US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

bell-cot

Context: 1 acre-foot, a usual unit of measure for agricultural water, is a bit under 1/3 of a million gallons. 17B gallons is about 52k acre-feet. Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert . The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A. Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no .

whycome

What does it mean to be consumed in this context? After used for cooling isn’t it clean enough for drink and other uses? Can’t it go back into other systems? Can’t it be used for agriculture?

fridental

What happens with the water in the DC after it has been consumed?

avalys

This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people. However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.

thevinter

Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless. Annual withdrawals (2015) - Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal - Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal - Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal - Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal - Aquaculture: ~2.76 trillion gal - Mining: ~1.46 trillion gal - Livestock: ~730 billion gal - Total: ~117.5 trillion gal (322 Bgal/day) Source: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015: U.S. Geological Survey Circular - https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1441

zachwill

One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water. It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists. There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.

dtech

So this isn't really a problem? That's like a small city.

slibhb

Lots of places in the US have plentiful water. Don't build data centers where there's a lack of water! And it's a dead horse at this point, but we don't need to be growing almonds in CA. If you actually care about water use, focus on that. Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.

krunck

Potable well water should NEVER be used for such purposes. Aquifers recharge at a rate far lower than industry wants to pull from them. At some point potable water for humans will run out. If you're using water just to evaporate it for cooling then use surface water.

goalieca

I’ll not dance around it. It seems like most people don’t like the inputs or outputs to this massive generational endeavour.

shimman

It's weird how all these statistics could end if the owners of these data centers would just simply release the numbers for the public to learn from. Instead they are keeping these figures private and we have people trying to best-estimate the reality. Mostly for reasons we all understand: true figures would cause an even larger public backlash. Fun fact, citizens of The Dalles, OR had to sue their own government to get them to release numbers on how much Google data centers were consuming (info Google stipulated should be kept "proprietary"): https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...

imglorp

Is anybody working on using all this waste heat for desalination? I think cold seawater can be used for the external loop, through a heat exchanger where it would meet the heated pure water from the internal cooling loops. This would cause evaporation of the salt water which could be captured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Multi-stage_flash...

delichon

Support for data centers jumps a net 31 points after voters are told modern facilities can reuse the same cooling water for up to 10 years, new poll finds. -- https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2092209623583404461 https://www.raineycenter.org/polling/data-centers-voters-are... For a closed loop cooling project: Fluid renewal occurs only every 7–15 years and is performed in a fully contained process that meets state and federal environmental standards. This design ensures zero water withdrawal, zero discharge, and continuous operation — fully aligned with TeraWulf’s commitment to sustainable digital infrastructure. -- https://www.lakemarinerdata.com/closed-loop-cooling

Vvector

An acre of alfalfa is typically irrigated at 5.5 AF per year. The standard center pivot field is 130 acres ~ 700 AF of irrigation, to grow alfalfa to ship overseas. Converting to gallons, 210 million gallons, for one field. 80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage. USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.

adolph

The article source for the 17B gallons is a Congressional Research Service report and its source is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. Both are interesting reads. The 17B number is an estimate. Here are some of the inputs: * reported numbers of server deliveries * power draw per server * average utilization based on various workloads, including a Llama 70B 8 node training run * mix of data center cooling types * do math to get to 66B liters, which rounds down to 17B galoons 0. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057#fn10 1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energ...

KennyBlanken

Article title is extremely misleading. These are figures from 2023 - almost three years old now, and since then US datacenter power consumption has doubled .

jandrewrogers

Now do the amount of water required for subsidized corn ethanol. 30 million acres, trillions of gallons of water, and almost no redeeming value.

1vuio0pswjnm7

Again, defensive HN commenters respond to facts about water consumption by citing other sources of water consumption But fail to consider that "AI" adds to those sources and raises total water consupmtion Is total water consumption important Perhaps the comparision that readers will make is not (a) existing non-"AI" water consumption versus "AI" water consumption but (b) total water consumption without the additonal "AI" data centers versus total water consumption with additional "AI" data centers. IOW, "before" versus "after" Will readers ignore (b) and only think about (a) It's the same response from HN commenters every time: compare "AI" data centers to some other water consuming activity

_DeadFred_

Wild to see pro-AI datacenter people pushing the vegetarian narrative. For the last 50 years people have found the whole vegetarian narrative annoying (even to those of us who have been vegetarian). Way to pick like the worst positions. Anti-human, anti-jobs, and now (newly added) and preaching to people upset that they should be a vegetarian? For being the smartest people you are horrible at understanding people.