'm very curious to see where AI goes. Definitely not on the hype train. More curious than anything. This article was a breath of fresh air.
1. Tallying the total water consumption impact, embodied water (construction), operational water (cooling), indirect water (electricity generation), supply chain water, etc.
2. Mapping current water intensity onto AI growth forecasts through 2030+
And if you look at those things in combination, there are reasons to be alarmed.
So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.
> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’
> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.
So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-dat...
[2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-cente...
hirpslop•2h ago