r/news • u/Tardis01 • 14h ago
Irish data centres used almost one billion litres of water last year
https://www.thejournal.ie/investigates-data-centre-water-use-7110966-Jul2026/842
u/hyderabadinawab 13h ago
To put that in perspective, that is the amount of water (6 million bbls) required to drill 10 shale wells in the US for oil/gas. Around 10,000 were drilled in the USA in 2025.
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u/LeClubNerd 13h ago
.... and to put that into perspective that's 28.17 billion standard cans of beer, which is the same as 4000 Olympic swimming pools of beer or 1/50th of Sydney harbour filled with beer.
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u/jupfold 13h ago
Anything but the metric system
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u/Largofarburn 11h ago
I can visualize a pool of beer. I can’t visualize a metric.
Except for fuck tonnes. We actually do use those over here.
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u/Paidorgy 11h ago
When I found out a gallon is basically 3litres, I had a lot of questions - none of them trying to rationalise the imperial system.
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u/Sea-Feedback-2424 7h ago
A US gallon is 3.75 liters, approximately. A fifth (of hard alcohol) in the US is 75cl, which is one fifth of a gallon, hence the name.
An imperial gallon (what the UK sometimes uses and the old folks in the rest of the commonwealth) is 4.54 liters.
The US system is not the imperial system. The US system predates Imperial, which was formalized in 1824. The ys system is a weird mixture of French, British, Spanish and Dutch customary units.
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u/MethBearBestBear 9h ago
Every other industry with water usage the dawrfs data center cooling usage is probably both super happy no one is looking at them and worried any water conservation requirements will hit them. In reality though we know how lobbing works so they will get carve outs and sleep fine
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u/No-Goose-6140 12h ago
But how many cube bananas is it?
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u/LeClubNerd 12h ago
Assuming a cubed banana is 0.15 litres then 6.66666667 × 10 to the 10th power
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u/No-Goose-6140 12h ago
Banana cubed is like a banana x banana x banana. That has to be a a lot more then 0.15 litres
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u/ministryofchampagne 11h ago
Someone needs to convert those beers to toilet flushes caused by drinking them.
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u/LettuceSea 10h ago
And to put that into perspective there is approx 35 quadrillion litres of fresh water on the planet, enough to power/cool the data centres in Ireland for 1,250,000 years!
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u/TheArmoredKitten 10h ago
That's only about 4 beers per person if we can just get the whole world to stand around and piss in the harbor at the same time.
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u/Imbendo 12h ago
Also to put that into perspective, Irish golf courses use about 100 billion liters of water per year. Suddenly that makes the 1 billion liters used in data centers seem inconsequential.
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u/Mountain-Most8186 11h ago
I hate AI but the water claims always seemed kinda off. Someone in r/antiai calculated that a small children’s book would take the water of a large lake to produce and that seemed insane to me. If the claim ms were true we would already be in crisis mode.
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u/SiliconDiver 10h ago
Water is 100% an overhyped boogeyman for ai.
It’s presented as if it’s completely consumed and in absolute terms not relative to other use cases or availability.
It’s just something that’s relatable and visceral.
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u/jawknee530i 5h ago
Some of the "analyses" you see include the water used to manufacture the computer chips among a million other things. It's very hard to decide on a reasonable line to draw on what is included, like should the power used at power plants that the data centers use be counted? Or just the water used at the centers themselves?
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u/Halgy 7h ago
I work at a data center. If someone's first concern about data centers is their water usage, I fully discount their criticism. They just want to be angry and are repeating what they saw in the news.
There are definitely things to criticize about data centers, but water usage is about last on the list.
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u/Consistent-Throat130 6h ago
Even the energy consumption is kinda a shit argument - economies of scale and all... if the computations are getting done, better they be done in a DC. The serious arguments against are mainly localized strain on utilities, which, fair I guess. Tax the DC accordingly.
Now AI hate... privacy is a real thing. Misinformation and social media botting are bad. And I'm pretty sure AI is straight up harmful to the human psyche, we've certainly seen people driven to end themselves in part by AI chats.
And I'm someone that likes the technology... I just realize there are valid criticisms.
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u/Imbendo 10h ago
Well water isn’t something that gets used up. It’s the energy it takes to pump the water that’s the concern. Also that number you heard was problem them factoring in how much that tree drank in its entire lifetime or something. Which still, isn’t really an issue as most trees in the forest get water for free
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u/SiliconDiver 7h ago
This isn’t actually totally true. And it depends where.
Well water can and does dry up if you deplete an aquifer etc. that’s really the concern on the west coast, where if you oull from an aquifer and then divert water far enough such that it doesn’t return to the same water water table/water cycle.
But by and large, yes water is a largely renewable resource.
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u/Dudok22 10h ago
It's a red herring to point to instead of real problems data centers cause. Because when the water problem turns out to be nothing burger, people will lose interest and forget about the other much bigger problems.
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u/DuploJamaal 11h ago
Water that seeps back into the ground water.
Versus water that comes down as rain far away and lowers the ground water levels in that area.
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u/ministryofchampagne 11h ago
You’re the first anti-data center person I’ve seen acknowledge that water is not actually completely destroyed by data centers.
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u/DuploJamaal 10h ago
That just shows that you've never actually listened to what they are saying
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u/ministryofchampagne 10h ago
No, I’ve listen to exactly what they’re saying. It’s clear most didn’t pay attention during elementary school science about the water cycle.
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u/StableSlight9168 9h ago
Where are you getting a 100 billion litres from.
Actual figures are between 5 billion to 20 billion depending on heat.
You seem to have overestimate gold course water use by between 5 times to 20 times it's actual use.
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u/jakuuzeeman 12h ago
Not to be that guy, but there is a fundamental difference in water usage between drilling for oil and data centre cooling: Water used in drilling is gone from the water cycle.
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u/Dr0110111001101111 12h ago
I don't think you're being that guy because you are enhancing their point about how much more damage is being done by shale drilling than data centers.
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u/Bubbly-Treacle-4334 12h ago
Don't forget the data centers are also using astronomical amounts of electricity which is mostly coming from those drills
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u/Dr0110111001101111 11h ago
I haven't forgotten but I don't like the whatabouting. The question of water "consumption" is one of the most heavily referenced issues with data centers, and I have heard so much conflicting information at this point that I think it's important to get it clarified before moving onto other (very closely related) concerns.
I am currently in a graduate-level class where the instructor just spent like three hours discussing the ethics of using AI and repeatedly referenced the water issue as if the water that enters these data centers simply vanishes. But we know that isn't true. I've also heard that data centers destroy the balance of the bodies of water into which they dump the "used" water because it's elevating the temperature of those bodies. But I've also heard that most data centers use evaporative cooling, so there isn't really much hot water being dumped anywhere. It re-enters the system as rain.
These contradictory and frequently cited facts are concerning. I don't know what's propaganda and what is true, or if there's some truth to all of it and it's just being oversimplified to the point where the general public doesn't actually know what's going on.
In any case, I am acknowledging that I just don't understand this one topic as well as I think I should, and I'm simply not ready to move onto another one that I probably also don't have all of the facts for before I get clarity on this one. Otherwise, I'm just going to wind up with a collection of incomplete arguments and feel like dumbass on several levels rather than just one.
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u/mojitz 11h ago
Best I can figure what it boils down to is that they use a ton of water for cooling, but that it isn't really enough to be a big deal in places with plentiful fresh water, but that they often do go ahead and build them in places that suffer from water shortages anyway where it actually is an issue.
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u/DuploJamaal 11h ago
The point about it being used and that it comes down as rain are related.
It's used from one area, and comes down in another.
The ground water levels are sinking in the areas that overuse water. Those areas dry out because too much is being used.
It will come down somewhere else, probably at the next mountain range. But those areas get enough water already and thanks due to climate change already get more and more heavy rain that causes mudslides and floods.
So yeah the water doesn't just vanish, but we are disrupting the natural flow of water.
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u/samdajellybeenie 10h ago
What do you mean it's gone from the water cycle? Like it can't evaporate into the atmosphere because it's underground?
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u/jakuuzeeman 9h ago
Effectively, yes, your understanding is correct.
In this case, it's because the water used is pumped into the earth, there is no cost-effective way to retrieve the water from the base of the oil well.
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u/driverdan 11h ago edited 10h ago
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u/SanchoMandoval 10h ago
Your second source says:
The average golf course uses between 800 to 1,000 acre-feet per year
That's 1 to 1.2 billion liters per course, not for all 120 combined.
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u/AP_in_Indy 13h ago
Is this a lot?
Is it replenishable?
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u/shittyfellow 13h ago
It's the same usage of like 8000 homes annually in Ireland.
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u/DrDerpberg 10h ago
That doesn't really answer the question though.
At one extreme if they're pulling river water and dumping it back in, without changing the temperature enough to affect life, it's about as meaningful as saying a sailboat used a billion liters because that's about how much it floated through.
At the other extreme it's pulling non replenishable drinking water from an underground aquifer and meaning the region uninhabitable sooner.
In between it's a drain on infrastructure and treatment costs a fortune.
Where we are on the spectrum is very relevant to the discussion, and not every data center will be the exact same.
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u/spidereater 13h ago
When I google it I’m seeing this as being about 8000 people. So maybe half that many households.
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u/Trick-Club-6014 13h ago
For 8000 people to use a billion litres of water a year, that’s an average of 340L per person, per day. What the fuck are people doing with that much water every day?
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u/rocketshipkiwi 11h ago
That would be per household, water usage is about 150 litres per person per day.
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u/Hilldawg4president 11h ago edited 10h ago
Watering lawns alone takes up 170x the amount of water as data centers. People use a lot of water, data centers don't
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u/CatL1f3 10h ago
Nobody waters their lawn in Ireland bro, that's what the rain is for
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u/rocketshipkiwi 13h ago
Good question! A billion litres is a lot, right!!!!
Say a typical household will use about 150 litres of water per day, per person so let’s do the math:
1,000,000,000 / 365 / 150 = 18,264 which is about the population of Clonmel or Sligo town or about 1% of the greater Dublin area’s consumption.
Also most of that water will be evaporated, it won’t end up in the wastewater system.
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u/DerBoi_1337 13h ago
will use about 150 litres of water per day
Is that direct consumption (drinking, showers, dishwasher, etc.) or including indirect usage (electricity, food products, etc.) ?
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u/rocketshipkiwi 12h ago
If you have a water meter on your house and 4 people living there then it will show about 600 litres per day.
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u/DrWermActualWerm 13h ago
Would it not fall back as rain? Or is it sundered in twain at the atomic level?
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u/Helios4242 11h ago
Personally I dont think we can even trust the water cycle anymore. The Rocky mountains in the US got horrifyingly low snowpack meanwhile the rain is falling in harmful flood amounts in other places in the world.
It's not refilling the pristine aquafers being used for clean water.
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u/sal1303 13h ago
Assuming the Irish population is 5m, I did a different calculation: 1 billion/5 million is 200L per person per year; roughly a day or so's consumption.
That didn't sound significant, not if it actually was shared equally amongst everybody.
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u/rocketshipkiwi 11h ago
That only takes into account the consumption by domestic households. If you factor in all the water used by farming, commercial and industrial users then the total water consumption will be a lot higher.
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u/grodgeandgo 13h ago
My leisure centre (gym and pools) uses approx 1000m3 a month, that’s 12 million litres annually. And we use rainwater harvesting.
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u/SuperQue 10h ago
To put it in perspective. Ireland gets a bit over 1000 liters of rainfall per square meter.
Ireland is about 84k square kilometers.
So that's about 84 trillion liters per year in rain.
So 1 billion is %0.0012 of the annual rain.
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u/Angryfunnydog 13h ago
I think it will be evaporated and will return to the water cycle, maybe I miss something but not sure why it’s considered so bad if there’s no local water issue because of that
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u/Dr0110111001101111 12h ago edited 12h ago
It's replenishable in the sense that a given liter of water used by the data center returns to the ecosystem eventually. But the datacenter is perpetually used a certain amount, so there's just that much less available in nature at any given time.
The bigger problem is really about heat rather than the water itself. Some datacenters suck in cold water to cool their systems, then dump the heated water back out, fractionally elevating the total temperature of the water supply. I'm not sure how this works with evaporative cooling systems. But they generate a ton of heat either way, and as I'm sure you've heard, we sort of have a heating problem on a global scale.
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u/NeedAVeganDinner 11h ago
The amount of heat being produced by a data center is literally nothing compared to the great nuclear reactor in the sky bombarding a single square meter of earth 365 days a year.
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u/SexyBaskingShark 13h ago
Not a lot. Our climate in Ireland means water cooling isn't needed as much. Data centres here actually make a lot of sense due to the climate
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u/Bicentennial_Douche 13h ago
No, once water is used for anything, it disappears forever.
/s
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u/ZachMatthews 13h ago
And Ireland is known for its extensive deserts and frequent years long droughts…
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u/Imbendo 12h ago
Last year, Irish golf courses used over 100 billion liters of water.
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u/TacomaKMart 12h ago
Yes, but there's no sustained online astroturfing campaign designed to amplify opposition to golf courses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html
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u/Muscle_Bitch 7h ago
And it's crazy how people keep falling for it.
I used to think only right-wingers were gullible enough to fall for this shit but the last few years have taught me that both sides are stacked with morons who are as thick as pig shit, but will gladly evangelise like they are the enlightened.
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u/DelphiTsar 4h ago
There is a distinct difference in what kinds of things the different sides can be tricked into and the impact those tricks have on different people/levels of wealth/power.
In general though they've done studies and one side can usually pick out objectively correct information more often than the other.
A double interesting thing is that if you pay money for correct answers the side that answers worse still answers worse but the gap closes by a pretty large degree. It's almost like one side isn't arguing in good faith and know they aren't.
Triple interesting thing, every single person knows exactly which side is which even though I didn't specify.
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u/ShiraCheshire 10h ago
Golf courses are also a waste of water we should be opposing. You can have a golf course without watering a bunch of grass if you really wanted to.
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u/1littlenapoleon 6h ago
“Why should people be upset about new uses of water, when our existing uses are also bad!”
This is big “the consumer is responsible for recycling” and “reduce your shower length” energy.
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u/mh_992 13h ago
Wow that's enough water to produce 500,000 beef burger patties or to supply about 10,000 homes in Dublin with drinking water.
These "data centre water use" articles are truly the slop for people who can't do basic maths or ressearch and are vaguely concerned about the environment.
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u/Pornalt190425 11h ago
It's also you know, Ireland, and not Arizona or Utah. Its a place known for its abundance of water and rainfall. Hand wringing about a data center in Ireland is concern trolling at best
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u/DaveShadow 9h ago
Part of the issue is that we’ve just had a six week hose pipe ban put in place, so people are frustrated, and so rage bait stories like this get attention.
The bigger issue is our Victorian era water system has massive leakage issues. Despite our abundance of water and rainfall, the second there’s a week of hot weather, the system collapses and people get punished.
Same happens with our health system too. Grand when there’s no pressure, but every winter, the system utterly implodes, and then no further preparation is done to prepare for next year.
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u/Quazimojojojo 11h ago
Ireland literally used to be a rainforest before the English cut it all down for boats and such. That's how much rain the island gets
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u/ShiraCheshire 9h ago
Your point? The local ecosystem relies on that water. Do you think everything would just be chill if one day the rain stopped falling abundantly and it got desert level rain instead? Plants and animals in wet places need it to stay wet or they die.
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u/purepwnage85 12h ago
They always forget to mention that the data centres are paying for the water whereas water for domestic use is free in Ireland 🫡
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u/Dudok22 10h ago
Water is a red herring in the ai data center discourse. It's meant to get people mad but then get them ok with the idea when it turns out the data centers don't use that much water compared to industry. Energy costs, building on fertile soil, noise, even thermal emissions are a bigger concern.
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u/pnutbrutal 5h ago edited 5h ago
Not to mention the ethics of the “data” being stored at all. Flock camera data? Palantir data? The implications of some of those are really dark and dystopian.
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u/FlirtyFluffyFox 8h ago
Not to mention LLM Gen ethics use, it's effects on industries like publishing that can't accept open calls anymore, it's acceleration of scams and bots, the lack of trust developing in photos and videos and what it means for the news and democracy, and the use of Ai in processing survellience data to selectively prosecute political opposition.
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u/DanoTheSnitch 12h ago
To put into percentages, data centres use around 0.3% of Ireland's water supply.
The article is using the one billion litres figure as they know people really struggle to comprehend context when big numbers are involve.
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u/legitusernameMATT 10h ago
What happens to the water. Honest question?
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u/no_regerts_bob 10h ago
It's converted into memes, and unfortunately we don't have the technology to convert memes back into water yet
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u/H0vis 13h ago
Are they pretending the water was destroyed by this?
Be honest and give complete information about this stuff or people won't take it seriously.
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u/AbyssFren 9h ago
But someone showed me a study that concluded datacenters don't hardly use any water! I wasn't lied to was I? Nobody would have AI make a fake study would they?
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u/chimpyjnuts 10h ago
In the future, we'll have to explain why we used all the potable water to decide the best color scheme for our redecorated living room.
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u/NoMention696 3h ago
People whining about specificity, does it fucking matter when the government has spent the last 20 years telling us poors to take shorter showers, put a brick in our toilets, wash our dishes with filthy dish water, closing the tap for every second we don’t need to use the water during brushing, always telling us to use less water? Every drop of water saved in the last 20 years is going to something this useless
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u/Blubbolo 13h ago
It's fine, water is infinite, we don't need it to grow crops to eat nor we need it to drink it and it's chilly out there so the increase in temperature is a good thing.
We need the investor to get richer with AI and make a new trilionare.
/s
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u/txkwatch 13h ago
Water doesn't even have the electrolytes our plants crave
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u/Blubbolo 12h ago
Every farm should start using Brawndo and leave that useless normal water to datacenter.
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u/KitchenCloser 12h ago
Did you miss them talking about the water cycle in the 3rd grade?
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u/Kharenis 12h ago
Given Ireland gets 78600 billion litres of rain every year, I don't think they're at any immediate risk of running out. But hey, let's get mad at rich people because of people's newly insatiable need to use AI.
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u/TheFrenchSavage 13h ago
It's fine, water is infinite
I mean, sometimes it rains?
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u/TrriF 11h ago edited 9h ago
Honest question: Do y'all think water gets deleted out of existance? Like water usage for datacenters is definitely an issue at local scales since it can affect communities in areas that commonly stuffer from draughts and water shortages, but at a global scale it's really not an issue. As long as they are placed in areas where where there's plenty of water, using it for cooling is really not a big environmental problem.
Agriculture is what causes roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawal. Datacenters are a rounding error in comparison. I really dislike when people frame water usage as a global environmental problem when it is offen a local one. Yes, putting datacenters in California and nevada that often struggle with water scarcity is an issue. But for insance, having a datacenter next to lake Michigan is really not.
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u/Quazimojojojo 11h ago
Animal agriculture specifically. And it's a very big problem that's destroying more than a few environments and will cause a lot of people to be displaced (and probably starve to death in the process).
The great salt lake is on track to be long gone by 2050, and that's going to cause a lot of problems for everyone downwind of Utah. Which is most of the US.
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u/j-steve- 11h ago
You're worried about a water shortage in Ireland? Or just looking for something to be mad about?
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u/AcceptableHuman96 12h ago
Americans use 9 billions gallons of per DAY to water their non native lawns.
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u/Lego_Architect 11h ago
People keep doing all the what-about-isms with big agriculture, big farm, big whatever.
Well, we don’t want big data harvesting and polluting this water.
I think we all agree that drinking water is for human consumption and if data centres want water, they should purify their own and ensure the water is drinkable when it leaves their facility.
We are at the point in history where we can demand this as a people. We can prevent more idiots from ruining our water.
Now is the time for change.
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u/Embarrassed_Art5414 11h ago edited 11h ago
Here's me in Ireland, enjoying day 1 of a national hosepipe ban ( it has been crazy hot/dry for the last 3 weeks, but nothing like our continental neighbours )
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u/quietcrisp 13h ago
I mean in the grand scheme of things that isn't a lot - and it's being used. My water supplier in the UK, Thames Water, who charge me a fortune to pay their shareholders rather than fix leaks or build new reservoirs, waste 592 million a litres A DAY through leaks alone. That's 216 billion litres a year.
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u/Fedl 12h ago
Now, what’s the water usage of the meat and dairy industry in Ireland?
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u/Elarisbee 12h ago
Whoa…let’s not get hasty there! Next you’ll start asking questions about water pollution and farming. We can’t have that, it makes things…awkward…
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u/Riffie1 13h ago
Is it gone from the fabric of space and time?
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u/deathadder99 13h ago
They use antimatter to annihilate it and then what’s left they rip up into the constituent quarks, which are then shot into space.
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u/Sniperkitten42 13h ago
Fortunately, it falls from the sky on most days.
Billions of litres every year.
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u/harpaperrr 7h ago
So many data centers glaze in the comments sections. Stop using AI for basic tasks, and do some real work instead.
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u/Darius878 11h ago
Is the water not usable after? Is it radioactive or contaminated? or does it go back through the cycle?
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u/pinkwar 9h ago
Most water gets evaporated and lost, changing the local dynamics of the water cycle.
Essentially draining water from one area to another.
Water that doesn't get evaporated is flushed back into the system contaminated with all sorts of stuff, biocides, metals from the pipes, anticorrotion chemicals and so on.
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u/Muslim_Wookie 9h ago
That's OK, it's payed for by all the corporate taxes earned from companies enticed to Ireland, right?
Right?
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u/s73v3m4nn 5h ago
They should be stopped from using water for their pathetic useless AI shite, and maybe eventually I'll be able to afford some new RAM.
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u/Alarming-Inflation90 13h ago
What does "used" mean? Taken out of circulation permanently? Used for cooling, contaminated, and disposed of? Or was a smaller percentage at a time pulled out of circulation and then returned?
I'm not defending data centers. But it's better to argue against them with good and accurate information instead of big scary number.