Comment by tptacek
3 hours ago
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
3 hours ago
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
So a system to recirculate the same 24 gallons per minute would be more expensive than $100k per year for water?
Apparently so
My state's gasoline refineries use about ~13 million gallons of water each day. It's about .7 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline refined.
I don't know if you mean to be reinforcing that it's nothing or not
Remind me median income?
$87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill.
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
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Remind me who leaves 8 bath tub faucets running 24/7/365?
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I live in a country of 5 million people and we lose 40 times that a year to leaks.
So a single datacentre introduces a water consumption cost that is within an order-of-magnitude of a near-median-population nation.
Perhaps not a meaningful amount at a national/worldwide scale. However, an individual datacentre consuming that amount at a local/regional scale could be more impactful.
The nearby city uses as 30Mgal to 60Mgal per day vs the data center that uses 13Mgal per year. The article gives you the data.
Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?
Transparency is not the same thing as honesty.
Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.
Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.
I don't understand your question. I'm commenting on the figures we know from this report. I don't have to work out the motives behind them to evaluate whether they're material (they are not).
Because the marketing teams don't do numbers and it's a high risk strategy
They are, and people just accuse them of lying!
Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.
“Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion… reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption”.
I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.
It looks to me like there's two Google DCs with different LLCs?
> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.
> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.
> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.
Even that 765 is like 0.04% of the water needed to irrigate Nebraska's ethanol corn crop alone. And ethanol is basically an agricultural proof-of-work function.
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Please elucidate if I'm wrong, but, isn't the problem the distribution of the water and not the amount? If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.
I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
> If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.
Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.
Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
This feels like an important point! People comparing to leaks (or other distributed examples that aggregate similarly) are not thinking about how the amount of water used in a single location changes the scale.
Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.
Real estate is almost always "hidden" behind an LLC or REIT, as recommended as common practice by CPAs and attorneys.
It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.
Do I understand the logic here to be "if there's an LLC with an obscure name involved, it must be using too much water"?
No, it’s that if there’s nothing to hide, then they shouldn’t jump through so many hoops to avoid basic industrial reporting requirements.
It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.
If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.
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To me, the logic is companies don’t put their brand on activities that contribute to tragedies of the commons.
Alphabet could have named the company “google data center 083941, llc.”
But Alphabet deliberately obfuscated its control of the facility.
That’s more of a convenient way to distribute and isolate risks than it is anything nefarious.
You see, that is nefarious. Not taking responsibility is nefarious.
Or to shift blame and hide wrongdoing.
What I now wonder is why the hell they're trying to hide it then. If the numbers are strongly on your side, why hide them?!
Because nobody reasonable believes water use is any issue, but these numbers are proxy for the usual stuff companies don't disclose for usual reasons (ones that rhyme with "competition" and "stock market")?
They sure as hell aren't making it easy for the "reasonable" to take their side when their response to the "unreasonable" is "the numbers you claim are bad are actually good, but you don't get to see them because they go to a different school".
We have perfectly good reasons to hide behind shell companies and ndas! Anyone who disagrees is a hater!
Because hedge funds are going to use those numbers to get better estimates of their business and revenues and use that in their forecasting which means Google loses in the stock market.
Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.
No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.
I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.
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>they are not meaningful users of water.
How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.
See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...
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Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.
Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
How do you get the California water to this datacenter?
In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.