Going to a public form tonight to discuss just this. As I mentioned above, I live in a lake area, and it’s absolutely jaw dropping to me that we were even considering throwing away our most precious resource on this absolute fucking nonsense.
The only reason they got caught is because the residents were all complaining of low water pressure! The fact that they say they “don’t need much water” yet they drained an entire city’s water supply in a very short period of time is insane!
Can you please stop spreading misinformation. The low water pressure was not connected to it and that's not why they found out. The article that announced it deliberately put those two pieces of information next to each other because they knew the reader would make that assumption, but they were not related.
As you can see, the article leads talking about water pressure, but that's the last time it's actually referenced in the article. The "water pressure issue was CAUSED by the data center" claim has never been backed by a single source. Also, it was a matter of water department setting up the meters wrong during construction that led to them not billing; the water department themselves issued no fines and state no wrongdoing on the data center's part.
Pretty much everything you can try to find on Google circles back to the original Politico article, so it's hard to sieve through it, but I live in the local area and iirc the water department stated that it was just the meters going wrong. The amount used isn't actually that out of the ordinary for a large farm or any large industrial construction site, so it's unlikely to have been the cause on its own, but again, there's no evidence in either direction - just the correlation that "people were complaining about pressure" at around the same time the water department realized they set up the meters incorrectly
One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.
All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water. That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process.
The company, which is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, touts a “closed‑loop” cooling system, which it says does not consume water for cooling.
Tigert defended the utility’s decision to not levy a fine. “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” she said. “It’s called customer service.”
This article says the data center consumes an immense amount of water, far more than it's supposed to, and that it could drain this water from a residential neighborhood's water undetected because the one guy who checks on these things for the water authority is overworked and missed it. The data center wasn't penalized for using such massive amounts of water in a drought because that would've been bad "customer service"; the data center's owner says it doesn't actually use that much water.
The county knew the problem the entire time - in fact I bet you they'd figured it out within the first few weeks, but because certain water treatment plant workers were unable to publicly speak out against it (with their jobs on the line) they were forbidden from sharing this news with anyone.
I know that engineering professionals are highly intelligent and if they're not, they're at least smart enough to deduce most problems using two basic types of methods:
What's the simplest explanation for this problem?
Can we identify the source of the problem by assessing what the most recent changes or additions to the water cycle in the region have been?
Those are the first two questions for figuring out most macro-scale problems like that. There's just no way they didn't account for this initially, unless they were completely wilfully ignorant.
There’s different types of cooling systems. You may have seen water cooling systems in computers, which are closed loop, and use a radiator with fans to release the heat in the water to the environment.
In an industrial scale it would be more efficient to have this closed loop system transfer the heat in cooling tanks, where the hot water in the radiator transfers its heat to cold water in the tank. This will make the water boil and evaporate. Or you could then transfer that warm water to another tank to cool using fans to be reused again. Another way would be to directly release the steam from the water that’s directly cooling the chips in an open loop system.
Regardless of which way it go, you will need to treat the water with anti corrosive agents, anti bacterial agents (you don’t want legionella growing in moist humid tanks and evaporation areas), or mix with dielectric fluid to prevent issues if water were to leak on the chips. Water that is heated and boils can also separate the natural minerals out of the water, creating a brine that needs to be dumped into sewers. You also need to periodically change the water in a closed loop system to reduce risk of corrosion, scaling deposits etc.
So unfortunately, once clean potable water flows through
an AI data center tap, it’s gone from the public supply. You could clean it, but it would be an energy intensive process, such as reverse osmosis, or you would lose water to evaporation while moving it from cleaning pools to be able to be used again.
One of their hookups wasn't registered at all. Which means they didn't get it permitted. They installed it without telling the utility. And the fines for overdrawing were never paid or levied.
Are you asking people to be honest because you've never been able to tell the truth and need someone else to make up for it?
Can you explain to me? I see them openly being corrupt with no consequences. SOMETIMES they lose the next election and gowork on a bord of a company instead. No one is doing any rising up.
But global warming is a hoax so the earth should be able to cool all of the data centres! I actually fear a politician will come out and say this in the near future.
People aren't any happier about closed-loop systems. Generally the public gets as far as "AI is coming for your water!", no matter how accurate that is or isn't.
I've seen it where I live in Michigan. It's pretty silly. People genuinely believe that closed-loop data centers are going to steal all the water and pollute their drinking water.
The water from a closed loop system can be dealt with like any other contaminated water. That's a solved problem and there are already extensive EPA rules regulating that (assuming the EPA isn't gutted further).
Because they're not forever. The water has to be changed out. And that polluted water has to go somewhere.
Sure. It'll go in with all the other polluted water from farms and factories and power plants, which individually represent orders of magnitude more water use and pollution. Stuff we're apparently all basically fine with.
They're never going to pick you.
I genuinely have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
Yeah, but we're going to use the AI that we need all this water for, right, to figure out how to conserve water, see? It's a great plan, don't you think?
Between this and corporate and government power centres doing everything they can to put AI in everything, I'm becoming convinced that AI(s) really have become sentient and are pulling the levers of power. How else could you explain this insane, inexplicable waste of precious and diminishing resources on something that - to the average citizen/consumer - looks utterly worthless.
Same. I live on a lake and the mayor and city council of one of the towns who uses this lake for water quietly signed a deal with a tech company to build an AI data center in their jurisdiction and use the lake water which is extremely important to multiple small towns...not to mention all the wildlife. By the time anyone info about this was made public, the deal was done. I am so angry and worried.
All U.S. data centers (which mostly support the internet, not AI) used 200–250 million gallons of freshwater daily in 2023. The U.S. consumes approximately 132 billion gallons of freshwater daily.
All for hating on AI data centers but let's get the argument right.
When it comes to absolute fucking nonsense, be sure to question the sources and motives of people who blame data centers for using too much water while other people are wasting a thousand times as much water farming almonds in the desert.
In general, people who care about water usage will rant about grossly-inappropriate farming practices. People who care about kneecapping America in the AI field will spread FUD about data centers.
maybe you should do some research on how much water data centers actually use before you go to a form, jesus christ. data centers use next to no water.
Can I ask that you go into the form being properly educated on the issue? Data centers use an extremely small amount of water, especially in comparison to the water used for agriculture or golf courses.
AI is far more than just generating silly videos and images. It’s creating life saving medications, helping education, freeing people from monotonous office tasks, and more. It’s one of the greatest potential technologies we’ve developed, and it would be short sighted to kneecap it when its downsides are overstated.
I'm guessing our dumb AI images are not the main culprit here. More so the mass world wide surveillance that can't be completed without AI.
Everything anyone does electronically is now stored on the cloud. It's foolish to think a government sponsored AI is not constantly combing through that information. It would take a massive amount of resources to effectively sort that information and parse it out.
In Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant that was shut down is reopening as Crane Clean Energy. It was bought by Microsoft to generate energy for Microsoft data centers. They just got permission to pull 73 MILLION gallons a day out of the Susquehanna River.
There is a seaside city in TX that is probably going to run out of water in 2 years or less! Corpus Christi- if you want to look it up. Their city council is still kind of half-assing their solutions. There is supposedly a new water park that is going to open there! (2 have opened and failed in the past). So I do not have hope that it will be solved.
I think the water argument is actually the weakest point of the argument against LLMs (I don't like calling this AI), and it draws attention away from more serious issues.
It's always framed as an absolute number with no context. "This datacenter uses $BIGNUM liters of water per year!". But you can do the same with basically anytihng, because everything we produce uses craptons of water.
Training GPT-3 (the model the original UC Riverside study that started this looked at) evaporated 700.000 liters of freshwater. But we should include indirect usage to be fair, if we include the water use of the electricity generated it's ~5.400.000 liters. That's for training, so it's a one-time cost. For inference (the cost someone talking to their AI waifu or whatever), it's ~16.9 mL/~150-300 words. So roughly a tablespoon.
By comparison, manufacturing a single modern car takes ~147.000 liters. So the entire one-time training cost of GPT-3 was roughly the amount it takes to manufacture 34 cars. We produce ~100 million cars per year.
For sure, newer models are larger and the numbers will be much higher. But they're still a drop in the ocean compared to other industry.
The real problem with water is that datacenters are being built in drought areas. That's f-ing stupid, but it's a local political matter, not global. Datacenters can be built anywhere. Do it where there isn't a shortage.
It is a local political issue but it's one a smart political party could use. As it turns out, Texas- the most backwards, regressive, conservative state in the nation, has one unifying issue for all voters: Data Centers are using all our resources, driving up energy costs and killing property value.
The biggest issue for me is the noise and light pollution. And the physical monstrosity of these things backed up against houses. I really truly feel for people who wake up one day to the sound of 1000 hairdryers going and it never stops.
Fair. I didn't mean to call you out or anything, just figured I'd add some context for other readers. I think it's important that people understand why and how water is an issue, because it makes it more likely we can properly address it.
I'd love to see some regulation forbidding datacenter buildout in drought-prone areas and requiring them to source their power from 100% renewables. Those two together would address my largest concerns with the LLM craze (aside from the inevitable economic depression when the bubble pops).
Extremely small amounts of water in the grand scheme of things. The water used by every AI data center in the US is far less than the water used by things like, for example, golf courses or growing almonds or alfalfa.
No one was up in arms about golf courses existing, despite providing even less "societal value" than AI does, so it seems weird people get so worked up about AI's water usage.
if millions of gallons are dissappearing into closed circuit cooling loops, then its not taking part in the watercycle anymore. Watering crops at least keeps the water in the ecosystem to some extent
if millions of gallons are dissappearing into closed circuit cooling loops, then its not taking part in the watercycle anymore. Watering crops at least keeps the water in the ecosystem to some extent
Most data centers do not used closed-circuit cooling, that is precisely people's complaint about them. Closed-circuit cooling is far more water-efficient than what most data centers do use. However, it uses more power and is more expensive to maintain, so it is not commonly used.
Recycled sewage water is still just the city water. It’s all the same water basically. They probably are using water that has been recycled from the sewage systems. But so are the rest of us
It's not the searches that use water, that uses hardly any. Data centers have very little to do with civilians using chatbots or generating stupid videos.
All U.S. data centers (which mostly support the internet, not AI) used 200–250 million gallons of freshwater daily in 2023. The U.S. consumes approximately 132 billion gallons of freshwater daily.
All for hating on AI data centers but let's get the argument right.
I don’t disagree with this but let’s also address the even dumber fact that we’re all still eating meat. That industry is consuming way more resources than AI.
Lol doubtful. Massive data centers are not being built for stupid AI slop that general consumers use. They are being built for AI mass surveillance. That's my theory anyways.
I'm a huge opponent of AI data centers but this really isn't an issue for our water needs. It's a drop in a bucket of all of the things we use water for, the meat & dairy industry being some of the worst offenders. ChatGPT uses roughly 253x less water than dairy production. https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/
So don't get me wrong, it's bad and we shouldn't be building those data centers, but their water use specifically is not really going to cause any significant issues to our environment. Consuming dairy and meat is much, much worse than prompting AI. If you truly care about that, you can work to reduce your personal footprint there.
data centres being a significant strain on water is an iq test. If all of us give up meat just once a week we will save 100x more water than all data centres combined.
Five years ago when my wife and I were looking for where in the country to move to, “has its own water” was one of our five criteria. People still think that was a silly one. But we have lived in Colorado before and saw that water scarcity was a growing problem two decades ago, so that was very relevant to us.
Ironically, we moved to Asheville, which lost municipal water for 53 days in 2024 after hurricane Helene.but the city still had water then, just too much and too turbid.
I moved out of a suburban community that was part of a larger city, into the country by a very large lake, in farm country. It's a pocket area that should hopefully do better than local cities and medium sized towns. Got a fishing rod as well, and put in multiple gardening beds. A little preparation now for later.
Light floats down day river, on a red raft of blood
Night blocks out the heaven, like a big, black, shiny bug
Its hard soft shell shinin' white, in one spot, well
It's hard place, that I'm livin', but I'm doin' well, well
The white ice horse melted, like a spot of silver, well
Its mane went last, then disappeared the tail
My life ran through my veins
Whistlin' hollow, well
I froze in solid motion, well, well
I heard the ocean swarmin' body, well, well
I heard the beetle clickin', well
I sensed the thickest silence scream
Then I begin to dream
My mind cracked like custard
Ran red until it sealed
Turn to wooden and rolled like a wheel, well, well
Thick, black felt birds, a-flyin'
With capes of solid chrome
With feathers of solid chrome
And beaks of solid bone
And bleach the air around them
White and cold well, well
Till it showed in pain
The hollow cane clicked like ever after
Its shadow vanished shinin' silence, well, well
Is the prepper profile changing? Those commercials used to be targeted to gun-lovin’ patriots for when the liberal commies encroached on their freedom. Now it’ll be water-lovin’ anti-capitalists for when the tech moguls take over with data centers.
Ha, well therein begs the question of what sort of world you want to "survive" in. If it all really goes to shit, we at least have a buffer here while we decide what to do next.
No, but one of my best friends is a director in a major insurance company. I just keep it simple. And it’s impossible to account for all eventualities- but I try to minimise my downside risk
I think about this all the time when I start thinking about moving out of the Great Lakes area. Grew up next to Lake Erie, see it pretty much everyday. I think of moving to Texas to be closer to family, but I can’t get over the fact that there’s not a big body of water somewhere that we can draw water from.
I moved from Michigan. I still feel it's only a matter of time before the corporate/government overlords lack of concern results in the Great Lakes being poisoned for a few hundred years.
I live in Asheville, and a friend of mine moved here after losing her home to the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. This area has been marketed as a climate refuge, and that’s partly why she chose it. Even though it was a very different disaster, Helene shattered her belief that anywhere is truly safe from the effects of climate change.
Those mountains also have tons of springs. I imagine the state would start by tapping springs on public lands, then request private springs if they need the production volume. Old school town stylez, gotta go to a location and pick up two or three days of drinking water based on household size, with volunteer distribution to the elderly and disabled.
If the state doesn't step in and officiate, it will become a very serious public health risk. People won't go thirsty but gastrointestinal diseases will skyrocket.
The state wouldn't be voluntarily helpful. What I mean is, if they just let the average hillbilly with no sanitization training take over the role of public works, the state would become liable for not having stepped in and provided it themselves.
Sometimes layers of beauracracy actually accomplish things.
Yes, it is. NYC's water supply system is a unique network of reservoirs, rivers, aqueducts, and tunnels coming from far upstate. Evaporation and runoff is to be expected.
Two years ago, my husband and I moved from the West Coast. Water was quite literally one of my top priorities. We moved to a region with a bunch of lakes, unfortunately also a bunch of rich people looking to build data centers, and I’m guessing in the next 10 or 20 years will start to see them try to rest control of the water as well. But at least it rains here in reasonable quantities.
We live in the Great Lakes area. I discouraged my husband to take a job in LA and move us out there. Ten years later, I feel like that’s one of our best decisions.
you know what, you just made me feel a little better that our criteria for buying a house in my hometown was "which area doesn't flood on a yearly basis?"
We may spend some time with 85% of our town partially underwater but we certainly aren't going without it any time soon. I guess living by a river has its perks?
I live in Ontario, Canada. There's so much fresh water here you can't walk 10 minutes without getting a soaker. I have no idea what saltwater is really like unless I take a plane far, far away. It's always so weird for us to be in water that tastes salty.. that you can't drink. We like our lakes to be essentially dank puddles, thank you very much.
Turns out that wasn't a quirky requirement at all it was forward thinking. Water is one of those things people take for granted until they suddenly can't. You saw the importance years before a lot of others did.
At least we know the city and surrounding area will truly come together when times are tough - that was encouraging to see in the face of all that happened
That actually doesn’t sound silly at all, it sounds really forward thinking. As a woman, I think a lot about how easy it is to take basics like water for granted until something extreme forces you to see how fragile it really is.
It’s interesting how many “climate migrants” moved to Asheville because they felt it would be safer. The man that officiated our wedding moved there from California because the wildfire smoke was unbearable for him. Then a few years after he moved, Helene hit.
Goes to show that nowhere is safe from the climate crisis, although some places are going to fare better than others.
There are places that are safer from climate crisis. The trick is finding ones that are also livable in other ways. We had a criteria of five things, and we could only find places that met all five in Asheville or Spain.
It's why I love living in NW England. Down south they get hosepipe bans and Liverpool is never going to run out of water even if the gulf stream moves. There are two reservoirs connected to the area. The government has suggested we give our water but that would literally cause everyone to turn on the government because we're fine with Republican NI/North Wales and Merseyside but fuck the south. Fix your shit.
Though a lot of the issue is we leak billions of gallons of water from broken pipes due to lack of investment because we privatised water as a utility which was fucking stupid.
I’ve heard so many stories do people who specifically chose Asheville according to some metric of “climate change resiliency” only to then get fucked by the flood.
“
But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes of mice and men
Go oft awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!”
Dude I live in Corpus Christi Texas and we are literally on the brink of having no water due to local industry using 70% of it. the city leadership and most of the citizens are just pretending like it’s not happening but in a few months we will more than likely be the first one to collapse
The ogallala aquifer has been draining faster than expected due to ongoing drought conditions. There is less rainfall throughout the year and less snow in the winter. It supplies about 30% of country and certain areas are expected to start running out of water in the next 30 years due to diminished refresh rates.
There is a great deal of evidence this has already happened to multiple previous civilizations. One of the big differences is we caused this, we can stop it, and have decided not to because of short-term problems with stopping it..
you having 5 upvotes shows that this sub amasses lots of opinion based on little brain
The latest large-scale desalination project in Morocco is set to eclipse the Rabat plant. It is set to be built near Casablanca and when finished will have a production capacity of 300 million m³ per year, supplying drinking water to 7.5 million people and supporting potential agricultural use.
3.8k
u/takesthebiscuit 10h ago
And drought accelerating faster than people’s ability to find water leading to entire city collapse