Comment by simonw
6 months ago
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
Agriculture feeds people, Simon.
It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that water, but a significant fraction of that activity is effectively essential.
If you're going to minimize people's concern like this, at least compare it to discretionary uses we could ~live without.
The data's about 20 years old, but for example https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2... suggests we were using over 2b gallons a day to water golf courses.
The vast majority of water in agriculture goes to satisfy our taste buds, not nourish our bodies. Feed crops like alalfa consume huge amounts of water in the desert southwest but the desert climate makes it a great place to grow and people have an insatiable demand for cattle products.
We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions for themselves. I'm not sure why we should take a different approach when making decisions about compute.
> We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat.
If you look at the data for animals, that’s not really true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is that the vast majority of water used for animals is “green water” used for animal feed - that’s rainwater that isn’t captured but goes into the soil. Most of the plants used for animal feed don’t use irrigation agriculture so we’d be saving very little on water consumption if we cut out all animal products [2]. Our water consumption would even get a lot worse because we’d have to replace that protein with tons of irrigated farmland and we’d lose the productivity of essentially all the pastureland that is too marginal to grow anything on (50% of US farmland, 66% globally).
Animal husbandry has been such a successful strategy on a planetary scale because it’s an efficient use of marginal resources no matter how wealthy or industrialized you are. Replacing all those calories with plants that people want to actually eat is going to take more resources, not less, especially when you’re talking about turning pastureland into productive agricultural land.
[1] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
[2] a lot of feed is also distiller’s grains used for ethanol first before feeding them to animals, so we’d wouldn’t even cut out most of that
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I mean it's even simpler. Almonds are entirely non essential (many other more water efficient nuts) to the food supply and in California consume more water than the entire industrial sector, and a bit more than all residential usage (~5 million acre-feet of water).
Add a datacenter tax of 3x to water sold to datacenters and use it to improve water infrastructure all around. Water is absolutely a non-issue medium term, and is only a short term issue because we've forgotten how to modestly grow infrastructure in response to rapid changes in demand.
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Thanks for the sanity!! I wish more people understood this
Ask people which they'd rather have: -no more meat and a little better AI -keep their meat and AI doesn't improve from where it is today..
I called out golf in my first comment in this thread.
If data center usage meant we didn't have enough water for agriculture I would shout that from the rooftops.
Yep--I'm agreeing that one's a good comparison to elaborate on.
Exploring how it stacks up against an essential use probably won't persuade people who perceive it as wasteful.
Growing almonds is just as essential as building an AI. Eating beef at the rate americans do is not essential. Thats where basically all the water usage is going.
Agriculture is generally essential but that doesn't mean that any specific thing done in the name of agriculture is essential.
If Americans cut their meat consumption by 10%, we would use a lot less water in agriculture and probably also live longer in general
Iran's ongoing water crisis is an example. One cause of it is unnecessary water-intensive crops that they could have imported or done without (just consume substitutes).
It's a common reasoning error to bundle up many heterogeneous things into a single label ("agriculture!") and then assign value to the label itself.
I am surprised by your analytical mistake of comparing irrigation water with data-center water usage...
They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to misleading conclusions on the impact.
That's a really good point - you're right, comparing data center usage to potable water usage by towns is a different and more valid comparison than comparing with water for irrigation.
They made a good point, but keep in mind that they're doing a "rules for thee, not for me" sometimes.
The same person who mentioned potable water being an important distinction also cited a report on data center water consumption that did not make the distinction (where the 628M number came from).
The problem is many data centers are in areas where water systems are supply constrained... - https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
This is not a distinction that your second link (that has the 628M number) was making either
> water evaporation from hydroelectric dam reservoirs in their water use calculations
The factual soundness of my argument is independent of the report quality :-) the report influences comprehension, not correctness...
The fact data centers are already having a major impact on the public water supply systems is known, by the decisions some local governments are forced to do, if you care to investigate...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
"...in some regions where data centers are concentrated—and especially in regions already facing shortages—the strain on local water systems can be significant. Bloomberg News reports that about two-thirds of U.S. data centers built since 2022 are in high water-stress areas.
In Newton County, Georgia, some proposed data centers have reportedly requested more water per day than the entire county uses daily. Officials there now face tough choices: reject new projects, require alternative water-efficient cooling systems, invest in costly infrastructure upgrades, or risk imposing water rationing on residents...."
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...