AI is draining water from areas that need it most
35 comments
·May 10, 2025monster_truck
maxerickson
Municipal 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
That 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.
nativeit
I'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.
grej
The conflation of AI and use of natural resources / energy use is mostly a political choice and a straw man.
Osyris
I was under the impression data centers use closed loop cooling.
archon1410
I 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
The 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.
ijustlovemath
It's much cheaper just keep pulling in cool water than it is to cool it yourself
bilsbie
Welcome to Gelman amnesia.
rpmisms
So put datacenters in Tennessee. We have tons of water and hydroelectric power.
Havoc
Surprised 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
john-h-k
Obligatory link about AI water/energy use https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/individual-ai-use...
jmclnx
Well 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.
bobbylarrybobby
Eh, 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
Step 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.
OptionOfT
I 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).
4ndrewl
You can't eat a hyper realistic picture of a dog in a suit.
smilliken
Would you concede the point if I produce a photo as proof?
CharlesW
Yep. 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
I'd rate basic necessities like food 4000x more important than data centers too
wintermutestwin
Of 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).
null
mmoskal
I don't know. I suspect most people rate data centers higher than almond milk...
osigurdson
If we could just get rid of these darn living creatures we would use much less water.
anthk
That's what I'd love Markov bullshit generators make these crawlers implode with metacircular nonsense. That and Gzip bombs.
roschdal
Artificial Intelligence is for people without enough natural intelligence.
I'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.