The AI water issue is fake

Data centers don't create jobs, pit municipalities against one another in a race to the bottom, and typically demand abated taxes and almost never deliver a net positive for where they operate.

But if you create a "water" monster, pivot the conversation on water being the issue, you can then show water consumption isn't a big deal. Water is the framing the data centers want because they can win the fight on that topic.

Don't let your enemy choose the terrain.

This is a big oversimplification. First, the 20% (of all datacenter usage being LLMs) is based on 2024 estimates, while meanwhile all of the LLM players are putting billions of dollars into building more and larger datacenters. This number undoubtedly already gives an underestimate for total LLM power usage, and if all of the planned datacenters actually materialize (which is a big if), it will be an underestimate by an order of magnitude or maybe two.

Second, water issues are localized, and building datacenters in dry areas (like Texas), where aquifers are already being depleted, is going to be an issue there, even if it's a drop in the bucket of the great lakes or whatever.

The AI water issue isn't fake, though it's often overstated.

The key problem is that data center evaporative cooling permanently removes water from local systems, unlike irrigation or golf courses where some water returns to groundwater, evaporated cooling water is lost to the atmosphere and must be continuously replenished.

While 0.008% of national freshwater seems tiny, the author misses the local impact. In water-stressed regions, even "small" demands matter. Comparing to golf courses in Phoenix sets the bar absurdly low, "less wasteful than the worst example" shouldn't be the standard.

The author dismisses 905M gallons in Maricopa County as "only 0.12%" of county use, but in a desert already overdrawing groundwater, that's 905M gallons unavailable for human needs.

The media has exaggerated, sure. But calling legitimate resource concerns "fake" swings way too far the other way. We need careful planning for data center locations, not dismissal of water consumption because other industries use more.

The uproar over AI data center resource use has been rather bizarre to see and feels vaguely luddite. As this article points out, frivolous things like golf courses are far worse users of fresh water (and land) than any amount of AI. And on the electricity side, forcing the US to actually build more power generating capacity and infrastructure is a good thing in my book. Once the AI hype dies down we can use that for BEVs and other useful things.

This article was first published over a month ago, but Andy just added the section on potable water as a result of this Hacker News comments conversation from a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45926914

> it gives the utility more money to spend on drawing more water and improve infrastructure.

Deeply unserious, gradeschool-level economics. “Infrastructure” isn’t a marginal cost you can smoothly ramp up when a big new consumer comes online.

nice to see a post with lots of data and sources

what comes out of the AI datacenters, and what that will do to society, is far more concerning to me than the water and electricity, which are trivial to address by comparison

Of course it’s fake. The datacenters aren’t consuming the water as part of their operation they are using it as a supersized version of a custom loop PC.

I worry though that the fact that people seem to see political upside in claiming this will lead to data center NIMBYism and a future where building more compute will be as hard as building more housing, with all of the follow on effects on prices.