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
This is a good illustration how cursed the datacenter topic has become when people go out of their minds on computer cooling while continuing to eat meat which lets be perfectly clear - is mostly for entertainment purposes. I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.
Datacenters do not need water. It is just slightly cheaper for them than cooling with electricity.
Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption, and ideally in a way where it isn't a ghastly eyesore.
I can imagine raising issues with a specific datacenter in a specific water-constrained location, but I agree that being vocally concerned about the teaspoons of water consumed to produce an AI response while being unconcerned with the thousands of gallons used to produce a cheeseburger seems like innumerate virtue signaling.
If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environmental impact of meat production, berates you for defending data center water use, would that convince you to change your mind?
What about a vegan, who also stopped flying and doesn't drive, and is organizing a protest to shut down the local golf course?
Are they stupid or something?
"17 billion gallons of water a year" sounds like a lot of water, but it's really not.
DCs are pumping the water through evaporative cooling towers because the latent heat of vaporizaton means there's a huge amount of heat sucked up in the phase change from liquid to vapor. None of the water is being "put back into the ground" except maybe that used during flushing and other maintenance.
"Dry" cooling exists, where there is a closed coolant or refrigerant loop run through radiators, but those require more power, which increases cost and limits how much power can be used for compute (but they also get the say "it makes us use more power, bad for the environment! We're being Green by using evaporative cooling!")
Meat is basically optional, you don’t need meat to be healthy or happy. There are vegetarian body builders. Meat has, probably, negative value on most American’s lives, due to its contribution to heart disease.
That’s not to say meat isn’t tasty. It is. But from an objective standpoint, the value is ehhh.
Arguably, AI has much more value, and for 1/100th the water cost. Hey, that’s pretty good!
That's just your opinion, though. I would prefer a purely vegerarian society with advanced AI that can cure cancer or discover new maths to society with meat and no AI.
I haven't seen a single article doing that though (from either side) and I honestly think that nobody would even trust these companies at this point (Meta et al) to give an honest analysis anyways.
- A truck holds 5000 gallons
- It would take 3.5 million trips to transport that much
- If each trip was 500 miles roundtrip, that's about 2 billion miles
- Trucks travel 140 billion miles each year in the US. That would add less than 2% to the total miles
- The trucking industry is about $1 trillion in revenue per year. So 2% of that is $20 billion total to transport 17 billion gallons. Or around $1 per gallon.
But that's tripled of water use across all sectors due to datacenter buildout. So no "comparison" to other uses is needed.
EDIT: Ah, I did misread it. Sorry!
It says that datacenters now use 3× the amount of water they used to use--it's specifically limited to that very, very narrow sector.
You're saying almond farm water use tripled due to data center buildout? What other meaning of "all sectors" could make sense of this claim? The report clearly says 17 billion while all other sectors are in the trillions.
I mean, sure, lets not build datacenters that are 100% evaporation-cooled into each desert-oasis.
But if general water availability is your concern, than datacenters are so far down the priority list that any argument involving them is just laughable. And if you are against datacenters, then find a proper argument instead of making environmentalism look stupid.
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.
Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the delusional fantasies of the tech elite (all of which hold deeply anti-human + anti-democratic views).
Let's do not act as if there wasnt other food, a lot of it actually.
Meanwhile LLMs aren't that easy to replace, they're biggest human achievement up to date.
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.
Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.
This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.
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...
Many regions do have enough water to support evaporative cooling. When water is available, using it is prudent because it saves so much electricity.
Using surface water is not a practical approach for most cases because the process would need to be built next to a river or lake - there is limited industrial real estate in these areas.
* 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
1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energ...
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...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00119...
80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage.
USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.
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/2092209623583404461For 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-coolingCan, but do they? Feels a bit like Musk's Colossus that "could" use nuclear power but has been running on "temporary" natural-gas turbines for years now.
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.
non-issue, chinese propaganda to get us to slow down.
unfortunately some people parrot it, but most are smart enough to know it's bs.
you'd think they would want to shutdown golf courses first, it's pure leisure and much more water, but it's not about that :)
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.
Additionally, the power plants which supply electricity to the data centers have the same cooling problem. They also typically use cooling towers.
It's not dishonest at all. Datacenters and fossil fuel power plants are absolutely evaporating fresh water for cooling. The piece that's missing from that discussion is that it helps them use less electricity.
Red flags galore. Wouldn't surprise me if it was bankrolled by bad actors and/or a website created/operated by AI agents.
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
When it comes to the rise of total water consumption like you’re talking about, data centers are a drop in the bucket. Truly negligible.
It's like when some Silicon Valley company is breaking the law and HN commenters attempt to defend/excuse the behaviour by pointing at other offenders. This is a juvenile response
Something like
"See, they do it, too."
or
"They need to investigate [not a "tech" company] first."
If the amount of water used by "AI" data centers was "negligible" then, one might expect, "AI" companies would be transparent about water usage instead of forcing the public to estimate
If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns.
So don't push it.
Even if you use such an extremely conservative ratio (and assume that all water used in datacenters is 100% evaporated away for cooling) the argument stands.
In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.
I don’t even care about that comparison. They’ll do whatever they’re going to do. But throwing around random numbers about water usage doesn’t make the point you think you’re making. It’s deflection, and nothing more. Not every random datapoint is context just because it uses the same metric.
It’s basically: “Frank is 8 years old and still poops his pants. So if he can do it, I can poop my pants too, Mom.”
If we want the other 80% (which I don't personally think we care about) 211 billion more.
Source of that inane statement?
It isn’t like the water magically disappears. It just gets turned into moisture in the air.
Though that can be very far away depriving the local environment or other industry of the water. Extra bad if that water is pumped up ground water.
If you think datacenters are a waste of water and you want to do a global campaign to stop building / shutdown golf courses first, then your values don't really make sense.
Golf is pure leisure, and uses 531 gallons compared to 17.4 gallons a year.
Datacenters on the other hand, power the site we're using right now to discuss the "problem". You wouldn't be able to have this conversation without them.
--
Why aren't people screaming constantly about golf courses and pressuring to shut them down?
Why the focus on datacenters if the bigger win is staring you right in the face (if you're that concerned about water usage)?
It's not about the water.
Many designs in-between with air cooling, hybrid, etc.
Still a non-issue, it's going back into the water cycle.
Any water issue would be specific to the municipality, it's not a national issue, nor is it an issue specific to datacenters, it's true for anything being built in the town (golf courses, power plants, etc.)
If you use a hybrid design, you still evaporate ~80% of your cooling water - you just use less overall cooling water.
The water going back to the water cycle doesn't mean it's potable.
And yes, I do understand that it is a very small fraction of overall water use. I am actually in favor of using water where it will reduce electricity use. But let's not be inaccurate - the water used for cooling is absolutely evaporated or sent to sewage, with the exception of whatever sits inside the system's closed loop (which exists whether or not the system is cooled evap/dry/hybrid).
yeah... that's the point right?
Hybrid systems keep the primary process fluid in a closed loop, they spray water on pads to cool the coils during the hotter parts. Basically a stop gap when air cooling is not enough.
There's also close loop systems that lose none, it's just more expensive to build. They are already being deployed in areas with scarce water. Microsoft and a quite a few others already built a few.
If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry.
But I just don't see that happening. Noone is going without water because of datacenters. Noone is going without water other than people in California who get there's stolen from farms. That's a real issue, not a hypothetical.
Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them
This is exactly my problem. I'm not saying you're wrong about this in any way. But your (and many others) core problem with datacenters is not actually the water use. The water argument is just a strawman to increase environmental legitimacy, and thats a really bad and harmful practice (I do realize that this might seem minor given incompetent political leadership that spews uninformed drivel all day, but coherency and correctness still matter!)
The water argument is simply never helpful. If water is scarce locally, then let local administration reject datacenter projects for exactly that reason. If they fail to do that, fix/campaign against the local administration (because that's where the problem is at). But blanket arguing against datacenter buildout because of water usage is just bad-faith campaigning, and it is gonna hurt credibility elsewhere.
Now when I use an internet search, the top answer is an AI guess/approximation to the result and can be completely inaccurate. I have to ignore that and move onto the traditional results and hope that they aren't A.I. slop websites.
LLMs have degraded the internet and search.
A BBS chatbot from the 80s (LISA) was almost as good as modern LLMs and that was just based on key words.
So, uh, yea, chatbots are very, VERY easy to replace.
Of course, because it's not like whole world went crazy after ChatGPT and hundreds of billions of dollars are being constantly invested into many of technology stacks - software, hardware, semiconductor engineering in order to push this technology even further, lol.
Lol. This is what anti-AIs actually believe!
A couple of dozen planned data centers, with an estimated combined use of 160k gallons per day.
Apparently the average household uses 300 gallons a day, which seems insane to me. I guess a lot of people water their lawns. That gets us to a mere 23 households per data center. Even with 100 gallons per day per household or less, the local data centers are not at 1000 households per data center.
And where I live, water is not a concern. They are building a pipe out from Lake Michigan, which has been in the works now for 10 years. That primarily gets the tri-city area off of the aquifers which have been drained at an unsustainable rate for the last 100 years.
If I lived along the Colorado river system, that's a different discussion.
That's nuts. These practices took so much water that native populations could no longer sustain themselves from the river. Complaints about the relatively low use of water by data centers seems pretty weak in comparison, although I still wouldn't locate them in the desert; the desert is a better place to load up with solar and wind farms.
https://coloradoriverscience.org/Water_law_and_policy if you're interested.
Totally agree, and that's part of why I was bringing it up. I recently was going down the rabbit hole of the story of the Salton Sea. Absolutely insane.
As far as I know, there's not a single place in the world where someone went without water to cook, drink, or bathe because a data center consumed it.
Also telling people to simply leave is very anti-human + anti-democratic. Workers should have the right to have a say in the company, they are the ones that do the work after all.
Telling people to simply leave just favors those with money compared to those without. There's also the whole you know... losing access to healthcare when quitting jobs; also IDK if you've been in a coma the last 3 years but the tech winter is still ongoing, LLM induced mania hasn't resulted in downstream companies hiring more.
As long as electricity at least partially produced using fossil fuel I would prefer data-centers to use as little electricity as possible. There are regions which are getting plenty of rainfall on average (which can be collected and stored) or were getting some water from rivers will have negligible ecological impact.
But currently DC operators have little incentives to choose DC location based on outdoor temperature or water availability and there are plenty of DCs in hot and arid regions.
Differences in air temperature are largely below the noise floor in terms of impact on data center cost. Slightly lower energy prices and other operational or capital costs are more than enough to offset significantly hotter climate. Arid climates improve evaporative cooling efficiency.
you don't _need_ a cow though
Most folks have highly distorted views of how animal agriculture works. It's disgusting and insanely inefficient.
I think we can all agree on this one yet this is not what's being argued in most discussions. What hangs up the discussion is the complexity of development e.g.: to build a datacenter it takes 1 year but to build energy infra it takes 5. So this complexity needs equally complex policy and people just don't have time for that when there's free range raging served right to your palm screen.
People could then either use the futures contracts to keep the price they pay for water the same as it was, or voluntarily reduce their water usage and sell the contracts to the datacenter for a profit. Same deal for power.
This would of course be a bit complicated for most people to manage, so maybe instead of giving consumers the contracts directly you could have some intermediary manage the contracts for them with approximately the same result.
Increased demand absolutely DOES increase the cost both in theory and practice.
> Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption, and ideally in a way where it isn't a ghastly eyesore.
Fact is, almost nobody "needs" meat in their diet, and even if all meat eaters did actually need it rather than merely want it, there are meats which use less than the average quantity of water.
From the above stats, the mean American's loss of water due to unnecessary use of water for unnecessary meat raised in their territory, is about 43 times the mean American's loss of water due to the unnecessary water use of datacenters that are in their territory.
I'm not giving up my meat so that datacenters can use it for cooling, if that's what you're suggesting.
If I read the USDA stats correctly, US red meat and poultry production went up about 5.6% from Jan-Jun 2025 to Jan-Jun 2026, i.e. the increased production of meat led to an increase in water use that was twice as much as the water use of all the data centres combined.
Meat is and mostly always has been(in euro societies) a luxury item meant mostly for the rich.
Capitalism turned meat into a MUST HAVE item for keeping up with the Joneses.
We consume absolute insane amounts of meat nowadays, and we waste about half of it, just so people can feel good cuz theyre eating a high class excess meal.
Lol most people throughout history didn't eat much meat. It's wild how modern western people refuse to see how we'll destroy the planet trying to feed 8 billion people with the most inefficient method of creating calories(beef). The inefficiency IS THE POINT.
And there are other kinds of meat that cost less water to produce. I don't think someone who isn't willing to give up beef for chicken is at a higher moral ground than someone who wants cheap tokens.
This is why we evolved to be omnivores. Basic biology laughs at your poorly-researched position.
For example, if a person's meat diet is virtually all chicken (reasonable given prices lately), substituting the chicken for almonds is a net neutral change. Almonds use every bit as much water as chickens do.
Granted, that may be an extreme example, as almonds are one of the more water-intensive crops, and chicken is one of the most water-efficient meats. There will likely be decent water savings in many cases, but at the very least, anything a person substitutes for their existing meat diet is going to use some water as well.