Comment by newfocogi
3 days ago
I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards:
'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.'
Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.
Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course.
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
Yep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2].
People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture.
1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w...
2: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-emissions-...
Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in. Why do we have golf courses in arid regions that have severe water shortages? Before places like LA county spends $8 billion on a toilet to tap system[2], maybe shut down the golf courses first.
1. https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/91363837/water-thirsty-golf-c...
2. https://www.mwdh2o.com/building-local-supplies/pure-water-so...
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It’s a great example of using large numbers without context to scare people.
Say “6.4 billion gallons” in isolation and people will be horrified. Put it in context relative to something like alfalfa farming and it doesn’t even appear on the same scale.
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And most of that alfalfa is owned by a Saudi conglomerate that then exports it to the other side of the planet to feed its dairy cattle
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You are overlooking location. The ideal place to grow crops is a place with great soil, good weather, a long growing season, and abundant water, but there aren't a lot of those. Of those four things, water is the only one that can be reasonably transported.
Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places where water is abundant.
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Solar powered desalination seems like a no brainer in places like California.
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Water is not evenly distributed.aData centers are not bieng located where there is excess water, they are bieng located in areas where they have access to the critical infrastucture they need,and the use of domestic potable water supplys to cool there operations is done as it reduces there land and infrastructure requirements, is quick, and they care nothing about the costs of electricity and water, while they drive up costs for the people who live in the surounding areas. People NEED water, data does not. People NEED agriculture, they do not NEED data. conflating the water uses of things to people is false.
I remember doing the calculations on the Nestle plant that caused a big storm a few years ago. The plant sat on several acres of land, which if converted into an alfalfa farm, would have consumed the same amount of water. The surrounding area was littered with alfalfa farms so it wasn't an unfair comparison. Meanwhile that bottling plant employs dozens of people, far more then a farm would have.
There are a lot of historical reasons for people to be angry at Nestle, aside from their impact on water.
It's become a meme, or a badge to display your tribal affiliation, to be mad at Nestle. Monsanto is another example of this phenomenon.
nit: Nestle sold off it's water brands in 2021 to a private equity group.[0][1]
0 - https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-s... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY
Right cause we have all gone and measured truth. Not just read possibly biased information off a screen.
Asimov wrote about this in Foundation. If you are not checking yourself it's blind faith in inherently self selecting dishonest people
Many golf courses in arid regions are on greywater.
That could be used as potable water again. Orange county,CA injects treated waste water back into the aquifer then pumps back out for water.
https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs
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Why is water used for golf a waste vs other uses?
From an utilitarian point of view golf courses use a lot of water per person playing.
the parent poster's using a sort of morality argument to call water usage they dont/cant benefit from as wastage.
The issue with Nestle is that they are paying pennies on the dollar compared to the public because "muh job creation" or something to that effect.
> How much water is wasted on golf courses...
Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
I mean unless you transport it off-planet.
You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.
In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.
You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.
For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.
A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.
Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.
Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
True. However, substitution of one good for another, or bringing online another source, won’t be instantaneous and thus otherwise needless human suffering will occur. The raw numbers don’t capture that.
> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.
You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong.
The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management.
Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.
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Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes.
During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity.
And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.
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Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.
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Here in Michigan, my water price is also about 5% of my electric bill. Which is also small, we barely used the AC this summer.
Water billing here is (frustratingly) not progressive: the first thousand gallons costs the same as the tenth or hundredth thousand gallons. It's cheap, we're surrounded by fresh water on the surface and you can stick a well down through 80-100 feet of glacial sand and gravel and get drinkable water basically anywhere.
I was surprised to learn that 70% of my township's municipal water is used by only 15% of the households: basically, those that irrigate their lawns daily.
Why should it be progressive if it's not even scarce there? Why are you trying to punish people unnecessarily?
>I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah)
Doesn’t matter whether you are in the desert or not, only matters if you are in a shared watershed with them. There is huge agricultural demand for water and water rights in those areas which translates to high prices for the areas where they can source water (like your presumably more-watered location)
I think the water-usage stuff regarding data centers is really lacking context in online discourse – and yet, I still believe that freshwater usage really needs to be more of a concern for people, generally. I'm not 'anti-AI' but, I cringe a bit every time someone dismissively says "water cycle" to dismiss concerns around freshwater because, some aquifers are not going to recharge in a meaningful timeframe. That water isn't 'destroyed' – but if a town is tight on water already, it's not necessarily coming back, practically speaking.
I would like to know how much water is taken by a datacenter vs. the same size space of apartments. I can see why it could be considered a bad choice for communities long term if a datacenter takes more.
The government in The Dalles, Oregon were suing local newspapers that were questioning Google's water usage in the city:
https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/
Apparently Google uses nearly 30% of the city's water supply:
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa...
I highly doubt any apartment block comes close to taking 30% of a city's water supply.
I’ve driven through The Dalles. It’s a very small town. A search shows a population of 15,000 and declining annually.
It’s also right on a big river. The article you linked said that Google was spending nearly $30 million to improve the city’s water infrastructure so there are no problems.
Talking about this in terms of percentages of a small town’s water supply while ignoring the fact that the city is literally on a giant river and Google is paying for the water infrastructure is misleading.
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That's because it's a large industry and nobody lives there. This pattern appears all over the place. The paper mills in the pacific northwest consume large multiples of the water used by their little towns.
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Some quick napkin math using averages (data center designs vary). One of Google's larger and thirstier data centers, in Oklahoma, is said to use 833 million gallons per year (that's about 2500 acre-feet, in useful terms). It occupies about 250 acres, most of which looks to be parking lots but whatever. The number of households that can be supported on 1 acre-foot per year ranges from 2 to 6 depending (Las Vegas on one end, San Francisco on the other).
You said apartments specifically and this urban form usually starts at 50 dwellings per acre, minimum, which would lead me to say the apartments use more water. The break-even point in this equation is 2-5 households per acre.
Apples and oranges, you can compare the water usage, but places for people to live aren't in the same category as datacenters.
Yes they are. Both can be built in areas with abundant water supply.
With no AC and gas hot water, my monthly water bill is ~150% of my electric (that water cost is not including the wastewater that is billed on the water metering).
My water usage is pretty average and my electric usage is apparently hilariously low.
I live in the northwest US. My water bill is 110%-120% of my electric bill.
a datacenter getting "priority" over potable water to feed the data farms instead of, say, requiring "humans first, datacenter if there's any left"
It staggers me you’ve never wondered these things before.
You’re paying money and using resources and you’ve never looked into the details?
Living in Australia where both are expensive and very finite it’s a must.
I track my water usage and electricity usage every month. I'm confused why the cost ratio is off by an order of magnitude from the author. The base monthly charge of my water bill ignoring any usage is more then 10% of my largest electricity bill (so maybe that's the answer right there).
We have the fourth largest river basin in the world. And four mountain ranges.