Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water(bloomberg.com) |
Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water(bloomberg.com) |
Power consumption and effect on electricity infrastructure is so, so, so much more consequential and dangerous. It alone is way more than enough on which to base a very solid anti-DC campaign. The water argument weakens the whole anti-DC position by being so refutable.
EDIT: with probable exceptions in specific local instances where water supply is already very constrained, like Utah.
Conditions for drought have been increasing across the US, including an increase in literal droughts. The ecosystem needs water to survive. We need to give a shit about our water supply. I live in a region that just had a public emergency declared due to drought and our area is upstream on the river that feeds many other states. If we have to watch our water consumption, those other states should be panicking. The power consumption is also a problem, but a lack of water is potentially worse, depending on the circumstances.
I actually have a great deal of respect for the average person. Most of the time, the intuitive model of the world is very good at getting workable answers. But it completely falls apart when something is outside the universe of what people deal with on a day-to-day basis. Try asking the people in your family what the profit margin of a grocery store is. People might go to grocery stores all the time and know exactly how to comparison shop to optimize their spend. But most actually have no idea about the numbers involved at each step of the supply chain. Trying to explain inflation to people over the last few years has been literal hell, because virtually nobody understands the differences between price levels and the first and second derivatives thereof.
Demanding closed loop cooling is just as important as demanding self built renewable power for new data centers.
I see no reason we should grandfather in 'heritage carbon emitters' when we are emitting way more than we ought to.
Personally, I find it ironic to see people going on and on about data centers on platforms like Threads, Reddit, and X. It's like, do you know where your data is going when you press that button?
And yet data centers don't seem to be operating under the same rules at a time when people have it shoved in their faces the techbro billionaires and their bought politicians don't have to follow the rules. That people can't get more housing built but somehow billionaires can magically get datacenters is going to cause resentment.
It doesn't help that data centers do everything in secrecy and then just break ground (because they don't want pushback) so it appears that they haven't followed any of the processes everyone else has to (specifically for limited/coveted/people have been waiting years water hookups). This is why they list the number of houses worth of water used. Because that number of housing could have been built instead or now can't be built without upgrading the municipal water system (at huge expense to the local community that already paid to build out the capacity the datacenters took for their remote billionaire owners' enrichment not local community benefit).
That doesn't seem like that much, really. The Seattle metro area isn't huge; that consumption is only 0.7% of New York's, and Amazon runs the largest network of data centers in the world.
California pistachios consume about 500–600 billion gallons of water per year.
How that data point is interpreted may depend on whether the reader or someone they know likes pistachios or not
It might also depend on how the person views farmers versus how they view Silicon Valley companies
And so on
It's not intrinsically clear how a reader is going to interpret that data point without knowing something about the reader
Will they opine that water use for some purpose is "worth it" or "not worth it"
What do they think of pistachios
What do they think of "AI"
People might be OK with water use for pistachios but not for "AI"
The _amount_ of water use may not be the differentiator. The differentiator might be the _purpose_ of the water use
Food versus computers
A lot of ways people use water can actually end up back in the source area after treatment. That should be considered differently than water evaporated in a desert that rarely receives rains.
For context, the city of London uses about 2.6 billion liters, or about 680 million gallons, per day.
So that's about four days of London water usage per year, give or take -- or just over 1% of London's water usage.
Also, I was wondering, what does 2.5B gallons of water equate to? Here's the answer for curious minds:
> Using EPA’s cited 82 gallons per person per day figure, 2.5B gallons/year equals the annual household water use of about 83,500 people.
I did some further math... If 1bn users world wide leverage AWS services in their daily routine (netflix, whatever, ...), the formula becomes this one:
2.5B gallons/year ÷ 1B users = 2.5 gallons/user/year
> Compared with the EPA-style U.S. household benchmark we used earlier of about 82 gallons/person/day, that would be: > > 0.00685 ÷ 82 ≈ 0.0084%
So the AWS data centers make up roughly an additional 0.01% of daily water usage. Why is this worth a bloomberg article?
I suppose this 1bn people are spread around the world, but the water use is extremely concentrated. The few sites of DC might cause real localised issues even if per-global-user number is small.
I live somewhere that's had a lot of interest from companies wanting to put up new data centers (northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota – open farmland basically). The water usage thing is easily the top concern/grievance that people cite in their arguments against data centers.
The US uses about 2 billion gallons of water per day on golf courses.
It's possible they've gotten more efficient in the past 14 years, but it's also possible there are more golf courses today. I haven't looked into it.
[0]: https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdfI had to say I was wondering why basic non polluting water use would need special attention like this. Apparently it’s a PR meme to divert attention from real problems.
edit: corrected to 736, its per year.
To my understanding, the only thing that changes when water is used for data centers is its temperature.
That's a lot different than residential use, where it's used in toilets and needs to undergo significant wastewater treatment to be cleaned enough to be re-used.
So how do we compare apples to oranges for these very different use cases?
Update: It appears my assumption about the only thing changing in the data center case is temperature. For much of that water, a phase change occurs (evaporative cooling), so it is no longer accessible to be recycled.
* In air-cooled datacentres an approach is "direct evaporative cooling". They might take 30°C outside air and spray a fine mist into it, cooling it to perhaps 25°C before it enters the servers. After passing through the servers the air might leave at around 38°C. The water is now dispersed as humidity in a large volume of exhaust air. Recovering that water would require condensing it back out of the air, which means removing huge amounts of latent heat, it would be cheaper to just use 'traditional' compressor based cooling in the first place.
Cooling towers (which are used in many 'ai' facilities) have essentially the same problem. Servers reject heat into a water loop, and the cooling tower then cools that water by evaporating a portion of it into the atmosphere. The water that leaves as vapour is the "consumed" portion. While some liquid water remains in the system and a small amount is discharged as concentrated blowdown that can be treated and reused relatively easily, the majority of the consumed water has been converted into atmospheric moisture as above.
I think a ton of people were REALLY misinformed about how much water AI data centers use. I know I was at one point.
Now there may be people pushing that narrative still on purpose because it clearly works. But I don’t think the average person who uses that talking point is doing anything other than expressing a concern based on the (terrible) information they got somewhere.
There's a reason certain types of misinformation become popular and others fizzle. The environmental concerns around AI are starting from the goal 'disliking AI' and going in search of a reason for many people. The environment is a convenient reason because it links to an existing left-wing cause & doesn't require conceding the frame of AI rapidly becoming extremely capable (scary! don't like to think about that!) so it's all comfort and outrage without stakes.
Edit: seems even this is just the summary first two paragraphs.
There is nothing to indicate 2.5B is too much, too little or just right. This is just reporting data. But HN replies are extraordinarily defensive. Why
The replies are reminiscent of those in threads under submissions reporting facts about "crypto" not too long ago, before SBF went to prison and the crypto hype subsided
Sure, they shouldn’t be powered by gas or coal. And the local effects are significant.
But the macro environmental effects are minor and the local effects can be resolved with the most trivial regulations.
According to new data quietly published this week, energy use by AI datacentres in the UK could cause the emission of up to 123m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) – about as much as generated by 2.7 million people – over the next 10 years.
That latest figure replaces a previous estimate – since deleted – that claimed emissions would reach a maximum of 0.142m tonnes of CO₂ in a single year.
But they mostly are....
In some cases, they are.
The Colorado River basin waters seven states and is in extreme drought. There are proposed data centers in the area that would require water from the Colorado or from already distressed aquifers.
They are being built with evaporative cooling which is not closed loop.
With that said, the vast majority of the yelling about water issues is overblown, power issues are far more likely to be a problem.
You could also argue that Amazon data centers are crucial commercial infrastructure that used for a lot of logistics necessary to move food around.
Saying "if it's edible then it doesn't matter how much water it uses, it's justified" isn't a good position to take.
Plus California was/is in a drought for years, that's why people bring up the almonds example.
Leaving aside whether a carbon tax would be an effective solution to CO2 (I genuinely don't know), there's no reason to suspect it would be an effective solution to our water crisis, particularly given the huge growth in solar recently.
Datacenters don't need cooling because they're burning gas for their power. They need cooling because computation produces heat. Even if they were feeding as much clean solar power back into the grid as they were using, we would still need to find a solution to their voracious thirst.
In terms of water, I also think that water is severely underpriced for a scarce resource.