Comment by paulryanrogers
6 months ago
Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean datacenters should get a pass.
Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.
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!
The other reason water usage is a bad thing to focus on is that datacenters don't inherently have to use water. It's not like servers have a spigot where you pour water in and it gets consumed.
Water is used in modern datacenters for evaporative cooling, and the reason it's used is to save energy -- it's typically around 10% more energy efficient overall than normal air conditioning. These datacenters often have a PUE of under 1.1, meaning they're over 90% efficient at using power for compute, and evaporative cooling is one of the reasons they're able to achieve such high efficiency.
If governments wanted to, they could mandate that datacenters use air conditioning instead of evaporative cooling, and water usage would drop to near zero (just enough for the restrooms, watering the plants, etc). But nobody would ever seriously suggest doing this because it would be using more of a valuable resource (electricity / CO2 emissions) to save a small amount of a cheap and relatively plentiful resource (water).
> The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it
Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
"...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..."
"I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption" - https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
"...So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption. If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated..."
Also from that article:
> U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021).
Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture.
USGS 2015 report: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945
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What counts as data center water consumption here? There are many ways to arguably come up with a number.
Does it count water use for cooling only, or does it include use for the infrastructure that keeps it running (power generation, maintenance, staff use, etc.)
Is this water evaporated? Or moved from A to B and raised a few degrees.
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Humans don’t consume much water used by humans. Cows do.
A farmer is a valuable perspective but imagine asking a lumberjack about the ecological effects of deforestation, he might know more about it than an average Joe, but there's probably better people to ask for expertise?
> Honestly, we probably use more water than they do
This kind of proves my point, regardless of the actual truth in this regard, it's a terrible argument to make: availability of water starts to become a huge problem in a growing amount of places, and this statement implies the water usage of something, that in basic principle doesn't need water at all, uses comparable amount of water as farming, which strictly relies on water.
The author of the article followed the quote from the farmer with a fact-checked (this is the New Yorker) note about water usage for AI training.
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.
> 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
Especially since so many anti-crypto people immediately pivoted to anti-AI. That sudden shift in priorities makes it hard to take them seriously.
On the flip side, the crypto hype machine pretty seamlessly flipped to the AI hype machine, so it makes sense the same anti crowd shifted pretty seamlessly. Given the practical applications of crypto were minimal and the externalities were mostly crime and pollution, I’m not at all surprised that many people expect the same for AI.
The anti-crypto people were correct, though. Why should we not push back when we’re seeing the same type of baseless hype that surrounded crypto being cultivated around the AI space?
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I didn't pivot - I'm still strongly anti-crypto and pretty strongly anti-AI.
But if I say "I object to AI because <list of harms> and its water use", why would you assume that I don't also object to alfalfa farming in Arizona?
Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide?
This is nothing but whataboutism.
People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the other bad things happening in the world at the same time.
Because your argument is more persuasive to more people if you don't expand your criticism to encompass things that are already normalized. Focus on the unique harms IMO.
No, that's not the point.
If you take a strong argument and through in an extra weak point, that just makes the whole argument less persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people think).
You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave factories produce is terrible for the environment."
Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.
Adding a weak argument is a red flag for BS detectors. It's what prosecutors do to hoodwink a jury into stacking charges over a singular underlying crime.
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.
We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness.
Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.
I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason datacenters would keep operating and beef production wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per gallon.
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> We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness.
Might as well get rid of all the lawns and football fields while we’re at it.
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Water taxes should probably be regional. The price of water in the arid Southwest is much higher than toward the East coast. You might see both datacenters and beef production moving toward states like Tennessee or Kentucky.
Of course golf courses are useful as shown by the fact that people pay to use them. Perhaps you mean that you personally haven't (yet) found them useful, but you know that different people want different things. I think eating shrimp is disgusting and never eat them but I don't want to ban global shrimp production because the people it would harm are not me!
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.
Not only electricity, air pollution around some datacenters too
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
I'd love to say the air pollution issue get the attention that's currently being diverted to the water issue!
> It's an externality like you discuss.
It's not even an externality? They just pay market price for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.
If datacenters are getting electricity and water at a rate lower than retail (costs passed on to residents or tax payers), and factors like noise and water pollution aren't factored in, then yes there are unpriced externalities.
In what way are they not paying for it?