This sounds like a lot, but it’s actually not very much. I mean, one singular almond requires 1,000 gallons of water. Beef requires shit ton, too.

Go vegan for a few weeks and you’ve just negated all your AI water use for the rest of your lifetime.

Is that supposed be a lot? That article states that all US data centers combined consume 450 million gallons a day, equivalent to 90 towns, which does not sound like very much.

Consume it how, exactly? Are the staff drinking it all? Because the the kit sure as hell isn't. :-/

The electricity, air pollution and noise pollution are all from natural gas. Data centers aren’t loud, on site temporary natural gas turbines are. We can instead install solar and batteries and none of these will be issues. We already grow corn for fuel at 1/10th the land efficiency of solar so it’s not like we don’t have the land for it

You could, you know, stop spreading deception about water usage if it bothers you so much when people call out deception about water usage.

At this point, I almost consider it trolling to bring it up: purposely throw in something incredibly stupid, and then throw a hissy fit when predictably called out on it.

Someone complaining about water usage is a very strong indicator that they aren't well-informed enough to contribute anything worth reading, though.

Maybe yours do, but all the CyrusOne date centers outside of Chicago smell like is grass and landscaping; they smell a great deal better than the car exhaust choked strip malls that dominate the exurban sprawl areas they tend to get sited in. I would much rather have one of those DCs as a neighbor than I would a Walmart.

They're stinky? How? And how do they pollute water sources? A datacenter is a building filled with computers that uses water and air for cooling. What pollutants get "emitted" by a bunch of CPUs and video cards? No one seems to go into details.

There are certainly problems that can be crated by dumping heat into a body of water, but that's not the argument being made.

I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.

The Us uses 320 billion gallons a day. Google thus used 0.01% of total US water.

Or about 0.6% of the water used to grow almonds

Thank you, I wasn't aware they did this:

https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2026-environmen...

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-...

It's helpful to put this number in context, although if the people you're talking to will do anything to avoid using the metric system, that becomes much more difficult.

Fortunately, now we have computers, which are great at unit conversion, so we can cut right through these feeble attempts at obfuscation. In non-medieval units, 10.9 billion gallons per year is 41.3 million cubic meters per year or 1.3 cubic meters per second. The river a few kilometers from me has a discharge of 22000 cubic meters per second (of fresh water dumped into the sea), so Google is the equivalent using 0.006% of the Rio de la Plata. Lake Superior contains 12070 cubic kilometers of water, which is 1.207 × 10¹³ cubic meters, also of fresh water, so Google's current use would dry up Lake Superior in only 290,000 years.

Google is mostly not very close to Lake Superior or the Rio de la Plata; a more relevant river might be the Sacramento River, which drains into the San Francisco Bay where Google was born, and it's much smaller than the Rio de la Plata. Specifically, its average discharge is 797m³/s, so Google is using 0.16% of the discharge of the Sacramento River. (But some of that is at datacenters far from California.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Agricultur... tells us that agriculture in California uses 34.1 million "acre feet" of water per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system, especially when they're trying to be sneaky). In non-medieval units, that's 42.1 billion cubic meters, and per year, it's 1330 cubic meters per second, almost exactly 1000 times Google's use. Of that, 18% (240 cubic meters per second) is spent on alfalfa, or was in 02014, anyway.

One major difference is that you need fresh water, like the water of the Sacramento River, to irrigate crops, but you can cool data centers with salt water from the ocean. It's less convenient, because there are a variety of annoying things that happen with biofouling and corrosion, but that's what you'd do if hyperscalers scaled up by another factor of 100× so that their water usage became large enough to be environmentally significant.

But that doesn't happen until they have 100× the computing power they have today. So anybody who tells you AI datacenters are a major water user is lying.