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You should complain whenever million gallons of water are wasted by corporations seeking profits or by governments for their shady operations. Not just when it's about AI.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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My country is int he middle of a data center boom, fuelled by the usual royal and political, uh, inputs. We also have seasonal droughts, which often result in water rationing and angry people upset at the mismanagement of our resources. Wonder which will give way first.
It's hilarious that so many people see Americans as free people
Land of the fee and the home of the slave.
It's worse, Americans choose over and over again to suffer, as long as other people suffer too.
How much time before someone figures these infrastructures make very good targets for vandalism? I risk I will see datacenters destroyed by mobs and other actors before I die.
It’s not vandalism, it’s direct action. Or sabotage, if you consider this to be a time of war (which it undoubtedly is — a class war). Don’t use the enemy’s language against ourselves.
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Seems like the real problem is that companies aren't being charged enough for their excessive water usage.
It's no surprise this is happening in the Land of Useful Idiots and Dipshits, texas.
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They deregulated shower heads just in time.
Well, I mean...Not for nothing, but Texas being one of the reddest states there is, and even being willing to double it down by heavily gerrymandering themselves for Trump worship, means that they did vote to serve their deep state and oligarch overlords. Which is quite ironic for the small government party. And that's coming from me, who believes in the potential of AI for humanity in the long-term, but only if used responsibly and not at the cost of people's quality of life to satisfy the corrupt elite.
But then again, irony is in their DNA, starting with all their preaching about "keeping kids safe". Speaking of which, Trump files where? I need to check if Epstein's name comes up in those.
Actual interesting question:
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down AI response time? A lot of the time you get an instant response from an LLM, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don't need it that urgently.
The majority of energy consumed is for training the AI models, not providing output from those models.
This means the resource consumption is not tied to usage and prompts. Also it means resource consumption to train models is temporary, relative to the model.
Oh ok. So they'll put the water back once the models are trained?
No they will just train more models. Do you ever pay attention?
The line must always go up. NO DOWN.
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Oh, and THEN, the AI will ask you to go take a shower if you're feeling dry, dirty or thirsty. I mean after telling you why taking a shower is good, why people take showers, which celebrities took showers the past week and asks if you want to ads taking a shower to next week's reminders.
Why can't they use the shit and piss water to cool their shit instead of asking people to cut back on water usage?
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I don't get the news about these data centers guzzling water, where is the water going? If it's for cooling, but that doesn't destroy the water..
They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you're cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I've seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.
Here's the report this came from https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2025-07-25/texas-is-still-in-drought-and-ai-data-centers-are-quietly-guzzling-up-water/
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Is cooling water not reusable? Shouldn't these be closed systems?
Apparently closed loop systems are not good enough for these kinds of applications, and often instead use evaporative. Which kind of logical, since they're not running a single factory overclocked GPU with a top of the line desktop CPU, but a cluster of factory overclocked GPUs with a server CPU.
So they build the computing centers in hot areas with water scarcity and make the air hot-humid?
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No wonder the government don't want anymore report on climate change.
I'm not joking when i say that not using ai is mostly improving my reasoning. Probably, each time I used it, i had to subconsciously offset some thinking to that brainless machine. I'm fine the way I am, i know it's being propped up as some ultimate solution but my creative output improved too.
We're probably offsetting some thinking and memorisation to a computer with a complete lack of experience of the real world, and it's somehow being presented as acceptable. I do n't think it's fine.
Could someone explain to me how these data centers use up water? Like is it evaporating? What happens to the water? I get the water consumption is very high but is the problem we're removing it from places that don't refill or does into the environment mean it's wastewater? Please someone help me understand.
Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.
For cooling many (most?) data centers use evaporative cooling. That evaporated water could be captured again with a heat pump (reducing the wasted water + recuperating heat for other uses), but it's Texas, so it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the data centers have no intensive to be less wasteful. So the evaporated water gets released into the atmosphere and it's gone.
Edit: about your question where the water is coming from: there is no simple answer, it's coming from many sources and it's being used for many things. But irregardless of the source, there's only so much available and using more than is available is not possible. When the math is done, it turns out that Texas is running out of water. At that point choices have to be made, and apparently Texas is chosing to increase/maintain the supply to data centers and to reduce the supply to people.
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Nice to see humanity has its priorities straight as usual... :)