> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.
I do not understand how that is even possible.
If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.
I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.
I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.
Reality is if a regulation is too broad it tends to get overwhelmed and dies when it requires 100 people to enforce.
Even a basic in house data center can push 100kw with a few servers.
(Directives are binding on states. They transpose them into national law, possibly adding additional clauses as it goes past (EU directives set a minimum standard, not a maximum) at which point they're binding on people.)
Nobody ever said the EU was efficient. Look for a deadline for that transposition on the original directive.
> 1. By 15 May 2024 and every year thereafter, Member States shall require owners and operators of data centres in their territory with a power demand of the installed information technology (IT) of at least 500kW, to make the information set out in Annex VII publicly available, except for information subject to Union and national law protecting trade and business secrets and confidentiality.
> 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to data centres used for, or providing their services exclusively with the final aim of, defence and civil protection.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ%3AJOL...
This kind of basic regulatory work is pretty thankless even when it's important. But I suspect the toxic politics of data centers will kick up some enforcement action sooner or later.
(Why is it so toxic? Well, the explicit promise from AI companies of mass unemployment combined with higher electricity prices, and maybe even destroy the world https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/anthropic... is why.)
I thought it turned out the EU had no business in national tax affairs.
Directives are not the same as regulations .
Directives are goals that must be achieved by adapting existing national laws or introducing new ones, and that takes time.
European directive is not a law, it's a directive.
It's up to the national governments to create applicable laws that are to the letter and to the spirit of a European directive. Then national bodies will start applying the law and govern its implementation/adherence.
An by "up to" I mean they are obliged... eventually.
And I wouldn't be so sure on being 'eventually' obliged, someone has to enforce it for that to happen and it's not looking like anyone has profit in it
I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that.
Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.
Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).
• EU Regulation: A binding legal act that applies immediately and identically in all EU countries as soon as it takes effect, without needing national laws.
• EU Directive: A legislative act that sets a mandatory goal that all EU countries must achieve, but allows each nation to pass its own laws to implement it.
It takes time for directives to take effect, unless a member state's national law already implements them.
I think that currently the EU is focusing on strengthening itself from a military perspective due to US policy shifts, so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people, thus prioritizing safety and perhaps energy production, as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China. If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
> According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030.
Yeah, so 2030 sounds like a long way off. It's 3 years away. We are not going to be meeting any climate targets.
Can someone explain the data center water usage? Data center don't drink water. It cools down the machine.
What's preventing them getting cool water from a lake and draining to it again to cool down? Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
Continuing a conversation is often just a slow-drip Streisand effect.
We can't do much about the 160B, but we could do a lot to build more power generation and storage. As just one example, in west Texas, natural gas is flared into the sky en masse from depleted oil wells because methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Some sites could be tapped to hit hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt of power generation. And any power you don't need can be exported to the Texas power grid so it can make money the day you turn it on. And if you're willing to spend a little more, you can sequester the CO2 and make the power generation mostly green.
Cue crickets from Silicon Valley on this one because it's neither nuclear nor renewable, but the crypto people love it so I would guess they'll eventually come around. That they haven't already is one facet of my disenchantment with tech culture. Their absurd belief in Star Trek Voyager-like scenarios playing out with AI in the next decade the other major one.
*Which is slightly more than the 3.3T gallons of water Americans used to water their lawns. So, ya know, where's the outrage?
> In the Netherlands, it is estimated that they account for about 0.1 percent of total consumption.
If that's true, what's the problem?
The main problem is, in my opinion, that those are just estimates. If we are supposed to accommodate the current and potential future needs, we need real data. Not estimates.
Because the law says they have to.
Water usage in terms of total volume is meaningless and certainly an overblown concern on a global scale. In fact, it is not a concern at all on a global scale, but it can be a local problem. If a datacenter uses water normally intended for households and the infrastructure is not designed for this, it is definitely a problem. And that's a good reason for having to report water usage, not just to punish them, but also to plan distribution accordingly.
Data centers tend to concentrate their water usage within urban areas, causing a strain on local resources. The value of their output is much less tangible. Their water consumption scales up around tenfold if you consider the indirect usage from generating the electricity.
But on the other hand; yes, it would also help enormously if people ate less meat.
By “strain on local resources” are you just stating the fact that they use resources? Or are you trying to imply that it causes problems for those resources?
Companies don’t just buy land, connect to water and power, and then the utilities get caught off guard when the water system is suddenly strained by water going somewhere. There are processes for approving this before connection.
If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.
At first you had me, but then I realised it's not true if the price is building more data centres! That was just a trick to make the climate worse! Grr /s
Here in France at least, companies can also be subject to FOIA requests for information pertaining to contracts they have with public entities. E.g. if a city publishes a tender to run tye local bike share program, then the company that gets the contract may have to directly answer (some) requests about that program.
But like I said, not sure if this applies to data centers which are, iiuc, mostly private ventures.
They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.
But if you do end up being correct, then the data centers in question will just sit partially or fully idle, using no / a tiny fraction of the electricity and water they could use (which as others have said on this forum, water usage concerns are massively overblown in most data center builds anyway)
According to whom and by what metric? The companies investing vast amounts of capital into them seem to disagree.
I live right next to a waste valorisation plant[1]. They have to exactly specify what amount of water they use and what amount of water they then send out to the waste water treatment facility. It also has to be clean to a very specific standard before it leaves which is also checked.
We have datacenters in Switzerland too, but very little outrage or debate because there are strict rules in place in most places. They can build all they want but it costs significantly more to meet environmental requirements.
The valorisation plant next to my home has water cooling tower/fans significantly oversized just to make sure the noise is keep under the required level.
Definitely not the Netherlands then
This is a Dutch website and here in the Netherlands we have demand issues. In these same areas where issues exist, data centres are being planned and built. There are waiting lists now for normal businesses who want a new connection to the net, or connections with more capacity. These are lists waiting for capacity to become available: The demand on the current net is already too high.
Are you suggesting we should stop using water to grow food for humans?
As others (including TFA) have noted, this is false because there's an EU directive requiring "private companies" to disclose this.
In any case, the "it's a private company" defense is as tired now as it was when it was about blocking people from social media, or debanking etc. Just because the legal system hasn't yet caught up to regulating companies in a certain way, doesn't mean that it's not in everyone's best interest (except perhaps the owners of the companies in question) to have such regulation.
> I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry.
The important distinction being that agriculture provides food, while data centers provide AI slop and advertising.
The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.
That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.
People need to eat, it's non negotiable. We do not need data centres.
We need the food, we'll die without food, telling people to eat less of whatever food, so a few "tech bros" can build a new datacenter is outright evil.
edit: considering this is HN and the downvotes, people here prefer datacenters over food
> Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution.
Belittling criticisms that way is childish and doesn't address a single one. Literally nobody on the whole planet, at least in public discourse, is using "I am angry" as an argument in any of this. Yet it's the first thing that is always brought up. It's just a cheap, thought-terminating stereotype.
In data centres all that water is so that some wimpy cunt gets to hit return after spending no more than 5 minutes in an half baked prompt so he can insert the answer into his pitch deck, or PR review — and now with pacing the frontier models, he actually doesn't need to insert it, it's inserted automatically wherever it might fit. When it comes to agriculture, that is to produce things like food. This requires obviously much more water, which means that's what we really should be cutting down. Agents don't need food so the solution is just to replace humans with agents.
If you have any other stubborn question resisting clarification just hit me up, and I'll explain it to you immediately and clearly.
Because there's a building populist push against these developments.
Presumably they still want to build these things. If I was trying to convince people who hate me to let me do what I want, I would not play so secretive as it may look suspicious. Especially if, ostensibly, the data is in my favor.
Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
This is extremely inappropriate on HN. Or anywhere, really.
I can think of a few reasons that companies might not share data. A big one is that people have no idea what a responsible amount of water usage is, so your information will be weaponized no matter what.
In the Netherlands it is not just about AI datacenters, even before the rise of AI pushback against Meta's planned datacenter made them cancel it. There has been a lot of criticism of the municipality that allowed Microsoft to expand its datacenters. The argument is that this is a small country that already has to make tradeoffs to get to its desired energy mix (wind turbines near cities on land) and then these datacenters are built that consume the power that is generated by sacrificing the little remaining open space. In the last few years there is actually a electricity shortage in some regions so "we can hook up this 200 MW datacenter but not your house" is a bad look.
It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.
From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.
That is not corrective. There is an EU directive, but it would have to be adopted as local law to become actual law.
The datacenters are following the laws in their jurisdiction.
Just because people haven't cared about the environment before doesn't mean they shouldn't start now. And just because there are worse existing polluters doesn't mean we shouldn't resist new ones.
A new golf course used to be seen as a great thing to have in your back yard and now we know their pesticide use increases the risk of Parkinson's. People are waking up and caring more. We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
But they should be made to report this. AND their use of water should be regulated - they don't need to use any water at all, it's just cheaper for them - and they should be contributing enough to mitigate negative effects on energy prices.
The problem isn't data centres. The problem is not pricing in and regulating externalities, whether caused by data centres or other things.
It would also quickly show us who actually cares about the environmental effects and who are using it as an excuse.
So unless you're talking about a tiny private residential pool you're at least an order of magnitude off.
There is a very obvious pattern here
The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
> as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China
Yes, there are government policy reasons behind why this is the case. Some would argue that these policy decisions are a net negative for the EU.
> If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
Fair point, these are good things to focus on. However, EU citizens are going to love it when there are no frontier-tech opportunities left in their countries, with everything in this area having to be imported from the US and China (note that just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons).
It's kind of sad that the only European LLM lab of significance is not even setting their model as a default one any longer.
Realizing something is not the same as acting on it and Europe is falling further and further behind.
If the EU does not build their own factories, then they will be reliant on factories built elsewhere.
Some do, but most don't since the requirements for using cooling water are relatively strict due to the pipes, equipment, and heat exchangers the water flows through. The water used needs to be free of any biological contaminants (such as bacteria and algae), maintain proper pH levels, and are often then treated with other chemicals such as biocides.
Lake water certainly can be treated to the level needed and used, it's just often cheaper to buy domestic water from the local utility than to construct and operate a small scale water treatment system along side the industrial process.
> Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
Most of the water is "consumed" via open loop evaporative cooling systems, so the water is never really "used" as in destroyed or anything. The majority of it is evaporated and returns to the land as rain and the rest is returned via sanitary drains, to city sewer systems.
Warm water fed back into the ecosystem will (relatively) quickly cause unwanted changes to the lake's biosphere.
Unless it's properly filtered, returned water will be contaminated by material in the cooling system.
It puts local demand on the water system competing with human need.
Turning water into steam uses much more energy than heating water, which means it's a much more effective means of cooling.
What you describe is the type of cooling used in certain power plants. That heats the lake though, which has its own environmental effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution
Some smaller data centers have a cool solution where they deposit extra heat into the municipal hot water grid, which is pretty neat https://www.techradar.com/pro/finally-some-good-usage-this-d...
For whatever reason people have clung onto this idea that the "Gotcha" to slow down AI is to worry about water consumption, and it's an idiotic gotcha.
In the US, the political backlash against data centers is also about the inability of government to be transparent about these buildouts (eg. City councils signing NDAs and building commissions quietly approving development plans without community input), the inability for utilities/regulators to actually hold data center developers to promises made (usually regarding resource/ utility usage), more complaints about affordability (cost of utility bills rising), additional hate against the unlikable tech CEOs (who aren't charismatic and whom have a long list of previous violations), fear of what AI will bring (the promised white collar revolution, promises of "infinite AI immigrants" in an age where immigration has been demonized), etc.
Only a few of these are about the "factory" itself. Lots of them are about the people trying to retain some control of their communities. Some of them are about the speed of the buildout (eg. compromises in water use / plumbing and noise / pollution created by the ad hoc on site electrical generation).
The data center CEOs are starting to admit that their NDA-blitzscale strategy may have backfired because communities are pissed and the NDAs prevented anyone from making a positive case for the buildouts while the rage was boiling over.
Meat too is wasteful, but yet again, here we are. All these are direct result of choices made by the majority...
Only because the government forces the cost of the water to be $0 for those who got in early, a policy that's causing extreme issues ecologically and causing the collapse of tons of environments.
If we actually allowed the real price today it wouldn't be anywhere near economically sane to do such a thing.
A recent datacenter proposal near me was going to be built on a ~35 acre site. The entire site projected to use ~300 gallons of water a day when fully operational. That's including toilets, irrigation, etc. A household on a quarter acre lot in that area often uses 10-15,000 gallons of water in a month. 35 acres cut into quarter-acre-ish lots means a bit under 140 households. We'll cut it down and say 100 after streets and what not. That lot being a neighborhood like the others nearby would probably use at least a million gallons of water in a month, about 33,300+ gallons a day.
I'm also not sure why you think it's a good thing to produce a bunch of electronics using conflict minerals and let them sit idle? Surely you must see the negative "externalities" of this?
This isn’t some unusual outcome. It’s like one of those maps that purports to show one thing but really just shows population density.
Providing a fully vegetarian diet for everyone is kind of non-starter.
From an infrastructure point of view, providing everyone vegetarian food sources overnight would not be possible, but that's not a realistic scenario. With a gradual transition, the transition would reduce overall resource use on basically all fronts, so there's no reason to expect extraordinary problems.
Of course, this is all theoretical unless people care enough to change their lifestyles.
I'm personally willing to change my life to help the planet and nature in general to the point it doesn't affect my wellbeing (as in health and safety). For me, personally, the problem is not changing per se, but people finding no amount of change enough, always moving the goalposts with "but, what if" clauses.
The problem with datacenter water use is the state of the water leaving the data center. Agriculture and meat industry can reuse the water multiple times from cleaner to dirtier processes and return it to the nature with reasonable processing.
The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
Why would any water be returned? Datacenters (and literally every industrial process that requires cooling) use water for evaporative cooling. The water evaporates, then returns as rain elsewhere.
The only water being "returned" I can think of would be from the intermittent or continuous blowdown systems to maintain TDS levels; but blowdown is a small fraction of the water consumed and is typically returned back via the city sewer system.
We're talking about water that's released in general use, right? I would expect a closed cooling loop to have some biocides but have almost none of that leave the system.
And one datacenter had a weird bacteria that one time.
China is not providing "open weight" models just because they think it's good for humanity. It is a competitive strategy to stay relevant at the forefront of the industry. The reality is that China is severely compute-constrained mostly due to Nvidia chip and ASML embargo. Nearly all available compute capacity has to go toward training, leaving very little for inference. It is why they release their models openly allowing third parties in EU and USA to host inference for them.
This will change when China reaches a critical scale of domestic AI chip production, which is inevitable.
There isn't a lot of VC funding available in Europe compared to the US, so without government intervention catching up will be very tricky.
It's why the USA and Chinese vultures are swarming. It's a bad situation.
No shortage of visionaries in EU leadership these days :-)
The EU is not as federal as the US and has basically no "federales" law enforcement of its own.
The Data Protection Commission in Ireland are remarkably lax about enforcing it because the government quite likes the tax revenue that Google, Apple and Meta brings them.