Comment by lynndotpy
6 months ago
Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
6 months ago
Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
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?
Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production, either. Your example would be even more extreme if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle. Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year in the US.
The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years.
Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.
>Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use.
If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)
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>Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production,
Excellent, that means we can save massive amounts of water by stopping almond production in the western US.
People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that doesn't really help the counter-argument.
Example article from a decade ago: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...
Aren't Californian almonds like 80% of the world's production?
Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ?
I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples.
Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have cloud AI compute. It's personal, but I'd be more sad that I'd never get to experience the taste of an almond and all the cuisine that comes with it.
> Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT
You've misread it. It's not compared to AI datacenters, it's every type of datacenter, for all types of computing.
In the future scenario you've laid out it wouldn't be cloud AI compute. You wouldn't be able to use HN or send email or pay with a credit card or play video games or stream video.
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Depends on what the datacenters are used for.
AI has no utility.
Almonds make marzipan.
AI has way more utility than you are claiming and less utility than Sam Altman and the market would like us to believe. It’s okay to have a nuanced take.
"AI has no utility" is a pretty wild claim to make in the tail end of 2025.
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Well, I don't like marzipan, so both are useless? Or maybe different people find uses/utility from different things, what is trash for one person can be life saving for another, or just "better than not having it" (like you and Marzipan it seems).
ok in that case you don't need to pick on water in particular, if it has no utility at all then literally any resource use is too much, so why bother insisting that water in particular is a problem? It's pretty energy intensive, eg.
Marzipan is fun, but useful?
AI is at least as useful as marzipan.
Activated almonds create funko pops. I’d still take the data centers over the funko pops buying basedboys that almonds causes.
AI has no utility _for you_ because you live in this bubble where you are so rabidly against it you will never allow yourself to acknowledge it has non-zero utility.
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What does it mean to “use” water? In agriculture and in data centers my understanding is that water will go back to the sky and then rain down again. It’s not gone, so at most we’re losing the energy cost to process that water.
The problem is that you take the water from the ground, and you let it evaporate, and then it returns to... Well to various places, including the ground, but the deeper you take the water from (drinking water can't be taken from the surface, and for technological reasons drinking water is used too) the more time it takes to replenish the aquifer - up to thousands of years!
Of course surface water availability can also be a serious problem.
So with the water used in datacenters. It's just a cooling loop, the output is hot water.
and water from datacenters goes where...? just disappears?
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I'll take the almonds any day.
Other people might have other preferences. Maybe we could have a price system where people can express their preferences by paying for things with money, providing more money to the product which is in greater demand?
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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.
you can make a strong argument for the greater necessity of farming for survival, but not for golf...
God forbid the public has an amenity.
I mean... Food is pretty important ...
Which is why the comparison in the amount of water usage matters.
Data centers in the USA use less than a fraction of a percent of the water that's used for agriculture.
I'll start worrying about competition with water for food production when that value goes up by a multiple of about 1000.
The water intensity of American food production would be substantially less if we gave up on frivolous things like beef, which requires water vastly out of proportion to its utility. If the water numbers for datacenters seem scary then the water use numbers for the average American's beef consumption is apocalyptic.
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Corn, potatoes and wheat are important maybe even oranges, but we could live with a lot less alfalfa and almonds.
Also a lot less meat in general. A huge part of our agriculture is feed to feed our food. We need some meat, but the current amount is excessive
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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.