I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.<p>The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
The disparity is that older data centers were for storing and serving data. They have a lot of bandwidth and storage, but aren't consuming much energy. Plus, they are there to provide quicker access to data, to provide a service to actual people.<p>New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At (<i>edit</i>) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.<p>Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.<p>These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.<p>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
Bright lighting is typically an artifact of the commercial property insurance policy in effect (namely, "Protective Safeguards"). It's asking you to demonstrate that you've done enough to create a barrier towards theft/loss.<p>It doesn't have to be really bright lighting but that's the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter's request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.
> With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers<p>I would have traded a data center for the dairies I lived near as a kid
<p><pre><code> > At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
</code></pre>
This is absolutely false. Those are the noise levels _inside_ the facilities. Noise attenuates by inverse-square law by distance. 90dB at 100 meters means 116dB at 5 meters distance... That's industrial alarms level of noise and would never fly in a residential area.
Extra zero. Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB. Even traditional server facilities can hit 80-90dB inside. I've read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn't fly.
<p><pre><code> > I've read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn't fly.
</code></pre>
So, first of all, I agree, that's still top much. But I think it's important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).<p>I absolutely believe that there's leftover noise around the facilities, too, specially low-frequency humming for electrical equipment, but I have yet to see _actual_ reporting demonstrating newer AI-centered datacenters produce even near the amount of noise OP was claiming.<p><pre><code> > Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB.
</code></pre>
That would mean 130dB of noise inside the facility, which sounds (pun intended) impossible to me, no matter how bad the acoustic planning is.<p>edit: just understood what "Extra zero" meant. The original comment before being edited said 100m and that's what I was quoting.
Apparently the noise emanates from massive fans for evaporative cooling on the roof. It's not coming from inside, which is why it carries so easily.
That makes sense, indeed. I've yet to see one of these new datacenters, but I've recently visited a hyperscaler's datacenter and most of the noise did seem to come from the outside ventilation.<p>I still heard almost nothing ~20m from it, but neither I (nor the company who built it) knew what kinds of workloads ran there and I suspect it was mostly traditional workloads.
as someone who has driven by Google data centers in Iowa and Facebook in Oregon, I can report you that I can’t hear anything from them from the roadside.
> So, first of all, I agree, that's still top much. But I think it's important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).<p>For someone who knows enough to point out that dB is logarithmic, you seemed to have neglected the fact that sound is inverse-square for distance? Unless these neighbors are _literally_ located 100m outside the data center?
Having worked in data center HVAC for a while I can confidently say you would only expect this noise from a pump room. Not even the air handlers or evaporators on the roof will be this loud
> At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss<p>Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable
do you have data on no new jobs/tax revenue?
Look at your local megascale datacenter on Google Maps satellite view. How many parking spots does it have? How many of those parking spots are occupied? Are you seeing hundreds of cars, or is it just the mandatory pair of security guards and <i>maybe</i> a remote hands technician or three?<p>The tax breaks are well-established in the media, see for example [0].
The taxable income is generated remotely from the location of the physical data centre.<p>That’s the root of the problem.<p>Even if the data centre raises billions in revenue and pays billions in taxes, that isn’t paid to any government entity close to where the building is.<p>The locals get replaced by machines, the revenue is pocketed far away.<p>It’s the equivalent of big mining companies “investing” into mine automation in some developing country. The locals <i>do not</i> benefit!
Yeah I am going to be honest if Google was a Dutch company they would bulldoze houses for them. They do it for ASML. But it is an American company and nobody likes them. The Netherlands, for all it's faults, is still too dignified to become a US colony.
I’m under the impression that most data centers have very few staff on site, almost zero.<p>Sure, some temporary jobs during construction, but I bet it’s nothing like a retail store or factory in operation…<p>As for taxable revenue, how does that help the community beyond property tax assessments?
You can’t collect tax revenue by giving away tax breaks worth almost the entirety of the taxes that would otherwise be collected. This is particularly common in the the gulf south - see Louisiana with Hyperion, which also has been an absolute disaster of a construction project (deaths, school can’t operate, all kinds of violations and damage) and is estimated to produce double digit jobs.
1.2kw over what time period?
Watts is already a unit of energy over time. (J/s)
Presumably on average over a year.<p>1.2kw is power, not energy (which would be kWh).
>For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW.<p>This is always kind of funny to me. How's an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?<p>How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?<p>What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed "data" center?<p>Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they'd like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.<p>Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can't decide if it's zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I'd be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can't be purely about power consumption.<p>>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?<p>What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because <i>you</i> aren't receiving the benefits is naive. No one's doing all this for free.<p>>If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?<p>You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We've been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?<p>You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?<p>And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.<p>Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you're not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.
>How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?<p>tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.<p>Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.<p>This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.<p>I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].<p>[0]<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1tes0rr/ai_data_centers_vs_factories_energy_and_water_use/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1tes0rr/ai_data_cen...</a><p>[1]<a href="https://global.honda/en/environment/initiatives/data/" rel="nofollow">https://global.honda/en/environment/initiatives/data/</a><p>[2]<a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_service/operations/pdfs/bringing_fabenergyefficiency.ashx" rel="nofollow">https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv...</a><p>[3]<a href="https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/health-care.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/health-care.p...</a><p>[4]<a href="https://electricityplans.com/how-much-electricity-does-an-apartment-use/" rel="nofollow">https://electricityplans.com/how-much-electricity-does-an-ap...</a><p>[5]<a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5058574/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5058574/</a> for water usage per square meter for hospitals<p>[6]<a href="https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2017/1131/ofr20171131.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2017/1131/ofr20171131.pdf</a> for water per person per year
My biggest problem with the data centers getting built around me are that they are building new natural gas power plants to power them, that will be greenhouse gases and decrease local air quality. I would be a lot more ok with it if they were using wind or solar. And maybe built it somewhere that didn't have a water shortage.
One being built near me is being built on public lands that are being sold off for datacenters. That's an additional pretty big negative (especially since the specific land was set apart as a wildlife habitat.)<p>I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
Google, at least, purchases 100% of its electricity from renewable sources [1]. This doesn't mean that they literally have renewables feeding directly into their datacenters at all times -- but for every kWh they consume, they are purchasing a kWh of renewable energy and adding it to the grid.<p>[1] <a href="https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f00cb38398a836e8c/download-1699a2e1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...</a>
I guess we can assume that the executives at the big AI companies don't believe in man made climate change.
Climate change is a lot less important when you are rich enough that it doesn't impact you personally, and when you don't care about what the world looks like after you die.<p>Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that's going to impact the company's profitability, but by then <i>your</i> stock options will have already vested - so that's a problem for someone else!
A(G)I is supposed to fix everything so nothing matters /s
By me they are converting cornfields to data center campuses. People hate it and are against it.<p>They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.<p>They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.
What's so great about cornfields? I can imagine hating it if they were deforesting the Amazon or something.
In the US, there's currently about 300x more land used by cornfields than by data centers.<p>Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.
I wonder what causes more harm? High fructose corn syrup or data centres?
It's almost like people want things built that they directly benefit from.
The current hysteria has little to do with datacenters and a lot to do with societal unrest about AI.
Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews. People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.<p>I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.
> <i>Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews.</i><p>Hasn't it been common knowledge for a while -- as in since well before the ai boom -- that those reviews are in practice mostly tools for obstructionism (I don't want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we'll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?<p>Is that's even half true, I don't think the "unforced" there really applies.
I like clean water to drink and air to breathe and a climate that isn’t on an increasingly hotter trajectory. Government should police corporations.
Then let’s change the laws and regulations.<p>In a society of laws you can’t just ignore the ones you don’t like, otherwise it undermines the entire system and suddenly the ones we all generally like/support aren’t being followed either.
Elon musk used his hundreds of billions of dollars to buy a social media platform to push a certain politician, bribed voters, and bought his way in to the government to fire everyone who would investigate his AI business.<p>You can't just "change laws" when the people building these data centers control the laws.
If they're truly there to just be crooked and corrupt then sure let's remove/reduce them openly and together.<p>Shady backroom deals are bad though, and selectively choosing to apply the rules to some and wave them for others isn't cool, in either direction.
>People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.<p>Others don't like technological progress to be reduced to the speed of bureaucracies who have no compelling incentive to be particularly efficient. Especially when the technology at hand might end up making quite a few of these bureaucracies much less staffed.
People dislike secretive bureaucrats more than they dislike slow or overstaffed ones.<p>Good luck with this attitude homie!
> <i>Good luck with this attitude homie!</i><p>This was the attitude these leaders took, though. It shouldn’t be downvoted simply for being wrong—it’s wrong in an interesting way.<p>Lots of folks in Silicon Valley thought they’d be cheered for bypassing bureaucracy. They were wrong and will pay dearly for it, possibly with their wealth and freedom. But it was a commonly-accepted attitude, in part driven by the Bay Area’s obscenely inept bureaucracies around power and building.
The thinking on display in this thread is something like,<p>"I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."
That can't be true. People obviously believe DCs have big local impact and it really does affect their power bills at least.<p>The global impact of AI doesn't change when you force DCs to build in another area.
It does if it slows the rate of data center builds and makes it progressively more difficult to site future data centers.
Kansas is a rural state that survives because of government agricultural subsidies as well as costly boondoggles such as ethanol that everyone else has to pay for. Complaining about government subsidies also going to other people is a bit rich.
The noise issues seem real, but don’t impact whole cities
Is it? Can you give me a link to a video that shows the issue in a straightforward manner?<p>Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.<p>I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).<p>I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
> societal unrest about AI<p>More generally, societal fatigue with tech culture overtaking everything, subsuming power from every other corner. Surveillance, the Zuck and Elon, COVID-19, immorality, Luigi Mangione and Elizabeth Holmes, a glut of cat videos and jackal-eared Wikipe-tans, delinquency of minors, 5G and everything else that technology can share some blame for, now focused on their visible manifestations.<p>The trouble is, once a danger becomes visible and ubiquitous, you’ve already lost. Fighting “A.I. Data Centres” is <i>literally</i> quixotic. If you look up “quixotic” in the Spanish Wikipedia, there is a photo of a chivalrous knight jousting with Nvidia’s CEO.
I live in northern va and I can tell you that histeria is about ballooning electric and other bills. vast majority of population is unfortunately “not there” in regards to any unrest about AI
Is there a well known reason that the US has ruled out building more power plants to meet the increasing demand? This seems like a weird complaint; if it is a problem that this industrial activity uses power, why not ban all industrial activity? Traditionally the response to more demand has been to build more supply.
1. Power plants take a long time to build and large capital investments, typically both public and private dollars. The power demand for the current hyperscaler datacenter trend is happening faster than supply can keep up, guaranteeing the current spike in prices.<p>2. Most heavy industrial users of power are running stable businesses that are often expected to offset some of the infrastructure costs themselves, making payments over time. Not only have many hyperscalers bent the rules to avoid doing this, even if they did do things the right way, much of the rapid investment is highly leveraged and if a bubble pops, taxpayers would be stuck with the infrastructure bill anyway.
Because the bubble will pop if they have to wait for power plants to be built.
Yup. From Fairfax. Very much what you said.
Not saying that increases in power bills aren't caused by ai datacenters at all, but I would like to remind people that there is currently a conflict going on that is impairing 5-50% of the worlds energy supply, which even if we used none of it, still would impact us (LNG exports) and getting people angry at tech is a good distraction for this time of year.<p>I think there's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
there is definitely more to the story when you are not personally affected by it deeply, then you have the luxury of looking at “deeper meanings” and shit. when you are, shit is quite simple and to the point. I attend every public hearing, community open house and submit shit online (<a href="https://www.loudoun.gov/datacenterstandards" rel="nofollow">https://www.loudoun.gov/datacenterstandards</a> if you live in the area) and it has absolutely nothing (and never will) to do with some conflict in some shithole place. it is 100% a local issue and it is not only if you have the luxury to not be personally affected by and which gives you additional luxury to dream up “global reasons…”
I mean, the latest ones are massive. Climate concerns aside, data centers don’t make great neighbors. They are never a net positive for the local community.
>They are never a net positive for the local community<p>Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.<p>The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.
The datacenter companies are forcing local governments to sign NDAs so they can't discuss the details with other areas, leading to them being pressured in to taking horrible deals that are a net negative for the area without.<p>They force these NDAs so people can't collaborate and see what a horrible deal they are getting.
> Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay.<p>We hear about their tax breaks though. Why don’t they get treated the same as other local businesses, and pay the same rates?
Two things can be true at the same time. Data centers are fundamentally extractive. They take resources in terms of space, electricity and water and make someone far away richer. They have almost no positive impact on their local communities beyond the initial build out jobs, and then after that they are huge windowless boxes that provide almost no jobs (and in the future, as they are more and more automated, they really will provide no jobs). And their negative impacts are already here, e.g. Maryland utility customers saw a huge increase in their electric bills due to data center build out.<p>At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology <i>that its most significant leaders</i> say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.<p>So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
There is no hysteria. We don't want to subsidise your lifestyle and to have pollution you produce dumped in our rural parts. We don't want it and it does not benefit us. Have all datacenters you want in your backyard.
I can’t actually understand the incapacity of the richest country on the world to build infrastructure. Why would people be fighting over resources like that when you can just build a hell lot of wind, solar and gas plants along with batteries and whatnot.<p>From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.<p>As a non American, I find this incomprehensible.
Because the US president considers solar and wind to be a woke scam, and no company wants to build legacy coal plants because it's a terrible investment at this point. So the datacenters are just building their own gas plants next to the buildings causing all of the noise and air pollution people are mad about.
Those reasons aren’t obvious to me. Why not just be transparent if that’s the case?
Google considers pretty much everything in hwops to be a trade secret. The point is to keep the specifics unknown as much as possible from competitors; the public at large's knowledge is just collateral damage in that fight.
What benefit could competitors get from that information?
The strategic advantage, by definition, is something you, as a company, don't know what it is. If you know, then people leaving your company take the information to competition and the it's not strategic nor advantage anymore.<p>So, given that you don't know what makes your company better then the competition, it's better to hide everything you can so you don't accidentally disclose useful information. God forbid competition discover your own strategic advantage before you do.
A friend accidentally told me not just how many servers Google was deploying for Bard, but what they were putting in them and the volume of the scale up.<p>A competitor with that information might have made a rush on a supply-constrained component market or negotiated longer term pricing agreements.
It doesn't even have to be competitors their suppliers would love to know the total amount of widgets that they'll be buying. That way they know if they're the single supplier
It tells them exactly how much they have to invest in hardware buildout to stay competitive with Google in terms of raw compute.<p>This is right up there with being able to predict a competitor's total manufacturing capacity for the next year because you have hard numbers on their raw material purchase.
The ability to improve their data centers, of course. Google is the company that launched data centers with commodity components.
And this one in particular is a high-ticket trade secret; it has been for decades, long before the AI push.<p>Power and water consumption number revelation goes <i>directly</i> to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything."<p>... whether this <i>should</i> be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
If they are so good at it, they should push to make that the bare minimum and get to hold all future datacenter permits.
This was more than a decade ago. Back then, the data center didn't even have public signage because Google was trying to be so secretive. Things have changed significantly since then and a lot of data is now published publicly.
<i>Very few</i> datacenters run by companies of any size, large or small, have signage.<p>Companies put signs on buildings so you can find them. Signs are important for retailers or offices where people need to find it. This isn't really the case for a data center. Data centers typically have a sign with simply the address of the building on it, so delivery drivers can find it. Any sort of a sign with branding is a waste of money at best, and a security liability at worst.<p>Even if you aren't worried about intentional security threats to your data center, you don't want the name of your company on it, because people will start showing up at the gate there instead of your primary business location.
Yep - better off redacting the great efficiencies we’re doing.
Did your datacenter consume 9GW?<p>I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.<p>The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
> Did your datacenter consume 9GW?<p>I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.<p><a href="https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-power-sources/" rel="nofollow">https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...</a><p><a href="https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption-guide/" rel="nofollow">https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...</a>
> I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.<p>The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]<p>Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.<p>But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.<p>1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-gw-utah-data-center-campus-approved" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...</a>
> But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use<p>Not even close to a true statement.<p>EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].<p>According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.<p>For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. Robert Moses dam in Niagara Falls does about 2,700MW.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/sep_sum/html/rank_es_capita.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...</a>
> 1GW of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi/Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.<p>I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.<p>This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).
If we printed electricity like China, this would not be an issue, we <i>can</i> have more electricity at lower prices when we're ready<p><a href="https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity-hits-1-28-tw-accounts-for-31-5-of-total-power-capacity/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity...</a>
>However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that Agate LLC is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.<p>The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.
I don’t think that 1MW is something older datacenters consumed. Unless you are talking about a single rack in a corporate server room.<p>It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24/7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.<p>Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.
You're confusing MW with MWh. Older DCs did indeed consume on the order of 1MW of continuous power, like the one at [0]. The 2012-dated DC at [1] has a redundant 22kW power feed per 42U rack, so that's ~500W per RU - which for most pre-AI servers was <i>plenty</i>.<p>With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delft/" rel="nofollow">https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delf...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/data-center-utrecht-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/dat...</a>
You are confusing MW with MWh and apparently kWh.<p>A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.<p>1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.<p>A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.
There were certainly 1GW DCs in the US 10+ years ago.
> But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.<p>Why can’t it be discussed?
> The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.<p>At a large enough scale, it doesn't matter how efficient you are - you're still causing a more damage than the region or the world can take.
There's also a lot of folks out there with no sense of scale getting "dihydrogen-monoxieded" by scaremongering tactics like measuring power consumption in number of atomic bombs.
Except that's not what you see people be up in arms about, or news reporting. Just like with a lot of other topics.<p>There being a grain of truth or a valid angle doesn't wash bullshit from being bullshit.
It is worth remembering that it heavily depends on cooling system involved.<p>Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude<p>But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north
I've been spending some time in Tasmania, Aus for the last few weeks and have been following the local debate regarding 3 data centres Firmus is planning on building here.<p>While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.<p>Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.<p>The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].<p>When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.<p>However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.<p>Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tasmaniancountry.com/newspaper/tasmanian-country/firmus-technologies-accidently-reveals-it-wanted-use-tasmanian" rel="nofollow">https://www.tasmaniancountry.com/newspaper/tasmanian-country...</a>
<i>> I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.</i><p>It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
Worth considering in the current climate. My impression a while ago is that the exact water and power usage of any large company's data center is seen as a trade secret of sorts; if a large company invested to become XX% efficient, it might not want competitors to know it hit a certain efficiency target.
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It’s already permitted and operating. Presumably they want the $XX million tax rebates, which haven’t yet been paid out according to this article. Maybe that’s the case in other places too.<p>Why not get people riled up over water under the bridge and not unpaid rebates? What can anybody do about it? Send the sheriff to lock out the facility?
They do! In great detail:<p><a href="https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f00cb38398a836e8c/download-1699a2e1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...</a><p>The data tables start on p. 90.
Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it's low) and people don't believe him.
Largely because of how many times it could have been stated prior, given it had been a talking point for some time, and the lack of actual evidence (him saying something is not often taken at face value…).<p>Of course, they'd like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won't get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.
Honestly, the water usage isn't the real issue - the electricity use during a climate crisis is. It's also a huge climate opportunity, because datacenter growth is basically gluing a giant pipe of financer money straight into datacenter and support buildout, and if we passed laws requiring the new electrical capacity be 100% renewable... They'd still spend the money, they're convinced this is <i>the</i> future so no cost is too high (an assertion I feel confident making because we're literally experimenting with putting datacenters in space right now).<p>Water use has <i>locally</i> been an issue in places where municipalities were taken advantage of and their local water supply management laws weren't set up to account for a giant consumer to just roll up and start pulling past replenishment rate. But there's nothing about datacenters that <i>demand</i> that be the case; those places were cheap to build in (and <i>why</i> they were cheap to build in should probably be its own graduate political theory thesis / series of fraud and mismanagement investigations and prosecutions).
That’s because he’s a known liar. Like he’s famous for his sociopathic lying even amongst sociopathic lying billionaires. Impressive almost.
That may be true, but I have a feeling that even a third party audit wouldn't appease you. If they confirm Sam's numbers, you'll claim that they were bribed. So how can we solve this problem? Can we trust government officials? Are there any non-biased organizations that could do the audit?
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Data centers tend to be higher security facilities for a reason. Publicizing any of their technical specs isn’t really beneficial, especially when any numbers that are provided will be dismissed unless even more information is provided to back them up.<p>Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
Absurd! every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.<p>If they are using over a certain percent of any public utility (and yes ALL utilities are public) the utility should force it to be disclosed.
How do you see all utilities as public? What if a commercial building has rooftop solar?
<i>> every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.</i><p>Correct. But they can't so easily without Google's (or other big tech companies) big legal departments to make challenging the excuses difficult.
How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?
The big hyperscalers always knew that eventually the tide would turn against them (for example when local towns noticed that the DCs didn't actually need very many locals to run the facilities).<p>They carefully hid things so they could expand for as long as possible, knowing that having the necessary footprint for services, cloud, and AI would be key to winning the race. When I worked at Google, our leaders were always "proud" they had built such a huge fleet (originally for search + ads but rapidly growing to a wide range of products and research) without competitors knowing just how large, because they figured eventually AWS and MSFT would realize they had to build out massively to handle the coming loads.<p>So they hide these things to stave off complaints for as long as possible.
It’s not high security if everyone is mandated to do it. Power consumption, energy sources, water usage for coolant, waste water treatment plan, etc.<p>I think the disinformation is people thinking that data centers directly use vast quantities of water. What happens is the power use stresses water supplies in local areas.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-ai-drought-water" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-a...</a>
Google has some custom hardware, so directly reporting it could be an issue.<p>Now that it has been, though…
That would not be good PR because a) it would be seen as flippant and b) no one would believe Google.<p>Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
Ok and? This wouldn’t be an issue if google et al would just share the numbers instead of hiding behind NDAs and whatever else.
Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something. Giving those people concrete numbers is not gonna change such misconceptions (and that's assuming they look at such numbers in reasonable relative terms in the first place).
The majority of current large data centers use open-loop evaporative water cooling which does in fact consume water.<p>Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.<p>This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.<p>Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961" rel="nofollow">https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...</a>
Seems easy enough to report multiple numbers and be clear on what water comes in (can even separate initial filling/construction from ongoing usage) vs what gets lost and what comes out as waste. I think people can understand this and it isn't a good enough reason to not share the numbers.
Fair point. But if I had initially learned that google was putting data centers in and it recycled water and it was a minor amount I would be more receptive than hearing that google is bullying communities and hiding details behind NDAs.
It is consumed because they evaporate it away and remove it from the local environment.<p>They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
Evaporated water stays in the water cycle though. It comes back down as rain, and returns to the water sources that were depleted (assuming these data centers are generally not using underground aquifers, which I think is true).
The issue for most (well, at least those who are informed and not just bandwagoning) is that it raises the prices of utilities, in which case it doesn't really matter that it stays in the water cycle. If your local municipal water authority has to expand operations to keep up with demand, that is going to incur capital costs which will either raise rates or require tax dollars.<p>While this water usage might be not a big deal in places with abundant water, it could be problematic in some areas of the US.
You can't control the water cycle over a datacenter and its water source, it is a global system.
> They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city<p>Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas fired steam turbine. And one such installation was proposed for this city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.<p>Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.
> Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something.<p>Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. If you noticeably distort the local economy then people are naturally going to want to know what resources you're consuming.<p><i>but trade secrets</i><p>I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
The irony is that it is unlikely datacenters would hit that "above a certain size"<p>The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
People do just that.
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Industrial use should never get to hide. It’s such impactful use so every aspect should be scrutinized.
You have some very motivated people with deep pockets who do not like negative press. Say anything negative and the downvotes will roll in.
> But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.<p>I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.
Google never wanted to share details about their datacenters because they thought (think?) their power efficiency was a competitive advantage. So it'd be lower than you expect.<p>Also, they didn't want you to be able to guesstimate how many machines / computing power they had, for similar reasons.
Right, they're so power efficient they don't want to tell the people around them how little water they consume or "not consume"?<p>People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say "No, actually we're not, here is the numbers", because Google doesn't want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I'm sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was "obvious" they couldn't divulge how little/much water the place uses.
Tbh this sounds perfectly normal to me. Companies often don't think it's worth defending themselves if theres no actual financial damage, and certainly don't want random employees to be doing it. It can be very frustrating, both for employees who want to defend their reputation and for the public who want the truth, but companies can be extremely conservative about chosing their public relations battles.
> <i>don't want to tell the people around them</i><p>It's probably more that they don't want to tell <i>competitors</i> anything they don't absolutely have to.
You can assume that any company at a large scale will not want to divulge any information unless absolutely necessary. Doesn't matter if you or I think that it might not need to be secret or might not be competitive. Unless there is both an internal push, a need and a sort of proof dat the information can be released, it will never happen. You'll usually find thing that are simplified or aggregated for PR and marketing, or things that are required for legal reasons, but everything else stays internal.
I worked at google as well.<p>They published a lot of less specific info (PUE numbers, water efficiency, etc)<p>They were very sensitive about any site specific numbers.
it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.
> it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.<p>It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.
LinkedIn CV says 8 Years working for google as a Data Center Facilities Technician, so. Yeah.<p>Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.
Along those lines just a reminder folks, China is installing about 1GW equivalent of Solar power per day [1]. Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries [2]. These are not zero-regulation, socialist wastelands.<p>All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that <i>we've chosen</i> to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?<p>[1]: <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-100-solar-panels-a-second-as-total-pv-capacity-tops-1-terawatt/" rel="nofollow">https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...</a><p>[2]:<a href="https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer" rel="nofollow">https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer</a>
Hmmm, which political party is famously against solar and renewables in general?
The same one that is paying for their support for data centers and is shifting as a response [1]. Like I said, if political capital is being spent shifting peoples' stances, how much of a waste is it to know we could move them on this and we chose not to. Generational fumble.<p>[1]: <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6121776-gop-worried-data-center-midterms/" rel="nofollow">https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6121776-gop-worried-data...</a>
> Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries<p>This is overstating things.<p>Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.<p>You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.<p>A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.<p>If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.
China are also building tons of coal plants.
What about water usage?
For most datacenters the actual largest source of water use is indirectly from power generation (coal, nat gas). Solar reduces that a lot also.
Funny how nobody asks the folks who build golf courses "what about water usage?"<p>hint: An individual 18-hole course uses between 300,000 to 1 million gallons per day
I think people actually do though? They are even sabotaged at times (has happened in Europe at least), to protest against their water usage.
Rather than talking in absolute numbers, ratios help relate human activities better, an example:<p><i>If</i> we can close 1 in 3 golf courses and have all the water we need for data centers - and then some - would that be acceptable to our society?<p>Do we desire so much golf that we'd prefer to stress our water systems instead?
I’ve brought this up
The water isn’t actually used. It is slightly warmed.
Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.<p>You understand, the water isn't used up? It's not even used up in agriculture. Even when you drink a glass of water, the water doesn't actually disappear, soon someone else will be drinking it. The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today. No need to panic about someone using water.<p>The only reason to be concerned is if someone is mixing the water with other chemicals at a rate faster than the natural filtration and then not paying for the treatment to purify the water again. But that is not an issue with data centers. Merely using water is a concern only for people who don't understand how matter is preserved, but a school physics book should dispel those concerns.
Sure the water is still somewhere, but its location is important for future use. US water reservoirs are at problematically low levels already.<p>> Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.<p>The linked article talks about >500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It's nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it's such a common thing to do then why isn't it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?
> It's not even used up in agriculture.<p>However, the source of the water can be "used up" faster than it can be replenished, such as in the case of some aquifers
That’s not entirely correct. Overall water is preserved but local sources of freshwater can be depleted or contaminated, which raises the cost of water.
> <i>The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today.</i><p>Nope. Plants turn water into oxygen and (the H part of) hydrocarbons, and animals turn those back into water. And after that, the result is <i>different</i> water than the cycle started with.
It’s not the water. It’s the electric usage, air and noise pollution from sanctioned (and often unsanctioned) diesel generators.<p>The concern is real and very much deserves the opprobrium voters are showing.
It's different issues in different places, and when built/operated by different companies. Global companies that put their name on the facility will be more careful of optics than a PE firm that hides behind shell companies.
The data centers in the article aren't ever running on generators.
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.<p>The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]<p>So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]<p>To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.<p>It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U.S._and_Canada" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U...</a>
[1]: <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/water/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/water/</a>
Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.<p>If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.<p>A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.<p>So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.<p>I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
That turns the focus to almonds and how insanely bad they are.<p>I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
No, it's just that people notice when they're being asked to concern themselves with numbers this far to the right of the decimal point. It's not just that almonds are bad. It's that they're vastly, heroically worse than data centers, so much so that optimizing water usage at data centers is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic.<p>If you <i>actually care</i> about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the talk about the water consumption is a red herring intentionally spread by the PR machines of these companies because it's it reframes the debate around an aspect of the issue that is ultimately irrelevant and distracts from ones that are more important like carbon emissions, pollution, electrical/gas price spikes due to induced scarcity and ultimately how these mega projects have little benefit for the people who will experience all the negative consequences of them.<p>Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.<p>That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure, our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things, and people collectively lacks the ability to think and talk about these things.<p>So the best we can do is inconsequential conversation about water usage.
What happens to the water used by data centers? Is it still clean, just warmed up?
Sorry if you think 280 household of water is not a lot and if the facts don't help your cause.<p>For a small locality it is a real amount of water. And if there's a draining reservoir, then that's _even more_ water being pulled out of a reservoir.<p>The almond discussion is tiring as well. We're not growing almonds in most of the world. The water in Montana isn't the water in Cali as well.<p>If the facts aren't on your side on a specific issue, at least have the courage to accept it.<p>> I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.<p>People protest golf course water usage. Water usage problems in Cali are not as big of a concern to people in Montana than water usage in Montana.<p>And of course there are people who think that the added buildout of data centers _for AI usage_ (people acting like "oh these data centers are just from everything", let's not kid ourselves what the source of the demand is) is a net negative. People don't think that about food.<p>Personally I think we shouldn't be setting up massive farms in a desert (and perhaps just figure out how to make society work in a way where during winter we accept having less fresh veggies available) either.<p>Data center defenders need to get better talking points, cuz they sound very silly (perhaps as silly as the arguments heard on the other side!)
Should I start running through the list of industries that use more water than datacenters?<p>Montana exports tons of petroleum products and beef. Should I illustrate how those industries also uses orders of magnitude more water than datacenters?<p>In fact, I would be impressed if you could come up with a single locale where a datacenter would be the primary water consumer. Even top 3 would be kind of impressive.<p>I'm not sure what you are trying to say other than "datacenters use water and I don't like it, and yeah those other industires in the area use 10-100x more, but like, I don't like datascneters so we need to focus on that"<p>I think the real snag is that average people have absolutely -zero- concept of how much water industry uses. Your local recycling plant washes all that dirty plastic you throw in the recycling to the tune of thousands of gallons an hour. And you're learning this right now for the first time in your life. But sure, datacenters running water through metal pipes, five alarm crisis here
My state's gasoline refineries use about ~13 million gallons of water each day. It's about .7 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline refined.
I don't know if you mean to be reinforcing that it's nothing or not
Remind me median income?
$87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill.<p>Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.<p>Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
Remind me who leaves 8 bath tub faucets running 24/7/365?
So a system to recirculate the same 24 gallons per minute would be more expensive than $100k per year for water?
Condensing the steam back into water would undo the cooling power, so yes. Massively less efficient. Negative efficiency, as required by thermodynamics.<p>Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
Apparently so
I live in a country of 5 million people and we lose 40 times that a year to leaks.
Read TFA, that is just the usage of the smallest data enter in NE, across NE their water usage is ~50x that, and that’s just Nebraska, not exactly a hub for data centers
Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?
Lincoln data center "comes online" in 2026 (info from Google). These are early, non-mature operating numbers. I'm disappointed this wasn't made more clear in the story and, of course, most of the comments here don't understand the context.
Transparency is not the same thing as honesty.<p>Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.<p>Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.<p>Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.
You're assuming they're hiding the numbers because they think they seem bad in the discussions about data centers using too much water. The cover up is likely motivated much differently, and I would bet that doesn't really care about people complaining about waiter usage.
I don't understand your question. I'm commenting on the figures we know from this report. I don't have to work out the motives behind them to evaluate whether they're material (they are not).
Because the marketing teams don't do numbers and it's a high risk strategy
Google prints the water usage of each of their sites in their annual report. What other industry is more transparent about water usage?
They are, and people just accuse them of lying!<p>Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.
Please elucidate if I'm wrong, but, isn't the problem the distribution of the water and not the amount? If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.<p>I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
> <i>If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.</i><p>Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because <i>those issues are worked out in advance</i>.<p>Nobody who is responsible for managing water is <i>surprised</i> by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
This feels like an important point! People comparing to leaks (or other distributed examples that aggregate similarly) are not thinking about how the amount of water used in a single location changes the scale.
Did you stop reading the article at the first data center?
"More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports _547.88 megagallons_ for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption." (emphasis mine)
“Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion… reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption”.<p>I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.
It looks to me like there's two Google DCs with different LLCs?<p>> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.<p>> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.<p>> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.<p>> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.
i'm guessing it means that when datacenter gets too hot (maybe load, maybe climate, or maybe a combination), they may use more evaporative or other methods to help cool. e.g. a turbo mode for cooling that uses more water, but isn't required at all times.
Yeah, though it says right below that 6 data centers report using 750MG, which is weird cause each of them would average 125MG, so 10 times more than the 13MG reported above.<p>At what point does it become significant? I’d think 200 olympic swimming pool worth of water taken out of the local ecology would have some impact. I guess it depends on the region.<p>The article doesnt say though if all the water ends up evaporated.
Perhaps not a meaningful amount at a national/worldwide scale. However, an individual datacentre consuming that amount at a local/regional scale could be more impactful.
What I now wonder is why the hell they're trying to hide it then. If the numbers are strongly on your side, why hide them?!
Because nobody reasonable believes water use is any issue, but these numbers are proxy for the usual stuff companies don't disclose for usual reasons (ones that rhyme with "competition" and "stock market")?
We have perfectly good reasons to hide behind shell companies and ndas! Anyone who disagrees is a hater!
Because hedge funds are going to use those numbers to get better estimates of their business and revenues and use that in their forecasting which means Google loses in the stock market.
Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.
Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.
No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.
I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.
>they are not meaningful users of water.<p>How so? <i>NOT COUNTING</i> leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.<p>See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities
<a href="https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commercial-bmp-watersenseatwork_section5.3_commercialpoolsandspas.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...</a>
Yes. GP is literally saying that 1-2 million gallons of water is a pretty small number not meaningful to anything at scale.<p>It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.
A single average sized fully occupied apartment building uses 8-13 million gallons per year on average.<p>A typical single family home uses over 100K gallons.
Please compare 1 million gallons to the 1 quadrillion gallons in the aquifer, or the 31 trillion that falls from sky each year in Nebraska and get back to me.
Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).<p>So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.
Real estate is almost always "hidden" behind an LLC or REIT, as recommended as common practice by CPAs and attorneys.<p>It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.
Literally every movie ever made was made by an LLC created specifically to make that movie. This is not some nefarious thing. It’s common business practice in any number of industries
That’s more of a convenient way to distribute and isolate risks than it is anything nefarious.
You see, that is nefarious. Not taking responsibility is nefarious.
Or to shift blame and hide wrongdoing.
Do I understand the logic here to be "if there's an LLC with an obscure name involved, it must be using too much water"?
To me, the logic is companies don’t put their brand on activities that contribute to tragedies of the commons.<p>Alphabet could have named the company “google data center 083941, llc.”<p>But Alphabet deliberately obfuscated its control of the facility.
No, it’s that if there’s nothing to hide, then they shouldn’t jump through so many hoops to avoid basic industrial reporting requirements.<p>It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.<p>If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.
Not a meaningful amount of water in early reporting from a non-mature operating state. Why are we drawing any conclusions at this point?
As other commenters have pointed out, 13.3 million gallons = ~40.8 acre-feet and this being Nebraska, the obvious comparison is agriculture (Corn and Soybeans being the main crop).<p>The average Nebraska farm is 989 acers[1] as of 2022 and uses roughly ~1,200 acre-feet of water (or roughly 390 million gallons) per year[2]. So a single average Nebraska farm uses roughly 30 times the water the Lincoln data center uses per year. There are 44,479 farms/ranches covering 44 million acres, which accounts for over 90% of the state's total land area.<p>Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming (even in a state like Nebraska that gets a large amount of rainfall compared to Central or Southern California). I hope that the current data center environmental focus continues to shed light on our industrial water and electrical usage.<p>[1]<a href="http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-nebraska-agriculture-facts/" rel="nofollow">http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-...</a>
[2]<a href="https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-management-data-now-available/" rel="nofollow">https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-man...</a>
This article seems to focus on one of the less interesting in terms of water usage data centers (for most of us non-locals) because the paper is from Lincoln and that data center is in Lincoln.<p>The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon.<p>Seemingly much better article (pictures, better comparisons): <a href="https://flatwaterfreepress.org/data-centers-can-guzzle-serious-water-as-some-nebraskans-worry-tech-giants-seek-solutions/" rel="nofollow">https://flatwaterfreepress.org/data-centers-can-guzzle-serio...</a><p>Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one.<p><i>Update:</i> in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient. That would be a nice thing for some journalist to research...<p><i>Update 2:</i> it seems that Google uses water-evaporation cooling in regions that they don't consider water-stressed. Here's a not-so-great reference (scroll down if the text-fragment link doesn't work): <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/06/03/google-pushes-water-standards-data-center-backlash#:~:text=The%20company%20argues%20evaporative%20cooling%20can%20be%20the%20better%20environmental%20choice%20in%20places%20where%20water%20supplies%20aren%27t%20under%20stress%20because%20it%20reduces%20electricity%20demand" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2026/06/03/google-pushes-water-standar...</a>
I lived in a town that had two lakes. No water problems for decades. Two year drought brought the lakes down about 30 feet each, so it looked a little bit like Lake Mead. Water rationing in the second year, maybe the tail end of the first, I no longer recall. Brown lawns everywhere<p>The city finally got permission from the state and the Army Corps to divert water from a nearby river, but only when the river was at a relatively high rate of flow. So functionally what happened was that once the drought broke they were able to refill the lakes faster, and top them up during storms in wet/dry cycles.<p>Every place is going to have higher and higher odds of becoming water-stressed over the next three decades. Some places more than others. Will the data centers shut down in those situations?<p>You might think that using 5% of the municipal water supply isn't much but it's a significant fraction of what austerity measures would be able to conserve to retain water through a prolonged drought. In that situation holding water a few extra months until the rains return is the goal.
So the big one uses the same amount of water per year that Lincoln city uses in 10 days?
Redaction should be a tested security operation, not a visual formatting step. If copy-and-paste, a PDF parser, or OCR can recover the content, the document was never redacted.
People shouldn't be latching onto side effect costs of AI data centers like water or energy use, it seems like an abstraction layer above the core complaint. If we don't want AI, or LLMs, or data centers that should be the complaint. Once it is abstracted to water use or similar it opens the door for data to show the actual water use is comparatively small.<p>Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
I agree with your first point but not the analogy. Climate change is causally related to carbon emissions; if we had 100% carbon-free energy, there would be no concern with waste beyond inefficiency. Data centers can increase electricity/water prices, but it's not a linear relationship like climate change. Prices can stay constant or even go down if we increase supply by building more infrastructure, or decrease demand by limiting how much non-residential buildings can pull from the network. But yes, the conversation about utilities is ultimately more of a proxy for political frustration. If data centers became 10x more efficient, the same people would find something new to complain about because they're fundamentally against the technology itself.
I'm not actually sure where you land on climate change being causally linked.<p>Don't get me wrong, I think carbon emissions matter but primarily because we should simply do better if we can. But I've never found a study that proves causation, at best its correlation shown primarily through modeling.<p>That doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it does mean that reducing carbon specifically isn't guaranteed to reduce or reverse climate change.<p>Surely you must agree thst such a complex system as the global climate can't be driven by a single factor, or a single element on the periodic table.
When laws are unjust, resistance is duty. And you usually have to come at them sideways, to delay while the wheels of justice slowly grind toward repeal.<p>Legislation gets easier once public opinion has turned against an idea or a company. But it takes a while to build that up.
I think I may agree with you here, but in this context can't you add more details? Your comment here is pretty high level and not specific to this topic or how we might go about trying to handle it.
Which laws are unjust in this context?
The concern around data centers looks a lot like a moral panic. They've been around for decades and nobody cared before the backlash against AI. They're like any other industrial building, subject to the same resource constraints and zoning laws. I suspect if the owners of that land built a steel mill, a semiconductor fab, or anything other than a data center with similar power and water requirements, nobody would care.
You are overlooking scale and pace. No one is trying to build more steel mills in the next 3 or 4 years than have been built over the entire history of the steel mill industry so far, with each new steel mill using around an order of magnitude more energy in the same space than steel mills built a few years ago.
After Prohibition was repealed, we didn't outlaw public drinking, but we did outlaw public <i>drunkenness</i>. There's only about a factor of 2-3 between the legal and the illegal activity. A fairly narrow margin between acceptable and excess, if you ask me. But it's not unique in that regard. We have the same kind of rules for interest rates, for instance. We accept this much, but not a larger amount.
> we didn't outlaw public drinking<p>Tonto, dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.<p>I am not really aware of the laws around walking down a public sidewalk with a beer in hand. It is certainly <i>gauche</i> but a done-thing to sit at a bus stop and have a Fireball or two.<p>However, any drinking establishment that serves alcohol will stop you at the door and won't permit anyone to carry drinks outside of their premises. That's a strict thing. My apartment community bans drinking in walkways and stairwells, which was probably done more by non-residents than my neighbors. So there are a lot of bans on public drinking, even if it is not blanket-outlawed.<p>A couple of major developments at the shopping mall, though: traditionally all American movie theaters were dry, but that rule has been relaxed, and even the major chains are serving alcohol now. At the mall there has been instituted a "sip & stroll" policy, where designated bars can serve you a plastic cup, and you can roam around the mall with drink-in-hand, as long as you observe the borders of it, where you can't walk into the parking lot or off-premises with your booze.<p>In general, I have seen many liquor-related laws be relaxed and lightened across my county and state. It seems that there's a general lack of will to crack down on the demand-side, when there is lots and lots of profit to be had on the healthcare-side, where you will get a diagnosis and medication and treatment, whether that is IOP or in-patient, so why not encourage more drinkers to overindulge? Broken window fallacy FTW!
> dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.<p>Relevant reading: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law</a><p>tl;dr details vary by state and municipality, but with very few exceptions you can't walk around a random town drinking fireball. Or, well, you can as long as you don't get caught.<p>I've seen what you're talking about though. It seems like the big trend for millenials has been "<blank> but with booze." Barcades. Sip & stroll at malls. Booze in movie theaters. Paint & Sip. The microbrewery craze that's partly just "bars but make them fancy"<p>If you really want to get thrown for a loop, go read up about the Tavern League. One of the most powerful lobbies in Wisconsin state government is a massive cartel of... bars.
I'm not against local governments setting zoning laws and regulations if they're concerned about the pace of growth. Personally, I'm not concerned because I think we can and should invest in infrastructure to keep up with demand. This will benefit all industries, not just AI. My point is that I <i>suspect</i> (I'll admit that I haven't done any research on this) that people wouldn't be against facilities with the exact same footprint if they didn't carry the label "data center" and this is primarily driven by a backlash against AI rather than the resource use itself. In that sense, they're trying to rebrand a political/culture war issue as a zoning or utility issue.
These new proposals, which have been suspiciously hidden under NDA’s, misdirection, etc. are ENORMOUS. And the local permitting in my area has data centers categorized as “light industrial”, and thus passed a 1-year moratorium to revisit the code. I am fully aware of smaller data centers along the highway I drive every day with no issue, and as such I do not consider myself crazy.
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<i>>Get out of here. Either you have a simple mind or you are commenting in bad faith.</i><p>I find it more and more common that people who disagree online respond by attacking the commenter personally instead of addressing their arguments. Saying "it's bigger" isn't enough; you need to explain why a building full of computers is fine if it's 100 acres but not if it's 1000 acres. You also need to explain why we shouldn't oppose comparable scale manufacturing, research, or warehousing facilities.<p>Cameras are different than data centers. Trying to connect the two is a rhetorical technique, not an argument.
There is sometimes incorrect conflation between what the datacenter is permitted for and what the datacenter actually draws.<p>> Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1]<p>This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?open=false#%C2%A7every-popular-article-about-how-ais-water-use-is-bad-for-the-environment-in-the-last-year-has-had-a-wildly-misleading-framing" rel="nofollow">https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?ope...</a>
It's helpful when journos put things in terms the layman can relate to.<p>I had no idea what 13 million gallons of water was until they pointed out it was like when I filled up my olympic swimming pool 20 times. That was a slow summer.<p>Given the pressure construed on resources, why not use personal or household usage averages?<p>Maybe ~450 people-years doesn't have the same impact as Olympic pools.
As soon as I saw the headline I knew they’d use Olympic swimming pools as the comparison point, as this is seemingly the international unit of volume for journalism
Its about the same consumption as a large chemical plant.
> Agate LLC reports expecting a refund of $55,822,472 from 2025 taxes. Fireball LLC is expecting a refund of $39,171,573.39 from 2025 taxes. Westwood Solutions LLC, the Google-owned data center in Omaha, is expecting a refund of $22,558,881 from 2025 taxes.<p>Wow!
Yea, that stuck out to me more than the resource usage.<p>Id find it difficult to believe that these companies are giving that much money in free loans to the government the way a retail worker estimating their taxes and getting a refund of a few hundred to thousand a year does.<p>Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?<p>Nebraska had a unexpected 86 million dollar gap in tax revenues collected last year[1] and these tax 3 tax breaks on their own account for 130% of that<p>[1]<a href="https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/15/nebraska-ends-fiscal-year-86-million-short-on-expected-tax-revenues/" rel="nofollow">https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/15/nebraska-ends-fiscal...</a>
You can get better cooling performance at the cost of slight water usage or you can use more energy without using water at all.<p>The greener solution is to use water.
This is entirely dependent on where you are geographically in terms of rainfall and weather. Both water and energy are abundant. The trick is getting them where you need them. So the where is what matters.
Seems like it'd depend a lot on e.g. carbon impact of the marginal watt v.s. environmental impact of the marginal gallon? Might depend on the individual site.
I dont like the olympic swimming pool comparisons so I converted to immigrant population comparisons. How many people's worth of electricity and water are the data centers consuming , of course all the analysis was done on gemini since we are talking about google data centers :) here's the output<p>> Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska.<p>> Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
How much polluted is the water after cooling? Can they not be reused?<p>As long as they don’t pollute, I don’t see much a problem with this amount of water usage. And the water doesn’t need to be disinfected either, only cleaned and filtered. So any natural renewable source would do.
Most of the water evaporates in the end. Once it rains down again, it can go through water treatment plants again and be reused. The other water contains everything that was in the original incoming water and concentrated forms of minor pollution for descaling. The contamination problem isn't that big compared to a farm or chemical plant.<p>Once the outside air crosses a certain temperature, air-to-air AC becomes less efficient and evaporative cooling can be used to get rid of heat instead.<p>Of course, this has the side effect of using more water during warm periods, when people and agriculture also need more water. That can be rather problematic in drought situations, especially in the decades to come.
It's evaporated so it's not polluted but of course it does strain the local area water supply that has to collect, treat and distribute the water first. Likely resulting in higher water prices for the area.
Consumption is only part of the problem other part is ground water pollution[1]<p>1: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o</a>
kind of confusing numbers here. the 13 million gallon figure refers to one specific datacenter, but you add on five more datacenters and the number grows to... 765 million gallons? The datacenter in Papillion accounts for 548 million of those. Is it bigger? Is it less efficient? not a lot of info apparent in this report.<p>If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
Well as long as there are statutes preventing disclosure of the real numbers, we can't treat this as a non-problem. For all we know somebody intentionally failed to redact the lowest water usage data-center in the state.<p>Different data centers have order of magnitude differences in water usage depending on how whether they use the water for cooling or not.
Regardless of the comments below there seems to be a crazy ideology forming about being completely pro or anti AI. On both sides people are either under or ober reporting how much power these datacenters actually use
For those who think "hey it's not that bad": here is some reading for you to get educated on the issue.<p><a href="https://archive.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home/gt2040-deeper-looks/future-of-water" rel="nofollow">https://archive.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home/gt2040-deeper-...</a> | <a href="https://water.usgs.gov/vizlab/water-availability/03-vulnerability" rel="nofollow">https://water.usgs.gov/vizlab/water-availability/03-vulnerab...</a> | <a href="https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts" rel="nofollow">https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts</a> | <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...</a> | <a href="https://natureforward.org/data-centers-and-water-use/" rel="nofollow">https://natureforward.org/data-centers-and-water-use/</a> | <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/data-centers-environmental-concerns-water-usage-construction-explainer-12499065" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsweek.com/data-centers-environmental-concerns...</a> | <a href="https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961" rel="nofollow">https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...</a> | <a href="https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption" rel="nofollow">https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...</a> | <a href="https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data-centers-impact-surface-and-ground-waters/" rel="nofollow">https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data...</a> | <a href="https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts" rel="nofollow">https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts</a> | <a href="https://www.nixonpeabody.com/insights/articles/2025/09/05/water-use-in-us-data-centers-legal-and-regulatory-risks" rel="nofollow">https://www.nixonpeabody.com/insights/articles/2025/09/05/wa...</a> | <a href="https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-resources/" rel="nofollow">https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-res...</a> | <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/americas-ai-boom-is-running-into-an-unplanned-water-problem/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri...</a> | <a href="https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine/articles/land-water-impacts-data-centers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine...</a> | <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/our-work/freshwater/water-scarcity/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldwildlife.org/our-work/freshwater/water-scar...</a> | <a href="https://swefc.unm.edu/home/living-without-water-is-draining-us-new-report-released-on-economic-impacts-of-water-access-inequity/" rel="nofollow">https://swefc.unm.edu/home/living-without-water-is-draining-...</a> | <a href="https://www.cdcfoundation.org/blog/addressing-growing-water-crisis-us" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdcfoundation.org/blog/addressing-growing-water-...</a> | <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/millions-of-americans-lack-affordable-water-access-heres-how-local-utilities-can-help/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/articles/millions-of-americans-lac...</a> | <a href="https://lifestraw.com/blogs/news/america-has-a-drinking-water-crisis" rel="nofollow">https://lifestraw.com/blogs/news/america-has-a-drinking-wate...</a> | <a href="https://www.digdeep.org/close-the-water-gap" rel="nofollow">https://www.digdeep.org/close-the-water-gap</a>
13.3 megagallons is 40 acre feet.<p>If it was irrigation water, instead of drinking water, that would be about 26 acres worth of irrigated crops - in drought conditions.<p>If they were bypassing the municipal water supply or using post-wastewater treated water for their water usage, I'd be more blase about the situation. But farms are much thirstier than people.
I don't really understand the hand-wringing about data centers and water. Unlike fossil fuels, when you "use" water, it doesn't go away, it goes back out into the environment. And since DCs use it for cooling, not some industrial process, it doesn't even contaminate the water in any meaningful way.<p>The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
I think the bigger issue with water usage ( if it's actually an issue ) is when the system is not able to handle the additional demand ( drying up wells, etc. )
Especially during the summer where water supply is already strained in some areas.<p>Yes water goes eventually back into circulation but that does not help in the place where the system is already at it's limit
True if you're using a closed-loop system. But if you're using evaporative cooling (which is the main cause for concern) then the place where the water 'comes back into the environment' may be quite far away (at least in a useful sense).
IMO the water thing is a distraction. It gets people quibbling over water instead of asking bigger questions about the data center.
Mostly, but not entirely. It <i>is</i> a huge issue in the Southwest, and it seems like a lot of DCs are being proposed and/or built in areas where water is far from abundant.
Fresh water supply has been on a downward trend for years. We are already looking at a future without enough fresh water, <i>before</i> the new datacenters come into play. The datacenters are being installed in some of the driest areas of the country that were already water stressed. In some cases they can also contaminate local water systems.
20-25% of the water consumed for evaporative cooling becomes contaminated waste water. It is used to clean out the residue left behind by the 75-80% of the consumed water that is evaporated.<p>The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
I would love to see a real breakdown of aquifer water usage.
Your use of "into the environment" is too broad.<p>If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.<p>For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.<p>Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
The water for the datacenter comes from the same place residents, farmers, etc get their water. If there is already not a lot of water, the datacenter can cause running out of water. Sending used water downstream doesn't magically reappear upstream.
Roughly 40 acre feet of water for the Lincoln DC. An acre of corn uses maybe a couple of acre feet a season. Corn irrigation alone uses tens of millions of acre feet of water per season in the USA.
From a redaction point of view: I can't believe this is still happening. Surely by now all government and local government offices have a data/records person and policies about information handling. I guess it's not really sensitive info like the name of a government informant. Maybe they intentionally leaked it with a 'whoops, we tried' excuse.<p>If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that.<p>If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
Data centers could avoid the whole water usage debate if they just collected rainwater on the roof or something. Most places that are getting datacenters are heavy rainers.
We're gonna need a comparison chart in number of almond milk lattes and/or golf courses. Otherwise what are we even talking about?
And yet, the scale of the tragedy being blown out of proportion online regarding the high water and energy consumption of data centers seems somewhat exaggerated to me. But, of course, it would be better to build them in places where there are no issues with clean water.
> <i>For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.</i><p>Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.
That's wishful thinking, I know, but would love a breakdown of those metrics into what actually goes into AI inference, training versus just TikTok / YouTube streaming, or just a Google search...To have some perspective. My hypothesis that prolonged video streaming might contribute similarly to AI usage? (But CDN etc might make that tricky to calculate...)
It's not terrible at all. It's dwarfed by common municipal demands, let alone industry or agriculture. It's an amount of water that's basically not worth talking about.
It… doesn’t look that bad. Electricity use is sizable. Water which usually gets all this screaming is, well, look up how much a golf course or a large hotel uses.
It varies pretty greatly, but our golf course uses untreated water from a relatively dirty river that is not used for drinking. It looks like Google is using ground water from the aquifer. These are significantly different beasts.
Concern about water use is the distraction they caused in the media so we'd too busy thinking about fake issues to think about the real issues.
Not a conspiracy theorist, but wait that really sounds effective. Just few months back I was wondering why were big datacenter companies not trying to sway the public that the water usage is low per query or whatever metric.<p>There will be protests and cases related to water usage of AI, but none of them would hold any ground. And winning the water case would just make the argument in their favour.
Which begs the question of who was the source of the water/electricity FUD?
Flood the zone.<p>> Just few months back<p>Just a few months more, and the public was still often making Epstein references.
Excess water use is actively harming people right now.
13 "megagallons" per year is almost none especially in the context of the Missouri River.
Accidental improper redaction on purpose!
So what? Water used for cooling doesn't disappear.
Historically large data centers used evaporative cooling. So the water disappeared in sense that it's no longer available in a useful form in it's original locations. That's changing with growing use of closed-loop systems.
A lot of people think it does, surprisingly. People memed too hard about "querying ChatGPT drains lakes" and anyone who contested it was deemed a booster, so it stuck.
no it doesn't but it doesn't go back to where it was taken from either. So it does affect local aquifers.
Data centers are ugly and dystopian. We can likely survive as a species without building a single other one. Society and general well-being does worse because of them and what they bring.
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This document was created after the Epstein redaction debacle and yet they still leaked redacted data. People will never learn. <facepalm>
Seems like a lot of water to me. And what does society get back from google in return?
This is also likely insignificant compared to how much water is constantly evaporated by a large lake.
If everything was on the up and up they wouldn’t be hiding things behind shell companies and ndas. The water and electric usage is the least of our worries. These things will make cancer alley look like a Sunday picnic. There is a reason executives won’t live anywhere near the hot zone.