AI is draining water from areas that need it most
58 points by mraniki 1 month ago | 42 comments- monster_truck 1 month agoI'm just not sure I understand what point they're trying to make.
Honestly, 6500 households of water a day is nothing. Individual cities often write more than this off in a day when rain overwhelms their watershed systems.
Even with perfect watershed recovery our ability to treat, utilize, and transport it back without losses is a far bigger concern. The average age of pipes in the US is approaching 50 years old. I've seen reports project the US will need to invest nearly 1T in the next 15 years to sustain the current system and rate of growth.
Hell, there was a 54 inch water main break in Detroit this winter that flooded ~120 homes. A conservative estimate for a pipe of that size leaking all of its water for 5-6 hours is 20-25,000,000 gallons of water. We're going to be seeing a lot more of that.
Another thing I see overlooked constantly is that many of these DCs are augmented with their own filtration systems which allow them to primarily consume greywater for a net gain.
- maxerickson 1 month agoMunicipal water drawn from the Great Lakes is mostly borrowed for a short time. There's energy costs to treating it for potability and then treating the wastewater, but not really a change to how much water is available.
- monster_truck 1 month agoThat completely misses the point, it's a harbinger. This area is seeing it first because it is largely floodplains on top of clay coupled with a decent amount of rain and a consistent freeze-thaw cycle.
Merely building a functioning bypass for a pipe of this size at this depth takes the better part of a year. Replacing it? Out in the suburbs some of the projects to repair pipes from the 40s that leaked and caused sinkholes are still ongoing, they started over 20 years ago.
- monster_truck 1 month ago
- maxerickson 1 month ago
- jmclnx 1 month agoWell I guess they should not be building these data centers in areas with no water and high ave Temps. Where they are building having these issues are a surprise to no one.
There are areas with lots of land, water and much lower ave air temps in the US and some have empty buildings that can be retrofitted for use as data centers. But no, lets build in places that allow the company treat their employees as slaves.
- Osyris 1 month agoI was under the impression data centers use closed loop cooling.
- archon1410 1 month agoI had the same impression, but apparently not.
> Many data centers rely on evaporative cooling, or “swamp cooling,” where warm air is drawn through wet pads. Data centers typically evaporate about 80% of the water they draw, discharging 20% back to a wastewater treatment facility, according to Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside.
- OptionOfT 1 month agoThe refrigerant is closed loop, but the condensers are sprayed with water which are much more efficient at removing heat than a fan + air.
I did some research on additional cost of water + increased efficiency of the condenser, but it's not just that. The water needs to be treated, otherwise it leaves way too much sediment.
- matt-p 1 month agoAI data centres rarely actually need to resort to using water because they're using DTC and not air cooling, so we're looking at cooling 60 degree Celsius water down to ~40 which you can do compressorless with dry coolers alone. In practice many will use cooling towers instead or aswell but they still don't need to evaporate nearly as much water as a normal low density data centre would per KW.
By the way "spray the condenser" technology is very very rare because it's pretty much worst of both worlds and nowhere near as good or efficient as a cooling tower but much more maintenance than a dry cooler + compressor. Typically for high efficiency modern sites you'd be looking at cooling towers or dry cooler + compressor for water facilities or spray the water directly onto the air (direct or indirect adiabatic) for air based facilities.
To complicate things many (typically city DCs/Colos/ enterprise facilities) are air based facilities that convert to water by using heat exchangers in the datahalls.
- matt-p 1 month ago
- ijustlovemath 1 month agoIt's much cheaper just keep pulling in cool water than it is to cool it yourself
- bilsbie 1 month agoWelcome to Gelman amnesia.
- archon1410 1 month ago
- nativeit 1 month agoI'm not inclined to endorse continued data center construction for much of anything, AI especially, but I was a little curious about how they determined what areas qualify as "high-stress" water conditions? Because they show red squares where I live (near Charlotte, NC) and we are pretty firmly within the normal range of precipitation and water levels. If anything, it's been wetter in the last 10-years than at any point in my lifetime.
- rpmisms 1 month agoSo put datacenters in Tennessee. We have tons of water and hydroelectric power.
- grej 1 month agoThe conflation of AI and use of natural resources / energy use is mostly a political choice and a straw man.
- mieses 1 month agowhen you get older and get past the "it was posted on the internet and therefore must be addressed rationally" thing then you might get by with "it's bloomberg" and get on with your day. don't let all these rumour mongering media companies waste your time
- mitchbob 1 month ago
- Havoc 1 month agoSurprised there isn't more of a push to align compute with suitable geography frankly.
A lot of stuff doesn't need 10ms latency. Why not move it somewhere that has geothermal, or abundant water, or say an ocean to dump heat into.
Seems like the approach is always to bring the resource to the datacenter instead
- benatkin 1 month agoThe Claude logo spinning is quite an unsettling thing to see.
- ashoeafoot 1 month agowhy not built near the ocean and use saltwater or brackwater as coolant?
- john-h-k 1 month agoObligatory link about AI water/energy use https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/individual-ai-use...
- bobbylarrybobby 1 month agoEh, I'd focus on agriculture first. AI is a drop in the bucket compared to what it takes to grow a cow or an almond.
- bb88 1 month agoStep 1 is simpler. Get rid of farming in the desert first.
This a fight going on in Idaho right now:
https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/ar...
If you look at a google map of Ada County Idaho, the only viable agriculture land requires watering from the Snake and Boise Rivers.
- rickydroll 1 month agoBack in 2017, I went to see the eclipse at Madras, Oregon. If you don't know the area, it's arid. Yet, on the outskirts of Madras, green fields were irrigated by spray every morning.
What crop was so valuable that they would use precious water in a near desert? They were growing Kentucky bluegrass for lawn seed.
Yeah, stop subsidizing agriculture in arid lands.
- OptionOfT 1 month agoI often wonder about this. Is it actually cheaper to farm near water, or farm in a hot climate and import water (e.g. CA & AZ).
- bb88 1 month agoThe mountains in California are basically huge water collectors in the form of capturing snow and slowly letting it melt into waterways. And it costs tax payers and farmers $0 dollars for the desalinization and transportation. What's left is the purification and the final distribution (which might be solar powered pumps).
So from this article:
https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/farming-family-uses-m...
1 billion gallons is not unreasonable for a large scale farm. Unless you're doing rail, 8000 gallons is pretty standard for a tanker. So that's 125,000 trips over the course of a year and 500 trips a day maybe? Assuming you had a 1 billion gallon source 100 miles would be somewhere around US$28M burning gas (assuming a tanker marginal cost per mile is $2.27). But water sources might be much more than that from where your farm is in the desert. If it's 1000 miles, it's $280M.
At that rate it may be cheaper to use solar power to boil 10 billion gallons of ocean water into steam and let nature do the work to move the water to where you need it.
- bb88 1 month ago
- rickydroll 1 month ago
- 4ndrewl 1 month agoYou can't eat a hyper realistic picture of a dog in a suit.
- smilliken 1 month agoWould you concede the point if I produce a photo as proof?
- smilliken 1 month ago
- CharlesW 1 month agoYep. Agriculture uses roughly 2-4K times more water than the infrastructure that powers data centers. https://www.unesco.org/reports/wwdr/en/2024/s
- Boltgolt 1 month agoI'd rate basic necessities like food 4000x more important than data centers too
- mmoskal 1 month agoI don't know. I suspect most people rate data centers higher than almond milk...
- wintermutestwin 1 month agoOf course! But what about all of the agriculture that gets exported? In CA, it is over half of almonds and ~15% of alfalfa (cattle feed).
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- osigurdson 1 month agoIf we could just get rid of these darn living creatures we would use much less water.
- mmoskal 1 month ago
- Boltgolt 1 month ago
- bb88 1 month ago
- anthk 1 month agoThat's what I'd love Markov bullshit generators make these crawlers implode with metacircular nonsense. That and Gzip bombs.
- roschdal 1 month agoArtificial Intelligence is for people without enough natural intelligence.
- bilsbie 1 month agoI’m hugely pro conservation, clean air and water, etc.
But modern environmentalism is a religion and this is how it works. Any human advancement needs a narrative on how it hurts the planet.
- healsdata 1 month agoHave you considered you have cause-and-effect backwards? Any human advancement hurts the planet and then the burden is on environmentalists to bring awareness?
Why would a for-profit not hurt the environment for more profit if it isn't illegal and won't get them sued (for more than they profited)? There's a rich history of them doing exactly that. Similarly, governments have done horrific environmental damage and it was up to environmentalists to create the awareness to make it stop.
I honestly don't know how you can look at a world with record numbers of wildfires, communities fighting over water supplies, and for-profit companies say that water beyond subsistence levels isn't a human right and think "oh yeah, environmentalists are looking for a reason why this water-consuming thing is bad".
Especially when the same technology could be powered in a way that doesn't pollute as much and cooled in a way that doesn't consume as much water -- if only the environment was more important than shareholders.
- bilsbie 1 month agoLike I said I’m on your team and extremely pro environment. I just see media alarmism in this issue and think there are more important things to focus on. but I’m willing to ask:
what’s your data on how water is being used improperly on these data centers? And what is the documented harm? Are plants and animals downstream of a data center dying from lack of water?
Also keep in mind the funny thing about water alarmism is that even after water is used it stays in earths water cycle. Watering crops returns to aquifers. Evaporated water rains down somewhere else. It’a not like oil we used once and it’s gone.
- healsdata 1 month agoYou commented on an article that contains data and said it was alarmist. From my perspective, that means you're not even open to hearing data because you've already decided. If you had problems with the data provided, you would have refuted it instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks.
- healsdata 1 month ago
- bilsbie 1 month ago
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- josu 1 month agoWe already went through this with crypto mining; the oceans didn't boil, the world didn't end.
- bb88 1 month agoEtherium also went to proof of stake. Apparently it's going swimmingly.
- add-sub-mul-div 1 month agoTell me more about your impression of the timescale that climate change would progress at.
- mschuster91 1 month agoYeah because the crypto world underwent a bunch of disastrous rug-pulls and large scale scandals that scared people off. And frankly I'm happy about this, the moment I started (and I'm not joking here) taxi drivers and hairdressers talking about NFTs I was pretty certain (and hopeful) that the bubble was about to burst.
- bb88 1 month ago