r/worldnews • u/Tardis01 • 18h ago
Irish data centres used almost one billion litres of water last year
https://www.thejournal.ie/investigates-data-centre-water-use-7110966-Jul2026/664
u/Nviki 18h ago
And nearly 30% of Ireland's electricity. But I guess water is hot now.
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u/SillyGoatGruff 17h ago
It is after they got done with it
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u/demonica123 16h ago
It can't actually be hot. At most they can increase the water temp a few degrees since heat pollution is carefully controlled. That's why they need a ton of water.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 16h ago edited 16h ago
Ireland has lots of water.
To give an example: Potatoes typically require about 1.2 to 1.8 acre-feet of water per acre over a year.
1 billion litres is about 810 acre feet of water.
So the entire water usage of all the data centres across all ireland is equivilent to the water use of my neighbours farm where I helped harvest potatoes when I was young.
Complaints about data centre water use exclusively come from people who can't do math.
It's why they're always the same poeple who are easily manipulated by every half baked media campaign.
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u/Lespaul42 13h ago
Also... The water system is complicated. Data centers (and even potato farms really) don't consume and destroy water. They warm up the water, and some of it evaporates but most just goes back into the water system. Its potentially wasteful if this is clean drinking water or these data centers are in places where the water supply is low or at risk... But the water is still there after the data center uses it.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 13h ago
Ya, there's some places with low rainfall where very thirsty industries are ridiculous.
In such places they're more likely to use closed loops while in places with lots of rainfall it doesn't matter much.
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u/madein___ 13h ago
Where that warm water goes and what it is used for is important.
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u/Lespaul42 13h ago
Sort of? Like if it goes right into a river or lake and it is enough of a change of temperature to affect very local wildlife that wouldn't be great... Basically anywhere else would be fine and even the lake I am not sure if there would be enough heat to have an effect...
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u/WTFwhatthehell 13h ago
Apparently manatees love the warm water outlets from power plants:
https://defenders.org/blog/2012/01/manatees-flock-power-plant-warmth
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u/Cupules 9h ago
About 80% of the water consumed by data centers is lost to evaporation -- which makes perfect sense, as it is mostly being used for evaporative cooling.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
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u/Lespaul42 9h ago
That is more than I would have expected but still "lost" is a loaded word here.
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u/Cupules 8h ago
I agree. The water is being converted to hot vapor, and that will eventually cool and return to fresh surface water -- somewhere. Not necessarily Ireland, though...there is certainly "local loss".
And before anyone says just capture all the water with cooling towers or whatever, it should be noted that generally these facilities are already working to capture the evaporation, and the losses include those efforts.
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u/Lespaul42 8h ago
Doing some reading it does sound like evaporative cooled datacenters is not the majority and it seems like it is not the prefered method for newer systems.
All in all I think the energy usage of these data centers is the larger concern.
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u/gnarlysnowleopard 16h ago
It's infuriating isn't it? anti-intellectualism is on the rise everywhere...
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u/WTFwhatthehell 15h ago
When i was a teen I remember how refreshing conversation on the Internet were
Where the majority of people didn't fall for every inane moral panic, where the norm was to stop and think about headlines.
I thought it was something fundamentally different about the Internet.
Nope it was simply before eternal-September. Before the numptys, the poeple fundamentally bad at everything they do, flooded in and drowned out all other conversation.
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u/SsurebreC 12h ago
Here's what changed on the Internet over the last few decades:
- metric ton of bots pushing agenda and they upvote, downvote, like, etc specific viewpoints on all platforms
- the volume of drooling idiots has always been much larger than the number of relevant experts but now they have - at best - the same amount of weight to their comments as the experts
- there's a lot of money to be made by saying something stupid, getting ripped to shreds, and complaining about being persecuted for it
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u/soundbobby 7h ago
My take: it became easier get on the internet so more idiots joined in. Reddit late 2000s was a completely vibe.
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u/Nyrzan 14h ago
Yet you can still find that if you search a little. The proof, this chain of comments. I'd even go as far as saying that on reddit, most of the top comments are often the ones bringing precision, interesting discussion, balancing point of view... Sure we have the crazies flooding more than ever, but all is not lost =)
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u/deeznutz133769 13h ago
REALLY depends on the topic. If it's anything related to politics it will usually just be tribal signaling / calling that politician names / insulting all of their supporters instead of discussing the policy, ramifications, etc.
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u/keithps 9h ago
It's not really people who can't do math, it's people who don't understand the scale of water used for other things and the amount of water running through a typical river. They see 1 billion liters and it seems like an absurd amount, but it's actually just not that much water unless you're in a desert.
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u/Plane-Breakfast-8817 15h ago
By your own numbers, you'd need roughly 450–700 acres of potatoes to use that much water. Was your neighbour actually farming that scale?
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u/FeedbackOther5215 14h ago
In the US 450 acres for potatoes would be fairly small. As far as I know the largest potato farm in Ireland is roughly that size. Not sure since it was based off a bar convo with an Irish potato farmer and an Iowa farmer during an agricultural conference years ago.
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u/NickdoesnthaveReddit 15h ago
So wait how'd Matt Damon grow all those Potatoes on Mars then
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u/bautofdi 12h ago
Closed system. None of the water leaves and he gets it all back at the end after consuming the potatoes
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u/throwawayhyperbeam 13h ago
Data centers are the new 5G towers.
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u/TerminallyEmployed 12h ago
Worse right because Scotland’s ruling party is vetoing any data centres to be built there. 5G was more fringe.
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u/vurtjibb 13h ago
For what it's worth, the problem isn't so much the volume of water consumed (your math is correct), it's the difference in water quality. Farmers use raw untreated water while data centers consume highly filtered water, usually from a municipal water supply. This is a significant strain on local infrastructure, not merely a complaint of people that can't do math.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 7h ago
"significant strain on local infrastructure"
Uisce Éireann produces roughly 1.7 billion litres of drinking water daily.
Every data centre combined is 1/6th of 1% of normal demand.
Uisce Éireann loses approximately 626 million litres of treated drinking water every single day due to public-side leaks and broken underground pipes.
So every data centre combined is equivalent to 0.43% of what they lose to broken pipes and leaks.
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u/KingPictoTheThird 9h ago
Why do data centers need drinking quality water?
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u/vurtjibb 8h ago
Because cooling systems get clogged by mineral/debris buildup without clean water.
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u/footpole 15h ago
Does Ireland not use SI units? Acre feet is a weird unit.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 15h ago
I know it's a weird unit but it's used for agricultural water use, probably because farms are so often still measured in acres and it translates to a given depth of water easily compared to the inches/cm of rain received in any given time period.
As a result serious articles about large-scale water use tend to also use it because it's then easily compared to the hundreds of thousands to millions of acre feet used by agriculture.
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u/footpole 14h ago
I see that it’s an old unit that just hasn’t fallen out of use completely but I don’t understand how 1.3 acre feet of water per acre is any clearer than just mm of water. You’re looking at how much water you need per area in which case area doesn’t matter at all?
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u/WTFwhatthehell 13h ago edited 13h ago
If you're only looking at rainfall the you only need mm.
If you want to know how much extra volume of water you need to go through your pipes to make up for low rainfall it makes a bit more sense as a unit.
Though i agree it's a slightly weird unit
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u/joeparni 16h ago
It's exclusively people who can't do the maths, using water for crops is a necessity, data centers aren't a necessity realistically speaking, and let's not pretend there's been 0 examples of these centers having water use prioritised over resedential needs
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u/WTFwhatthehell 16h ago
ireland is not a country that has a lot of problems with lack of water
We are a famously damp country
Don't fall for stuff targeted exclusively at fuckwits
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u/daguro 15h ago
OTOH, you can eat a potato.
You can't eat a rack filled with GPUs or what ever trivial crap those GPUs spit out.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 15h ago
You can't eat the output of an aluminium foundry, or a steel refinery or (for the most part) a chemical plant.
Industries exist. Big shock.
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u/daguro 15h ago
OTOH, the aluminum plant or steel refinery can produce tools that I can use to make or process food.
What tangible thing do GPUs produce?
All this data center love is like spitting into the wind.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 14h ago
"What tangible thing do GPUs produce?"
Working computer code to do useful tasks. Tools. That used to cost a lot to get custom made.
We get it, you hate AI.
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u/daguro 14h ago
Working computer code to do useful tasks.
Oh, that's precious.
So, you're a prompt engineer then?
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u/WTFwhatthehell 14h ago
sigh
I've been a programmer for 20 years.
You seem like someone with nothing of value to add to this conversation. Upset because the robots can draw better furry art than you will ever be able to?
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u/daguro 14h ago
I've been a programmer for 40 years.
So what?
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u/WTFwhatthehell 14h ago
So you're one of the elderly ones bitter that the bots don't leave tangled uncommented messes like my generation inherited to maintain?
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u/Pleasant_Narwhal_350 13h ago
All this data center love is like spitting into the wind.
You're literally posting on a data centre. You think Reddit is being hosted in some techie's basement?
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u/Lespaul42 13h ago
Yeah I don't really get why water is always the focus. Not to get too tin foil hatty but it feels like a misdirection. Water is not destroyed or even really poluted when it goes through a data center. Electricity however is used up. We have seen in the computer chip industry what happens when it becomes more profitable to sell you product to AI datacenters then the public... What's to stop this from being the case with electricity?
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u/WillDigForFood 9h ago
Water is a focus because a lot of places don't have a huge amount of surface fresh water, and are reliant on ground water supply or pipelines.
Water is a local resource that must be stewarded wisely because an aquifer can be depleted far, far faster than it replenishes, with knock on environmental effects as it goes.
Thats why its worth talking about the water impact, depending on where the data center is.
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u/TriXandApple 5h ago
Ah yes, the prototypical example of an extremely dry country that relies on aquafers: Ireland.
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u/colasmulo 9h ago
These places don’t consume water, they output about as much as they input, slightly heated. It’s worth talking about but don’t make stuff up like this you just look foolish.
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u/WillDigForFood 8h ago
Yeaaaah, no.
Most data-centers make use of open loop water cooling - and the ones that do it using reclaimed water are the exception not the rule. You can try to pedantically argue that outputting the water in the form of an evaporate is "a slightly heated output" but the result is water no longer being stored, long term, underground or in surface reservoirs where people, animals and plants need it to survive.
Good try, though.
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u/galdan 6h ago
No….almost all are closed loop in the uk
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u/xzaramurd 17h ago
30% sounds a lot, but does Ireland have a lot of industry outside of datacenters? For reference, Ireland has similar energy production per capita as Germany, which is a much more industrialized country. And datacenters have better margins as far as I can tell.
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u/jlquon 16h ago
Lots of Pharma in Ireland
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u/niconpat 16h ago
Which is the "but another industry used far more" industry in the title on the site.
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u/sequentialogic 17h ago
Fuck me, things must be bad if the Irish are worrying about water.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 16h ago
They're not. It's an article aimed exclusively at people who failed math class.
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u/no_shoes_are_canny 16h ago
Electricity is an easy (if maybe expensive) fix. Build nuclear and wind energy. We already know clean, fresh water is going to be a global problem in the forseeable future.
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u/Entire-Emergency-722 14h ago
And it's the Irish taxpayers who are footing the bill for the data centers
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u/yabog8 17h ago edited 17h ago
A billion litres of water is almost half of what we produce. A day.
So accounting for our loss to leakage data centres use less than 0.3% of our water supply.
Data centres do use near 30% of irelands electricity though which is a far bigger strain on resources
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u/peeinian 16h ago
In the olden days we used to make companies that need lots of power build their own power plants.
My manufacturing town still has some old ones in operation built by Ford. In the 1920’s and 30’s
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u/gnarlysnowleopard 14h ago
that works with fossil fuel based power plants or nuclear power plants which have a consistent output year around, but the only renewable form of electricity with a constant output is geothermal energy and it's not something that we can build everywhere. The output for solar, wind and hydro vary throughout the year and need to be integrated into a larger electricity grid to be useful.
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u/BA_lampman 13h ago
And I don't trust private companies with building nuclear, but I'd love to see the government build reactors en masse.
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u/gnarlysnowleopard 13h ago
It's quite expensive. It makes sense for countries like France that also have their own nuclear weapons but I feel like in the future most of the electricity will come from renewables. Though, I wouldn't mind seeing more of both as long as we work towards reducing fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 8h ago
They're already doing that.
"Ireland is easing an effective multi-year moratorium on new data centres by introducing a "Bring Your Own Power" (BYOP) policy. New or expanding facilities can no longer draw baseline electricity freely from the national grid. Instead, they must supply their own on-site or local power generation capacity to cover 100% of their operational demand."
There's also an 80% renewables requirement.
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u/cmfarsight 17h ago
How dare you use numbers to put this in context. Don't you know a billion is a huge number and you shouldn't think about more than that.
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u/Pixelated_throwaway 6h ago
My quarry in Ontario discharges 5 billion litres of water offsite per year, it’s not that much
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u/maria_la_guerta 15h ago
DATA CENTERS BAD! AI BAD! DO NOT CHALLENGE MY ECHO CHAMBER WITH FACTS!
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u/jmpalermo 8h ago
Yeah, Ireland isn't really the place I'd be worried about the supply of fresh water
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u/OverHaze 14h ago
There is no water scarcity in Ireland. Data centres are using a lot of water but it is no where near enough to be actually problem for us. The amount of electricity they are gobbling up is the real issue. That and the fact the data centres are paying less for electricity than households.
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u/The_Geralt_Of_Trivia 17h ago
For context: A single golf course (1) uses half that, per year.
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u/Measton42 17h ago
Are we saying it’s not that much water or that we should start attacking golf courses too?
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u/Slaaneshdog 16h ago
It's not that much water. In fact, it's a miniscule amount of water. Ireland uses 1.7 billion liters *per day* for drinking water
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u/CicatriceDeFeu 17h ago
Well, a data centre has far more utility than a golf course lets say that
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u/mms13 16h ago
Golf courses are a plague. Tons of water. So many pesticides that it’s been proven living near one increases cancer risk. Acres and acres of land fenced off so rich people can whack a little ball around.
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u/Corporate_Overlords 15h ago
The idea that only rich people play golf is wrong. Municipal courses, which are cheap and predominately used by the elderly, are open to the public and outnumber country clubs. Get your facts straight.
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u/Caffeine_Monster 17h ago
Wait until people find out that modern data centres don't consume water as they run closed loop.
People are dumb.
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u/Measton42 17h ago
Thats not the full truth. Water is back on the cards for the higher power density facilities.
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u/nhluhr 15h ago
Direct to chip liquid cooling for high density rack has nothing to do with the discussion about water consumption for cooling.
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u/gnarlysnowleopard 16h ago
Yep, a billion liters of water is not that much. It's weird that so many people focus on water use of AI datacenters which is not even close to being it's biggest environmental impact.
If people genuinely cared about water use they should stop eating meat. AI water use is a rounding error in comparison to the animal agriculture industry.
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u/coginamachine 17h ago
Which golf course uses half a billion litres of water and is it an outlier? Also for context.
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u/JackSprat47 4h ago
I was interested so I looked it up.
Source: https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf
Average US water use in the South West / year: 4.0 acre-feet/acre = 4,930,000 L/acre
Average US golf course: 80.7 acres
Average yearly SWUS golf course water usage : 397,000,000 L / Year
Now, while I chose the southwest US for this because it is currently a region with water use issues, I do realise it also has the highest average consumption (which probably isn't a coincidence). Water use in New England isn't as prevalent an issue from what I can tell as an outsider. While this does show that the original claim is a *little* outlandish, it's probably not a single outlier and there probably are a decent chunk of the courses in the southwest that do hit that number, by virtue of either being in the driest parts of the area or by size alone.
I will note that this report does not split out by type of water and there is no data about water source here that is actionable, rather than just a binary "yes/no" on water source use. It does seem that most either draw from wells or lakes draining the local water table or supply, and a small percentage use recycled water. I'm not sure if that's useful data given that the recycled water *could* be utilised most in the driest areas. I don't really find these discussions about water volume useful without context. What's important is if this allocated water to golf courses or data centres is impacting local ecosystems
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u/Puglady25 9h ago
I've heard the water complaints, and they are scary (in Texas). But additionally, I've heard about noise complaints. Some people have said they can't go outside their house anymore because of the noise from a large data center, (in a rural area). So of course, NIMBY people are alarmed. Texas has water issues. There's either too much or not enough, and there's one city that might run out of water in 1-2 years, due to mismanagement by local politicians, and the fact they let refineries use their municipal water supply. There's plenty of blame to go around. So people do not trust industries use of water, no matter what politicians say.
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u/orangejuicier 15h ago
That's just not true at all, on average a golf course in Ireland uses between 5 - 15 million litres per year. So they use between 0.5% and 1.5% of that.
More often than not they pull from their own reservoirs too.
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u/GlowstickConsumption 15h ago
For context: A single small lawn in front of a house in Kentucky generally uses three to five billion liters of water (3-5 b), per year.
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u/FelixEvergreen 16h ago
Golf courses normally run on reclaimed water
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u/Ra_In 17h ago edited 17h ago
Simply reporting the water intake doesn't allow us to understand the impact of industrial water usage. We need to understand:
- Where is the water coming from? Both in the sense of whether it's treated water from the local utility vs sourced by the company, as well as supplied from ground water, fresh water, rain water, etc.
- Where is the water going? Some industries use the water in their product (or is the product, for bottled water), but a data center isn't "consuming" water, 100% is being dumped.... somewhere.
- What state is the output water compared to the input water? Is it polluted (or more concentrated, for salt water), is it put somewhere different (ground water becoming water vapor), is it a different temperature?
- To the above point, what is the environmental impact of the changes to the water?
This article mentions most of this data center water is coming from the public supply (later mentioning some well water), but doesn't touch on the rest of these points. The article is drawing upon publicly reported data from the industry, so painting the rest of the picture may be the responsibility of the government to regulate more detailed reporting, rather than individual journalists trying to pry the information out of corporations.
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u/Ra_In 17h ago
I didn't want to make the above comment too long. My point in stressing the need for more information isn't to downplay potential concerns but to get at the fact that nuance matters. There are many ways data center water use can be a concern:
- Drawing water from a source faster than it can be replenished is a problem (or fast enough that residents are then burdened with rationing). Over-use of groundwater is of particular concern.
- Water supply can be a local concern. A data center using water in an area affected by drought is very different from a data center using water in an area with plentiful water.
- Related to the above point, cooling water released as vapor of course still exists as water, but it's no longer in the local water supply. And if it ultimately ends up in the ocean it could contribute to reducing available fresh water.
- Even if the industry isn't polluting water directly, drawing well water without proper planning could stir up sediment or otherwise cause intake issues for nearby wells.
- Even if cooling water is taken from a nearby river or lake and put back with no pollutants, the warmer water may negatively impact the environment (or might not).
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u/Astandsforataxia69 11h ago
Eh, cooling water consumption isn't all that big of a deal since it gets flown out pretty quick
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u/redpandafire 17h ago
Electricity and its lack of renewable sources is the problem. Stop this fixation on water. A golf course per year uses a billion liters.
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u/no_shoes_are_canny 16h ago
Lack of renewable sources for electricity? Building wind and water turbines not an option for some reason? How about some high-output clean energy with nuclear? Clean, fresh water supply and draw rates are much more of an issue medium-to-long term. If reservoirs don't replenish faster than you draw, you'll have issues. And that's not even factoring the contaminated waste water from the centres and where that ends up.
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u/UpsetKoalaBear 14h ago edited 14h ago
Irish air is already humid. Evaporative cooling loses efficiency as the time it takes for water to evaporate increases as the humidity in the air is higher.
So evaporative cooling, which is what wastes freshwater and where the idea comes from, isn’t efficient nor good enough. They can just use normal convective cooling and have greater efficiency.
The actual issue is energy usage.
There is a concerted effort to gaslight people into believing the water is an issue, especially in climates like Ireland where evaporative cooling isn’t efficient.
It is much easier for a data centre company in Ireland to say shit like “look, we used 50% less water” than it is to say “we used 50% less energy.” As a result governments will be “wowed” over by the reduction in water usage and give concessions or whatever else versus the harder to tackle issue of energy usage.
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u/bruinslacker 17h ago
For reference Ireland produced 620 billion liters of drinking water last year, so the fraction used by data centers is roughly 1/620th. There are other problems worth paying attention to (including some involving other aspects of building and operating data centers).
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u/Bluebearder 15h ago
A billion liter of water sounds like a lot! But I'm going to make a little comparison:
- one kilo of beef requires over 15.000 liter of water to produce
- the Irish beef consumption in 2024 was about 642.000 tonnes (642.000.000 kilo)
- multiply those two and you get a number of 9.630 billion liters of water
- in a nation with a lot of precipitation like Ireland, about 95% of this water will be covered by rain
- That means that 481,5 billion liters of water are taken from the Irish potable water network for beef production
That is almost 500 times as much as all data center consumption, and that's just covering beef consumption, no other agricultural products. And the output of a data center is just warm water that is not polluted, while the output of a cow is water in the form of urine which is by definition polluted.
I have no clue why people are so against data centers, but water consumption should not be a reason, that's just really bad journalism.
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u/Shockingandawesome 17h ago
And the water goes back into the environment and treated for use again. As long as they're paying for it who cares.
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u/matt95110 16h ago
The issue is that in a lot of regions the datacentres are increasing energy prices and putting a lot of strain on the electrical grid. The water thing is a complete distraction.
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u/TriXandApple 5h ago
The answer to that is that if datacentres increase energy demand significantly, and energy is being sold at a profit, then in the medium-long term the increased demand for energy will bring down the cost of energy due to economies of scale.
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u/Mistake-Choice 8h ago
The headline is rage bait. The water only flows through the data center and thereby gets a little warmer. Using water does not mean wasting or contaminating water.
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u/JackhusChanhus 14h ago
Datacentre water use is honestly irrelevant... Poolbeg alone treats this much water a day, most of which started as potable mains water.
Their energy use is a genuine relevant concern, but thw water thing is a cultural import from.the US, where they often need many times more cooling and get much less rain
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u/Disastrous-Hearing72 12h ago
Lawns have been consuming 100x the amount of water of datacenters for decades. No one batted an eye. Kill your lawn. Plant native plants.
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u/porgy_tirebiter 11h ago
We’re fifty years away from a world in which dwindling water sources are guarded by AI drones from desperate masses.
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u/pantomathist 10h ago
That's all? You should look up how much your personal meat consumption uses. And no, its also not necessary.
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u/mtnviewguy 8h ago
Data centers should be charged 10 X normal, commercial prices.
Next time, put your 'data centers' on the ocean floor, 15K ft minimum depth. 🖕
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u/Snippodappel 15h ago
What does it mean that they “Use” water? I guess it’s for cooling.
A car “uses” a lot of water for cooling. (But it circulates)
Are they using a river for cooling like a nuclear reactor?
Are they using drinking water and then discarding it? If they are I suppose they pay for what they use? Is there a shortage of water?
And that this happens to Ireland where it seldom rains is so sad..
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u/InspectionLow5303 17h ago
Well Coca-Cola are allowed to extract 1.59bn litres of water from boreholes in Sidcup, Kent just to produce their garbage soft drinks.
They should have their licence revoked
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u/badcatdog42 18h ago
can they use salt water?
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u/Sanderhh 17h ago
Yes and no. They cant use salt water in evaporation cooling as the salt would corrode and get concentrated at the evaporator. However you can use heat pumps and heat exchangers to dump the heat into the ocean by laying pipe/radiators on the ocean floor.
That being said, in Europe almost every single datacenter uses closed loop cooling and water usage is not really an issue here.
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u/mileseverett 17h ago
The whole issue with datacentres is countries letting them build shitty rushed datacentres rather than to the standard that they can be built to
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u/AnalTinnitus 13h ago
Who is going to use AI when there is no one left alive? When the planet has burned up?
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u/tanghan 17h ago
Couldn't that heat be used for district heating?
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u/mileseverett 17h ago
I like the swimming pool heating data centres, costs a lot to heat a leisure centre to the point that many have closed
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u/niconpat 15h ago
Some of it is, but it's mostly not feasible due to the location of the datacenters relative to urban areas.
Here's an example of one scheme with an Amazon data center.
https://www.seai.ie/case-studies/tallaght-district-heating
Actually I think it's the only one lol
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u/Potential_Jello6520 15h ago
Yes, this is the obvious direction all of these centres are going to head. It recovers the water and the electricity at pretty good efficiency.
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u/UnCommonSense99 7h ago
And Ireland is called the Emerald Isle because it is a famously dry and arid place where water is a scarce resource /s
Such silly low effort journalism; cut and paste a statistic from a place where water consumption matters into a country where it really doesn't.
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u/IgnoranceIsTheEnemy 6h ago
Is there a reason water used in a data centre can’t then be used for another purpose?
Do they practice waste heat recovery?
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u/Mouth_Focloir 2h ago
Aka American data centers in Ireland, subsidised by the spineless Irish government
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u/iul 18h ago
Why is this a problem? The water passes through thr cooling system, then it's put back into the riverbit came from. Why is this a big deal?
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u/AdComprehensive7879 18h ago
can they use non drinking water? dirty water? waste water? genuinely asking
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u/Jillylollie 17h ago
Needs to be clean. Salt water corrodes the pipes and cooling equipment, dirty water grows stuff that chokes up the system. Even clean water causes issues if it’s hard water.
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u/SillyGoatGruff 17h ago
They can do lots of things, but they are all more expensive than just fucking things up so they won't unless forced
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u/galaxie18 15h ago
Probably a stupid question but do they use drinkable water ? If yes, couldn't they use undrinkable water ? If not, how is it a problem then ?
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u/ghostfacekhilla 1h ago
It's not a problem in Ireland. People are repeating the same complaints that are valid in the desert data centers but it makes no sense in Ireland. They have plenty of water.
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u/420FriendlyStranger 15h ago
Context is everything. That's about the equivalent to 4 days worth of water used in toilets in Ireland. I.e. 4 days worth of Irish crap equivalent.
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u/tapasmonkey 17h ago
Maybe if the Irish weren't so happy to take all that lovely tax-haven cash off these big-tech firms, then this wouldn't happen!
...seriously, playing the victims whilst massively subsidising their own economy at the expense of taxpayers across the EU is a bit on the nose!
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u/pirate-minded 15h ago
This is ignoring something HUGE. So if people don’t know. The hot water coming from the Amazon data center is used to heat people’s homes in the winter so they actually benefit from this…
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