Comment by donohoe
6 months ago
The AI water issue isn't fake, though it's often overstated.
The key problem is that data center evaporative cooling permanently removes water from local systems, unlike irrigation or golf courses where some water returns to groundwater, evaporated cooling water is lost to the atmosphere and must be continuously replenished.
While 0.008% of national freshwater seems tiny, the author misses the local impact. In water-stressed regions, even "small" demands matter. Comparing to golf courses in Phoenix sets the bar absurdly low, "less wasteful than the worst example" shouldn't be the standard.
The author dismisses 905M gallons in Maricopa County as "only 0.12%" of county use, but in a desert already overdrawing groundwater, that's 905M gallons unavailable for human needs.
The media has exaggerated, sure. But calling legitimate resource concerns "fake" swings way too far the other way. We need careful planning for data center locations, not dismissal of water consumption because other industries use more.
> The author dismisses 905M gallons in Maricopa County as "only 0.12%" of county use, but in a desert already overdrawing groundwater, that's 905M gallons unavailable for human needs.
Can you help explain what 905M gallons of water means?
My biggest problem with the data center water debate continues to be people throwing around big scary numbers like that without attempting to provide context for them.
(I found one estimate that the average US resident uses 30,000 gallons per year, which would make 900,000,000 gallons the same as 30,000 people.)
So imagine 30,000 people suddenly appear in the empty lot next door needing water.
I'm not trusting the linked blog itself, so I looked up the sources it used. The blog is claiming:
> estimates that data centers in Maricopa County will use 905 million gallons of water in 2025
One reason I don't trust this blog, is that this text links out, but the link itself ends in:
And when I follow through, the actually linked text (on domain circleofblue.org) says:
Not being an American, I had to look up Maricopa country; according to Wikipedia, it's 62% of the state's total population, so lots, but definitely not all; and according to this other list of data centres, it has most (but still not all) of Arizona's data centers: https://www.datacenters.com/locations/united-states/arizona
Either way, whoever made this blog post, wasn't paying quite close enough attention to the sources for my taste. Don't mind people using ChatGPT as a search engine (it's better than Google these days, after all), but this does feel like a blog that was vibed, not one that was carefully curated.
Now, if the circleofblue.org claim about 905 million gallons is true, I can compare it to the claim on the hopefully-trustworthy arizona.edu domain that "Arizona used 7.0 million acre-feet of water in 2017": https://mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/article/arizonas-water-us... and the state population of 7,582,384 and can see this is very close to approximately one acre-foot of water per person per year, but I don't need to be approximated when I can do an exact calculation in Wolfram Alpha and get 300,824 gallons/person/year: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=7+million+acre-feet+%2F...
This makes 905 million gallons/year equivalent to 3,008 people, not 30k, but remember this also includes all the other industry, farming, etc.: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28905+million+gallons%...
But the two really important parts here are (1): according to the previously mentioned map of Arizona's data centres and circleofblue.org link, that's for all 108 data centres across Arizona not just one; (2) 102 of the 108 data centres are in Phoenix, which has a population of about 1.6 million and isn't going to notice the impact of 30k, let alone 3k, extra residents.
(But then, can I trust circleofblue.org and datacenters.com? Is anything on the internet trustworthy any more?)
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>The key problem is that data center evaporative cooling permanently removes water from local systems, unlike irrigation or golf courses where some water returns to groundwater, evaporated cooling water is lost to the atmosphere and must be continuously replenished.
But farms and golf courses suffer from evaporation as well, so that argument really only means you can discount farm/golf water usage by some fraction (eg. 50%). Considering the consumption figures are 0.08% for datecenters and the 8% for golf courses, the argument still holds up.
The word "desalination" pops to mind.