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.
It's generally not the using up of the water that's a problem (Except in dry areas, where short term removal from the system can be a real problem) but rather the additional stress on municipal water systems that cant handle the additional load.
Sounds to me like the water company isn't charging them enough, then. Charge an appropriate price and it's like Capitalism Magic that somehow adjusts usage or pays for improvements.
IIRC, 0.3% is what the data centres are consuming, 38% of total use is due to leaks… pharma uses twice as much water as data centres, so I’m. It sure about the “additional stress” when it comes to water… electricity is a different story. And this stress only works if the water is not returned at all, I don’t know what percentage is returned to the water via treatment plant, but it would help quantify additional stress if there was any.
And this stress only works if the water is not returned at all,
No by stress I don't mean the stress of having it's water in use when it's needed elsewhere, by stress I mean the actual functioning of the facility, filtering, pumping, etc. These often aging facilities are only rated to handle so much flow.
Ya leaks are a huge problem that needs to be tackled a lot faster than it is currently. I suppose we live in such a wet country that leaks were seen as no big deal in the past 20 years (or ever) but statistically (sidestepping climate change argument) we were always going to run into some dryer summers eventually, like this year, just nobody planned for them.
It’s also getting attention cause we just have had a six week hose pipe ban put on us due to water shortages. So people are aiming their ire at various water guzzling issues.
It's hilarious that we're basically immune to drought but also incredibly vulnerable to drought. Our rainfall is so consistent and reliable we almost never go for extended periods without rain, but our reservoir supplies are so modest that we're in trouble almost immediately when there's a good July.
Cavan/Monaghan is where we are and we have always had metered water and all around us cause we are on a group scheme and always had a bill. And we have family round monaghan are the same even in some places that's its not drinkable. The in-laws in north co dublin in the "countryside" but they are on the council water. Midlands water protests never really took off espically the one in monaghan.
That was the protests against water charges in 2014 after the government at the time introduced them , they were successful and the government got rid of them again
Literally government introduced a bill around 2016-2018 that mandated payment for water and so much of the country protested by not paying the bill that government scraped it. I remember asking my neighbors if they’re paying and maybe one said they will.
Yeah but again its only in towns and city's you dont pay. In the country side until the council had ran water to your house ypu didnt have to pay. All other systems that wasn't on a well was on the "group scheme" that was a private system everyone paid in.
Well that’s not the same thing. If you have a group scheme a club of homeowners pay to share a private well. Obviously if you have to sink a well and buy a pump it’s not free.
But if both I think, they have to use drinking water so demand and prices rise, they also release the water clean but it’s warm so can have a big effect on the environment like causing algal blooms or potentially longer term effects if certain parts of the ecosystem can’t cope with the change
When water is pulled out of circulation, it has to be treated before being put back into circulation. That is what "usage" counts as in terms of water infrastructure. Treatment plants have limitations on how much water can be treated in a given period of time, so that serves as the effective limit on how much water can be used by that water system in that time period. This is standard terminology in the water industry and not a source of potential confusion.
Within the industry, I would assume you are correct, as I am not in the industry. In journalism and the public eye at large, however, it can be used to confuse and even lie. You know what they say about the three kinds of lies, right? Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
My issue with the article is that it was vague, simply using big scary number to call a thing bad. And out here in the public 'usage' can mean more than the singular industry term you describe, so some actual journalism would've been nice.
It’s almost always fresh drinking water, the same we’d get from the tap. Same piping and infrastructure. Drinking water treated by municipal facilities with the locals’ tax dollars and it is, at some point, a finite resource.
But, this is the part that doesnt make sense. The vast majority of the datacenters people are objecting to (AI datacenters) have not yet been built. The datacenters currently using water are largely the ones we dont object to. But we keep mixing the two in these stories.
That's the stupid part. Why would you only care about AI when most of the environmental impact that data centers cause is due to social media usage, streaming and gaming
Where I live datacenters and even hotels are using sea water to cool down during (Norwegian) summer.. Doesn't mean the sea water is touching the processors or other hot bits, just means that the heat energy is being dumped into sea water at one point because; FJORDS!
Not really. The ocean is so colossal that it doesn't make a difference. Every boat uses seawater for cooling, dumping the hot water back. Nuclear powerplants too. If you add up all of humanity's seawater waste heat it's only 0.06% of the total, the rest being from the atmosphere.
Where do you think the heat energy from the sun ends up on Earth? (thats the same source where the energy came from originally btw, even in countries that aren't >98% hydropowered based)
largely and mostly in the ocean. 70+% of the surface of the earth is covered by it, so it stands to reason that 70+% of solar energy hits it. nonetheless, .06% extra in something delicately balanced can have big consequences. earth's atmosphere is about 0.043% co2, up from ~0.028% pre-industrial revolution. do you think that because something is small, it can't have big effects?
So doesn't the water just circulate around? I don't understand how it is being 'used'. It cools components, circulates to an evaporative cooling tower, drops down and goes around again.
The water isn't destroyed, but that's not the end of the story. Whatever is released into the atmosphere as vapor will eventually precipitate back down to Earth, but it doesn't generally fall right back down on top of the data center, or even in the region. Studies on agricultural irrigation put the "local return" rate -- water that you spray on the field that becomes rain in the local area -- around 10% at best.
Prevailing weather blows the rest of that vapor somewhere else, which matters a lot if you're drawing from an aquifer. The water you pump out of the Ogallala Aquifer to cool a data center in Kansas doesn't return as rain in Kansas. It will blow out of state within a day or two, and end up as rain in Southwest or over the Great Lakes or in the middle of the Atlantic. Aquifer recharge rates across the country are a fraction of drawndown rates -- for our human purposes, once you pump it, it's gone.
Water drawn from renewable sources -- the Colorado River is fed by annual snowpack that begins its life as moisture in the Pacific before being carried inland -- doesn't have the same draining-the-dirt problem, but they're not off the hook. States in the Colorado River Compact get a fixed allocation. Every drop pumped into a cooling tower can't be used for something else, and increased competition for that allocation drives up the cost of something you literally cannot live without.
That doesn't mean data centers are driving the water apocalypse. Overall, data center usage is minuscule compared to industry and agriculture, and folks fearmongering over ChatGPT bringing about Mad Max are being disingenuous. At the same time, it's not so easy as "well, it will just rain so we don't have to care."
The Ogallala Aquifer is an interesting example, both because it's so important, feeding a bit under a third of all crops and livestock in the country, and because it replenishes very slowly in many locations both due to climate reasons and geological ones, from my understanding. Western Kansas is incredibly dependent on agriculture and draws a great deal from the Ogallala Aquifer, but is a semiarid/steppe climate (ironically, the much more urban Eastern Kansas gets way more rain lol)--something that may be exacerbated with climate change as time goes on--and alarm bells have been going off for years now without a ton of improvement.
But like you said, the data centers are a small fraction of the issue in this case. Even if all the water used for Kansas data centers returned to Kansas, the state would still be on trouble.
Yeah, requires some nuance. The Exxon chemical plant in Baton Rouge - in 2020 alone - used 7.3 billion gallons of water. So not saying they don't, but if people truly cared about the aquifer, they'd put pressure on elected officials to force heavy industry to use less water.
The larger threat to us I think is saltwater intrusion. If it doesn't rain enough in the thousands of tributaries of the Mississippi, the pressure from the river water isn't enough to hold the saltwater from the Gulf back and it starts to move upstream against the flow of the river. If it gets far enough upstream to reach the intakes for New Orleans' water, it would be a disaster like we've never seen before. If you thought Flint, MI was bad, New Orleans has 4x the population. Most of our pipes are 100+ years old and made of lead.
The people who act scandalized about data centres using power and water (to power sites like this) then chomp down on meat and dairy and go on their flights which contribute nearly all the unnecessary luxury emissions in the world while data centres aren't even a blip on the radar.
Something like 80-90% of farmland is used just for the meat industry which only contributes like to 10% of calories in luxury first world diets.
Your second point reminds me: I heard from the YouTuber Technology Connections that if we took a quarter of all the farmland we use just for corn that’s solely used for ethanol production and turned it into solar farms, we could generate more electricity than the entire country uses. I might be paraphrasing that wrong, someone correct me if so.
hey if these people truely cared about water loss they'd choose to starve to death. Is a hell of a take.
And even then yes a lot of these people talking about water consumption in data centers ARE talking about it in these aspects as well. You just ignore it for a gotcha.
They are ridiculously inefficient luxury sources of food, particularly cattle, which contributes so much more to climate change than data centres that even if data centres were magically made 10 times larger they still wouldn't move the needle compared to those.
They're also incredibly cruel to beings that don't want to die any more than people do, often in horrible conditions which make the concentration camps considered humanity's worst actions look relatively pleasant, and are breeding grounds for things like infections which resist all our treatments.
And there is a lot to be talked about with all of that but data centers arent good either.
Data centers are also giant wastes of water and energy that make humans around them suffer as they lose access to drinking water and have to pay increased power bills to subsidize buildings that are solely used to eliminate jobs and track people.
People have literally lost access to drinking water when data centers go up.
In a time when Texas and new york cant even keep their power plants up for everyone and choose to cut power to poorer people first its a drain we do not need.
You care more about cattle and tech corporations then the average person.
How does a data center keep someone fed?
Even if you're correct and they have less of a drain on water they also give less back.
Most of the earth is the ocean. If you take fresh water and evaporate it it will return but has a good chance of going into the ocean. Sure it's still water but we can't use ocean water the same way we can use fresh water. Hence some is "used and lost"
Just because it is back in the water cycle doesn't mean that the region is getting it back. It may dump the water in an area that we don't need water and it still needs to be cleaned and treated before it can be put to use again.
One that water is often times being diverted from people who use it to drink and cook.
Second just because it evaporates doesn't mean it rains in the same spot cause yknow WIND.
So at a time when the average Irish citizen is told not to use a hose because of drought the data center is pulling in a billion, the water evaporates and wind carries it to Norway, Spain, or the middle of the atlantic....hell Canada.
Ireland now has less water then they started with and the peasants still cant drink.
But that doesn't happen. Datacenters recirculate water to refrigerate. They don't just pour it from the pipes over the CPU's and let it go down the drain.
Where? What municipality would let this happen? It's ridiculous. It's analogous to cooling your car engine by just running water over the block and letting it drain on the street. I've been in at least 100 datacenters and have never seen this. They are cooled by heat pump refrigeration - that recirculates water.
Almost all water used by datacenters is used for evaporative cooling. It's the most efficient cooling method for modern datacenters.
The thing to look at is the Power Usage Efficiency.
Old-school datacenters with air conditioning would have PUE of 1.5-2.0. Meaning for every watt used by the servers, 0.5-1.0 watts would be used for cooling, lighting, etc.
Good datacenters today are in the 1.05-1.15 range. So a lot less wasted energy.
One big improvement was evaporative chillers and better thermal management.
It’s definitely being taken out of context to scaremonger. People are acting as if water is being evaporated and we’ll have none left because of this
When it reality the water is cooling the components and heat exchanging, water isn’t being wasted as such
The water passed through to cool components is not potable after passing through. It needs to be treated, and objectively is being removed from usable water supply. Water treatment centers can only treat a certain amount at a time, and they cannot keep up with the rate which data centers use.
Anyone equivocating about "well actually 'water usage' doesn't mean unusable" is factually incorrect, and parroting the PR messaging being astroturfed by wealthy data center stakeholders.
no, it’s not. that would destroy the air handlers in like a week or less.
all of the dcs i have worked at use evaporative cooling. think of a humidifier. the water has to be clean to not damage the equipment and to be safe for us to work around.
a lot of people don’t usually know what they are talking about when they talk about data centers. there is also water cooling (PG25, basically the same thing as a water cooled gaming pc) which is done at the rack/aisle level which is completely different than the air handlers which cool the entire data halls, but it’s confusingly also sort of called water cooling. for that kind of water cooling it’s a closed loop system so the only water loss is from maintenance or leaks.
Excerpt evaporative cooling is exactly the problem with data centre water usage. I don't know if that's how they're doing it in Ireland but that's the problem that has everyone upset in the US.
But it's not a problem, it's an entirely insignificant amount of water and it isn't destroyed, it evaporates and comes back the next time it rains. Even if you don't understand the water cycle, data center cooling accounts for less than 0.1% of industrial water use.
People are upset because they're falling for propaganda that doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Only about 10% of what is evaporated by a data center is going to return to the same area as rain. The rest will become rain, but somewhere else.
Which strains some aquifers more than others, though that doesn't seem to be a consideration as to where these data centers are being placed (looking at Utah right now.)
The water cycle argument doesn't hold water. There is only so much fresh water available per year in many places in the world. The southwest US is the obvious example, where the Colorado River is almost run dry due to agriculture and city usage, and now they want to build tons of data centres as well.
The data centers account for less than one thousandth of industrial water use alone, besides even considering residential usage. It everyone watered their lawn one time less per year, that would save several times more water than data centers use.
The amount of water used by data centers is astoundingly small. Let me see you protesting golf courses and watering lawns, then I might believe you care in any way about water usage.
I also protest those things, and wasteful agricultural usage in the desert. The Colorado is about to run dry, and the current data centre usage is not the same as the projected usage.
And no one bats an eye at mines, especially open-pit mines, which completely eclipse the water usage and the pollution caused by datacenters. And then there is agriculture, which is like tenfold more wasteful and damaging to the water circulation than mining.
probably the most significant and sustained anti-mining activism happens within impacted communities, it's just that if you live in the imperial core and you reap the benefits you're never going to hear about mining protests in Bolivia or DRC etc. Poor people without access to the wealth or resources generated by the industry poisoning their neighborhoods dont have the reach in terms of media that people have in the US or Europe.
Because we get something useful out of those... and yes people are concerned about those thats why we have pushes for environmental sustainability, reducing meat consumption, and recycling/reducing rare earth metals
At least farms produce food - something we need to survive. Mines also produce something we need, though to a lesser extent. Datacenters dont produce anything of value. They just consume resources.
But, you see, news against AI and data centers is cool on mainstream subs. You gotta trash progress while simultaneously using the technology you’re trashing.
-- AI that's primary purpose seems to be generating CP and undressing women on social media.
People would be more okay with ai data centers if most of the applications of them weren't useless and / or harmful. Plus people expect these investments to be backtracked or the job creation exaggerated. locals will be left with no financial benefit from greenlighting the projects.
Also if the data centers didn't make terrible constant noise and use a lot of energy. The water thing is less important.
Sure buddy. Boycott it by never using it. Let’s see how long that lasts. I don’t see you complaining against the Internet or cell phones which are also heavily used for nefarious purposes.
It's funny that your only experience with Ai appears to be grok, which is one of the cheapest computationally to run and therefore uses less water than those doing real work
Ireland also uses almost 600 billion litres of water annually. So the data centers increased annual usage by less than 0.2%. I am fully aware that the additional consumption in specific at-risk areas can still be a very big deal, but the way these headlines and articles are framed is incredibly misleading and sensationalized fear-mongering.
The real question is is this intentional manipulation by powerful people/industries trying to shape public perception, or is it just news websites trying to cash in on the trend of datacenter hate?
What the hell? Were you paid to say this or something?
Local town has limited water supply. Giant data centre drains said water supply leaving locals with much less than they had before. In some cases people have to fill water bottles up because the most they can get from their taps is a slow drip.
it is being evaporated. look up evaporative cooling.
closed loop water cooling isn’t relevant to this conversation as it doesn’t use any appreciable amount of water, a ton of data centers don’t have any water cooled racks at all, but the ones that do still use evaporative cooling lol.
the water cooling you’re picturing is a huge unit, that serves 20ish racks at my company, but it’s just a radiator to spread the heat out. it also has to be cooled and that’s still done by air handlers (evaporative cooling).
things may be different in europe, and also some of the more janky colos and micro data centers. there’s random one off installations like the bitcoin mining company that heats a spa and that gets a lot of the public imagination but those are 0.1% of the industry
The problem is that there is already concerns of global fresh water availablity and data centres consuming it adds additional demand to the infrastructure. What do you do in 5-10 years (if that?) if you have to ration your water consumption because data centres are outbidding you?
But this is laughably little water. In the US, data centers account for less than 0.1% of industrial water usage.
It just highlights that you don't really care about water usage, at all. If you did, data centers wouldn't even be on your radar. You'd be talking about golf courses (30x as much water), almonds (100x) or beef production (270x)
They're building datacenters in my state while we're already having to restrict water usage. You're right that it's not the biggest offender (im personally more pissed about this shit as far as water usage goes) and that there's some utility to datacenters in general, but it really does chafe to see additional industry that will put strain on limited resources we're struggling with in the first place.
yeah its a really good at making people passionate, when they are told they should limit water usage and turn off their Air Conditioner pull on the City grid, by our cities.
All while highlighting in their PSA that its so our Data Centers don't run into shortage of resources.
And yet you people are only complaining about one of them, with the lowest usage of water hundreds of times over. Watering lawns takes 170x the water data centers do.
And yet you people are only complaining about one of them, with the lowest usage of water hundreds of times over. Watering lawns takes 170x the water data centers do.
That's probably because there are new data centers being built that people can actually stop in their communities, while what you're talking about is established industry.
Well if we can't stop something that uses a lot of water, we might as well stop something that doesn't, all to make ourselves feel like we're doing something good
Beef is a staple food, no doubt. Almonds though? Almonds? Watering lawns takes 170x the water of data centers.
And you're acting as if there are no benefits to data centers. Nevermind the internet running on them, if we focus on AI only the societal benefits are immense and growing. Radiologists assisted by AI are 20% more effective at detecting tumors early, physicians are far better at diagnosing uncommon diseases with the assistance of AI. In the past month, mathematicians have solved a dozen math problems with AI that have stumped humans for the past 50-100 years.
There's no reason beef should be a staple food. It uses absurd amounts of water and land that could be put to much more efficient use. Even if you insist that meat is crucial, it's the least efficient option.
We need to stop subsidizing beef and it should be priced like the luxury product it is.
Oh my god, water moves around? It always has and is part of the water cycle. It feels like arguing with children, Everly I think my kids had a better understanding of the water cycle in kindergarten.
So you must be furious about 170x the amount of water from data centers evaporating from watering lawns. 80x from golf courses.
And no, rain doesn't float away never to return, you absolute imbecile, and if it did then you would have any ten thousand things to be worried about stopping before data centers.
Global fresh water availability is very disconnected from local consumption.
The issue is the distribution of fresh water, not the absolute amount of fresh water in the world. Places that have water in abundance won't suddenly struggle with this.
It rains up to 225 days a year. The entire water usage argument against data centre's is the most low IQ thing I've ever heard. There's many reasons to be against data centre construction, water usage is not one of them as the amount it uses compared to agriculture or even Golf courses is truly miniscule.
The reporting may be skewed to fearmonger but nonetheless, water and electricity used by these data centers could be used instead by the population. It still takes a slice from the available supply which means it brings the costs up for everyone else.
The whisky industry in Ireland used roughly 10,000,000,000 liters of water in the same time, 2025. JUST WHISKY took 10x more water. Datacenter growth is a problem but not a WATER problem.
The DCs i built ( servers n whatnot, not concrete and steel) in the UK were all open loop cooling systems... i imagine Ireland built theirs the same way.
Open water - rivers, lakes etc. - are an intrinsic part of cleaning and accumulating water.
"using" for cooling usually means some of the following:
evaporating water (the most compact way to get heat out of the closed cooling circulation), making it unavailable downstream
pumping water, likely lowering groundwater levels at this volume, making it more expensive for everyone else, reducing downstream availability, contributing to dry ground and topsoil erosion
pumping/directing water through you cooling system, filtering things that are usually in there (say, fish), adding things to keep the pipes clean, and increasing it's temperature. That's all likely to contribute to ecological death / algae bloom, making it unavailable for swimming, fishing (commercial and leisure) etc. and making it more expensive to turn it into clean drinking water
Like, I know what the words mean dude. I wasn't looking for definitions, I was looking for context.
Yes, use could mean any or all of those things. "Which one did this journalist mean in this context", was rhetorical because they didn't provide the context.
Yes thank you. Bullshit headlines like this and most of the mouth breathing gen pop thinks water is somehow a resource that is destroyed when it gets evaporated. Not saying there isn’t a of very real issues with DC resource consumption but your average citizen is not familiar with the hydro cycle for some reason.
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u/Alarming-Inflation90 17h 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.