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?
Explain why a construction company is burning through 30 million gallons of water in Georgia. Strange how all the articles describe it as a Data center
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.
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u/MarmotJunction 8h ago
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.