The AI water issue is fake

shepherdjerred

I posted this because I thought it was interesting. I've seen a lot of comments about AI water usage. This article feels a bit biased and I would love to see HN's take.

icapybara

The internet has disconnected us from reality so much that a lot of people simply don't care. If it supports the party line they are for it.

janice1999

You know this is from 2025 because of the large number of emdashes in the text and in the comment liked by the "author".

po1nt

I don't see the point of measuring how much water we use if we're not poluting it. It's water. It will evaporate and rain down again. It's renewable resource.

bix6

Two things jumped out to me. 1. No accounting for other countries or externalities such as large corporation leveraging to get what it wants at the expense of community members. 2. > Put another way, almost all (80%) the reported water used by AI occurs during the generation of electricity Well that sure seems like a problem to me cuz that’s water that now needs to be used for generation that wasn’t prior and it’s a significant amount. And that impacts my water and electricity prices now. Edit for 3: > Consumptive use can harm total access to freshwater, but freshwater sources are also regularly being replenished. Yeah I don’t think so when Mexico City is sinking because its aquifer was depleted. All in all he’s got some interesting points but I think he’s hyper focused on numbers and ignoring broader things.

kashura

The part in the article that is actually of interest to me focuses on the tax revenue section. Can someone versed in this explain? My initial reaction is b.s. Companies building these data centers, in many instances, get tax breaks to start building. On top if it they get different breaks on cost of electricity or materials. And on top of it, we all know that corporates pay less taxes than individuals already. And last but not least, data centers don't require a lot of staff, so there is no "trickle down". Curious to understand this better.

blurbleblurble

Listen, I really like LLMs and diffusion models and machine learning and all this stuff, and I want to see it happen in a just and sustainable way. "AI" doesn't necessitate extreme waste. If anything, reasonable policy constraints would push "AI" to be even better.

lacewing

I can't imagine what possessed the author to write this much text on the topic. But yes, that was always my impression. My pet conspiracy theory - which is completely unsubstantiated - is that if you're pushing for data centers in rural communities, you actually want people to get fixated on water usage, because you can then talk to the county commissioners and shoot down these criticisms so easily. Mega-scale AI data centers have other externalities. They're often touted as a way for rural counties to become the hubs of the digital era, but they don't employ many people, don't generate a whole lot of tax revenue, and basically just leverage cheap electricity at the expense of local residents. So it's a sham in that respect. You're not gonna have X, Google, Amazon, or Meta reinvigorate your community. You're just gonna have ratepayers subsidize some inference via higher electricity bills. I have no doubt that someone will chime in saying with an "actually..." that electricity is fungible and therefore, it doesn't matter where the datacenter is built. If it were so, they wouldn't be getting built in places like Wyoming or eastern Washington, and electricity prices in these markets would be the same as they are in the SF Bay Area. In practice, though, there's plenty of factors that make the US electricity markets a lot more local.

Supermancho

https://andymasley.com/writing/ was 50$ bounty, now 300$ - that's an unusually brazen stance.

passive

Maybe I missed it in the article, but it's less: "AI uses more water than other things" and more: "AI's water usage is being approved without proper planning, because of the arguably fake sense of urgency around it." Other industries that use significant water have significant regulations already . AI has been desperately trying to avoid ANY regulation (unless it forces folk to use AI.) I don't personally think water usage is the biggest issue with how AI is being rolled out, but it's one that is easier to engage the public on then copyright, or societal context collapse. :)

nofriend

The table of contents opens links in a new tab. If they didn't, they would require a full page reload, because they don't use fragments. This is seemingly how substack is designed.

sohex

I think this article hand waves and side steps what I see as two notable issues. The main one is aquifer depletion. The consumptive vs withdrawal argument mostly holds water, but consumptive is a sliding scale. Evaporative cooling for data centers is solidly at the far ‘truly consumptive’ end of that scale because the consumed water will not reenter the local watershed. That’s problematic because aquifers are very slow to refill. So this is genuinely a concern in water stressed areas. The other is the weak growth model. I suspect we’re only going to see faster and faster growth of data centers in coming years, making the consumption there more exponential than linear. Meanwhile the majority of the other consumptive consumers are strongly tied to demographics and population growth is slowing everywhere. For example agricultural water use in the US has held steady or even declined in recent years. In fairness, part of that agricultural decline in use is from advancement in technology and methodology and we’ll likely see the same with data centers, but those numbers are unpredictable. On the whole I agree that the concern over data centers in terms of water (and electricity) usage is overblown to an extent, but I think we do need to pay closer attention to the points that actually matter when looking at the situation.

tzs

> Importantly, I am not saying that it’s impossible for data centers to ever cause any problems with water. They require careful planning in the same ways other large industrial buildings do . (Emphasis added) I think that part of why AI data centers seem to have more stringent local objections even in areas that are generally pretty friendly to industrial development than do other industries that use a lot of water (or a lot of electricity) may be that there often isn't enough time to do that careful planning. If you wanted to build say a new paper manufacturing plant there would be local objections because paper manufacturing a lot of both water and electricity. But nobody urgently needs a new paper manufacturing plant. There is plenty of time to address the objections and figure out something that will make most of the locals happy. With AI data centers there is a (possibly bogus) need for a lot in a short timeframe, and so a lot of pressure on officials to approve them without the careful planning such a project should have.

1vuio0pswjnm7

What is the "AI water issue" The blog post never defines it