Comment by simonw

> I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics"

The comment you're replying to is calling other people AI skeptics.

Your advice has some fine parts to it (and simonw's comment is innocuous in its use of the term), but if we're really going meta, you seem to be engaging in the tribal conflict you're decrying by lecturing an imaginary person rather than the actual context of what you're responding to.

Expecting a purely technical discussion is unrealistic because many people have significant vested interests. This includes not only those with financial stakes in AI stocks but also a large number of professionals in roles that could be transformed or replaced by this technology. For these groups, the discussion is inherently political, not just technical.

| Drop the politics

Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.

Most municipalities literally do not have enough spare power to service this 1.4 trillion dollar capital rollout as planned on paper. Even if they did, the concurrent inflation of energy costs is about as political as a topic can get.

Economic uncertainty (firings, wage depression) brought on by the promises of AI is about as political as it gets. There's no 'pure world' of 'engineering only' concerns when the primary goals of many of these billionaires is leverage this hype, real and imagined, into reshaping the global economy in their preferred form.

The only people that get to be 'apolitical' are those that have already benefitted the most from the status quo. It's a privilege.

I mean, it is intellectually honest to point out that the AI debate at the point is much more a religious or political than strictly technical really. Especially the way tech CEOs hype this as the end of everything.

> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits.

I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.

It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.

It seems like there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and "AI skepticism."

I have no idea why.

I don't think that the correlation is 1, but it seems weirdly high.

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> On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits.

Zero obligation to satisfy HN audience; tiny proportion of the populace. But for giggles...

Technical merits: there are none. Look at Karpathy's GPT on Github. Just some boring old statistics. These technologies are built on top of mathematical principles in textbooks printed 70-80 years ago.

The sharding and distribution of work across numerous machines is also a well trodden technical field.

There is no net new discovery.

This is 100% a political ploy on the part of tech CEOs who take advantage of the innumerate/non-technical political class that holds power. That class is bought into the idea that massive leverage over resource markets is a win for them, and they won't be alive to pay the price of the environmental destruction.

It's not "energy and water" concerns, it's survival of the species concerns obfuscated by socio-political obligations to keep calm carry on and debate endlessly, as vain circumlocution is the hallmark of the elders whose education was modeled on people being VHS cassettes of spoken tradition, industrial and political roles.

IMO there is little technical merit to most software. Maps, communication. That's all that's really needed. ZIRP era insanity juiced the field and created a bunch of self-aggrandizing coder bros whose technical achievements are copy-paste old ideas into new syntax and semantics, to obfuscate their origins, to get funded, sell books, book speaking engagements. There is no removing any of this from politics as political machinations gave rise to the dumbest era of human engineering effort ever.

The only AI that has merit is robotics. Taking manual labor of people that are otherwise exploited by bougie first worlders in their office jobs. People who have, again with the help of politicians, externalized their biologies real needs on the bodies of poorer illiterates they don't have to see as the first-world successfully subjugated them and moved operations out of our own backyard.

Source: was in the room 30 years ago, providing feedback to leadership how to wind down local manufacturing and move it all over to China. Powerful political forces did not like the idea of Americans having the skills and knowledge to build computers. It ran afoul of their goals to subjugate and manipulate through financial engineering.

Americans have been intentionally screwed out of learning hands on skills with which they would have political leverage over the status quo.

There is no removing politics from this. The situation we are in now was 100% crafted by politics.

The fact that certain specific data centres are being proposed or built in areas with water issues may be bad, but it does not imply that all AI data centres are water guzzling drain holes that are killing Earth, which is the point you were (semi-implicitly) making in the article.

An update: there seems to be a critical error in the reporting of metrics in this book for the water issue. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mis....

I do think the whole water issue as pointed out in the book is completely discredited with this call out.

The author Karen Hao acknowledges this:

https://x.com/_KarenHao/status/1990412118584144113

Thanks for the recommendation, added to my reading list.

The mistake you are making is letting the author choose your points of comparison, without having a high-level picture of where water usage goes. Comparing water usage to a city is misleading because cities don't use much water; large-scale water use is entirely dominated by agriculture.

I'm conflicted. Zooming out, the problem isn't with AI specifically but economic development in general. Everything has a side effect.

For decades we've been told we shouldn't develop urban centers because of how it development affects local communities, but really it just benefited another class of elites (anonymous foreign investors), and now housing prices are impoverishing younger generations and driving homelessness.

Obviously that's not a perfect comparison to AI, which isn't as necessary, but I think the anti-growth argument isn't a good one. Democracies need to keep growing or authoritarian states will take over who don't care so much about human rights. (Or, authoritarian governments will take over democracies.)

There needs to be a political movement that's both pro-growth and pro-humanity, that is capable of making hard or disruptive decisions that actually benefits the poor. Maybe that's a fantasy, but again, I think we should find ways to grow sustainably.

IIRC Google chose to pull out altogether to punish the locals for standing up to them— even though they happily built air-cooled data centers elsewhere.

None of which have to do with AI or AGI.

Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer.

It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case.

What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-dat...

> I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a different story: the farmer said that the local utility was set to hike rates for the third time in three years, with the most recent proposed hike being in the double digits.

The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it. There are plenty of credible reasons to criticize data enters, use those instead!

I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.

I don't think there's a world where a water use tax is levied such that 1) it's enough for datacenters to notice and 2) doesn't immediately bankrupt all golf courses and beef production, because the water use of datacenters is just so much smaller.

You're not wrong.

My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss.

And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading.

Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month.

Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections—driven largely by anticipated data center growth"

With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than it did yesterday.

Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual impact on the world, engaging with the facts and understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.

In what way are they not paying for it?

This feels like it makes a lot of assumptions:

1. That just because a region doesn’t have enough potable water to support humans and data centers, it also doesn’t have enough potable water to support the humans alone.

2. That the temporary increase in water prices due to the new demand of the data centers will provide enough revenue to upgrade its facilities

3. Even given enough revenue to upgrade its facilities, that the utility will choose to upgrade its facilities and increase demand

4. That the downsides of a temporary increase in water prices while new facilities are built is acceptable and will not cause suffering

5. Even after new facilities are built, that the cost of those facilities will be low enough and the increase in supply large enough that water prices for humans will be lower than they were originally, even with a large and wealthy new buyer on the market.

It doesn’t feel like a very strong argument to me.

This part of his argument is not self evident or intuitive and I'm not convinced that the abstract economic model maps cleanly to the messy reality. I'm much more assuaged by the fact that it seems to cost ~$1/1000 gallons to convert fresh water into potable water.

Like, if agriculture uses fresh water and data centers use potable water, the important question is how hard it is to convert fresh water into potable water?

The answer seems to be "not very" so the difference is kind of moot

Here's his full argument: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...

There's a bunch in there but this bit caught my eye in particular:

> The US public water supply uses ~40 billion gallons per day, all of this is potable. Data centers used 50 million gallons per day onsite in 2023. So their potable water usage was 0.13% of the public water supply.

That's a naive argument. Infrastructure construction timelines are typically measured in years and decades. You need to find the political will to do it and sufficient guarantees of long-term demand to justify the investment. And the work itself is often done in difficult environments, such as under major streets or on privately owned land that may already be in use.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone.

This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity.

What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people - than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.

Water usage largely depends on the context, if the water source is sustainable, and if it is freshwater.

Of course water used up will eventually evaporate, and produce rainfall in the water cycle, but unfortunately at many places "fossil" water is used up, or more water used in an area then the watershed can sustainably support.

This is a constant source of miscommunication about water usage, and that of agriculture also. It is very different to talk about the water needs to raise a cow in eg. Colorado and in Scotish highlands, but this is usually removed from the picture.

The same context should be considered for datacenters.

They are making an anti-disruption argument.

I think it's bad though to be against growth, for reasons I've described in another comment.

That is correct, AI data centers deliver far more utility per unit of water than farm/golf land.

who are you to determine the utility? we have the market for it and it has spoken.

Not to mention that this is likely a very short-term debate. Modern AI/ML/compute has been a huge boost to fusion R&D, and tons of AI/tech capital is flowing into companies like Helion and CFS. Necessity is the mother of invention and all.

It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first few plants go live and mass production begins within the next decade. Knock on wood.

A lot of data centers are near the Columbia river, as power is cheap there thanks to hydroelectric; which flows through an arid desert-like region, but is also the largest river in the western US and it's simply impossible to pump too much water out of it.

Does it route the hot water back into a river?

In europe several power plants get shut down each summer because the heated water from those plants would have significant impact on the local wildlife.

The problem is more one of scale: a million liters of water is less than half of a single Olympic-sized swimming pool. A single acre of alfalfa typically requires 4.9 - 7.6 million liters a year for irrigation. Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool and be sent back, but the irrigation water is lost to transpiration and the recycling-by-weather process.

So, even if there's no recycling, a data center that is said to consume "millions" rather than tens or hundreds of millions is probably using less than 5 acres of alfalfa in consumption, and in absolute terms, this requires only a swimming-pool or two of water per years. It's trivial.

Not really. The majority of data center water withdrawal (total water input) is consumed ("lost" to evaporation etc...) with a minority of it discharged (returned in liquid form). I believe it's on the order of 3/4ths consumed, but that varies a lot by local climate and cooling technology.

There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options, but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction of data centers globally.

"Presented by the USGA" (the United States Golf Association) gave me a wry chuckle there.

That said, here are the relevant numbers from that 2012 article in full:

> Most 18-hole golf facilities utilize surface waters (ponds, lakes) or on-site irrigation wells. Approximately 14 percent of golf facilities use water from a public municipal source and approximately 12 percent use recycled water as a source for irrigation.

> Specific water sources for 18-hole courses as indicated by participants are noted below:

> 52 percent use water from ponds or lakes.

> 46 percent use water from on-site wells.

> 17 percent use water from rivers, streams and creeks.

> 14 percent use water from municipal water systems.

> 12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.

If water is just used for cooling, and the output is hotter water, then it's not really "used" at all. Maybe it needs to be cooled to ambient and filtered before someone can use it, but it's still there.

If it was being used for evaporative cooling then the argument would be stronger. But I don't think it is - not least because most data centres don't have massive evaporative cooling towers.

Even then, whether we consider it a bad thing or not depends on the location. If the data centre was located in an area with lots of water, it's not some great loss that it's being evaporated. If it's located in a desert then it obviously is.

Put that way, any electricity usage will have some "water usage" as power plants turn up their output (and the cooling pumps) slightly. And that's not even mentioning hydroelectric plants!

The reported case about water wells running dry had to do with issues in construction rather than anything about the data center's regular operation:

> But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater from construction. It had nothing to do with the data center’s normal operations (it hadn’t begun operating yet, and doesn’t even draw from local groundwater). The residents were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this is not an example of a data center’s water demand harming a local population.

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...

We really need to stop tying people's retirement to the market. I've already lost ground due to 2008, and COVID, and while I was young, I lived through my parents suffering through dotcom as well.

It's long past time we have a universal public pension, funded at least in part with a progressive wealth tax, or least go back to private defined benefit pensions to where the employer or pension fund bears the risk rather than the individual.

Supplement it with market speculation if you want, but we need something guaranteed for everyone that's a little more robust and provides a better living than the paltry social security we have now.

Absolutely.

Yeah I think it's to avoid mineral buildup on the cooling equipment which would then need to be replaced more often.

Humans have been measuring between human only vs augmented labor for literal centuries.

Frederick Taylor literally invented the process you describe in his “principles of scientific management”

This is the entire focus of the Toyota automation model.

The consistent empirical pattern is:

Machine-only systems outperform humans on narrow, formalizable tasks.

Human-machine hybrid systems outperform both on robustness, yieldjng higher success probability

Good enough?

I don't think anyone who read my comment here misunderstood my usage of the term "AI skeptic" as applying to any form of machine learning as opposed to modern generative AI.

See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268

Given the difference in water usage, more data centers does not mean less water for agriculture in any meaningful way.

If you genuinely want to save water you should celebrate any time an acre of farm land is converted into an acre of data center - all the more water for the other farms!

Whether it's a "gigantic" waste of water depends on what those figures mean. It's very important to understand if 25 million liters of water per year is a gigantic number or not.

Its not gigantic and its not a waste. Brainrot creates massive economic value that can be used to pay people for products you are more happy to consume.

And also, none of those current use cases are a real benefit to society, outside of maybe research cases.

The only benefit is to the already wealthy owner class that is itching to not have to pay for employees anymore because it impacts their bottom line (payroll is typically the largest expense).

It's not like we are making robots to automate agriculture and manufacturing to move toward a post scarcity, moneyless society, which would have real benefits. No, instead we have AI companies hyping up a product whose purpose (according to them) is so that already wealthy people can hoard more wealth and not have to pay for employees. It's promising to take away a large portion of the only high-paying jobs we have left for the average person without an advanced degree.

Me being able to write software a little faster, without hiring a junior, is a net negative to society rather than a benefit.

Seems the problem is the revealed preference of the normies, rather than the technology itself.

That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about here:

> A small data centre using this type of cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...]

> For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Querétaro sites used 40 million litres of water, it added.

> That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the numbers are huge.

That's not credible reporting because it makes no effort at all to help the reader understand the magnitude of those figures.

"40 million litres of water" is NOT "a lot of water". As far as I can tell that's about the same annual water usage as a 24 acre soybean field.