The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.
These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.
With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
It doesn't have to be really bright lighting but that's the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter's request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.
> At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable
This is always kind of funny to me. How's an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?
How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed "data" center?
Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they'd like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.
Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can't decide if it's zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I'd be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can't be purely about power consumption.
>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?
What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because you aren't receiving the benefits is naive. No one's doing all this for free.
>If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We've been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?
You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?
And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.
Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you're not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.
I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.
They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.
I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.
The global impact of AI doesn't change when you force DCs to build in another area.
At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology that its most significant leaders say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.
So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.
As a non American, I find this incomprehensible.
At a large enough scale, it doesn't matter how efficient you are - you're still causing a more damage than the region or the world can take.
There being a grain of truth or a valid angle doesn't wash bullshit from being bullshit.
Why can’t it be discussed?
I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.
The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.
https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...
https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...
The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.
It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24/7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.
Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
The data tables start on p. 90.
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
Now that it has been, though…
Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude
But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north
While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.
Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.
The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].
When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.
However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.
Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.
[1] https://www.tasmaniancountry.com/newspaper/tasmanian-country...
but trade secrets
I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.
Also, they didn't want you to be able to guesstimate how many machines / computing power they had, for similar reasons.
It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.
Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.
All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
This is overstating things.
Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.
You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.
A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.
If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.
The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon.
Seemingly much better article (pictures, better comparisons): https://flatwaterfreepress.org/data-centers-can-guzzle-serio...
Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one.
Update: in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient. That would be a nice thing for some journalist to research...
Update 2: it seems that Google uses water-evaporation cooling in regions that they don't consider water-stressed. Here's a not-so-great reference (scroll down if the text-fragment link doesn't work): https://www.axios.com/2026/06/03/google-pushes-water-standar...
The city finally got permission from the state and the Army Corps to divert water from a nearby river, but only when the river was at a relatively high rate of flow. So functionally what happened was that once the drought broke they were able to refill the lakes faster, and top them up during storms in wet/dry cycles.
Every place is going to have higher and higher odds of becoming water-stressed over the next three decades. Some places more than others. Will the data centers shut down in those situations?
You might think that using 5% of the municipal water supply isn't much but it's a significant fraction of what austerity measures would be able to conserve to retain water through a prolonged drought. In that situation holding water a few extra months until the rains return is the goal.
Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
Legislation gets easier once public opinion has turned against an idea or a company. But it takes a while to build that up.
> Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1]
This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either.
[1] https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?ope...
I had no idea what 13 million gallons of water was until they pointed out it was like when I filled up my olympic swimming pool 20 times. That was a slow summer.
Given the pressure construed on resources, why not use personal or household usage averages?
Maybe ~450 people-years doesn't have the same impact as Olympic pools.
The greener solution is to use water.
As long as they don’t pollute, I don’t see much a problem with this amount of water usage. And the water doesn’t need to be disinfected either, only cleaned and filtered. So any natural renewable source would do.
Wow!
Id find it difficult to believe that these companies are giving that much money in free loans to the government the way a retail worker estimating their taxes and getting a refund of a few hundred to thousand a year does.
Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Nebraska had a unexpected 86 million dollar gap in tax revenues collected last year[1] and these tax 3 tax breaks on their own account for 130% of that
[1]https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/15/nebraska-ends-fiscal...
> Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska.
> Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
If it was irrigation water, instead of drinking water, that would be about 26 acres worth of irrigated crops - in drought conditions.
If they were bypassing the municipal water supply or using post-wastewater treated water for their water usage, I'd be more blase about the situation. But farms are much thirstier than people.
The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.
If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that.
If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
There will be protests and cases related to water usage of AI, but none of them would hold any ground. And winning the water case would just make the argument in their favour.
The concern is real and very much deserves the opprobrium voters are showing.
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/water/
Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.
Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.
Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.
I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.
> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.
> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.
> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.
I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.
Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.
Yes water goes eventually back into circulation but that does not help in the place where the system is already at it's limit
The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
The excess minerals don't worry me much.
If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.
For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.
Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
> I've read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn't fly.
I absolutely believe that there's leftover noise around the facilities, too, specially low-frequency humming for electrical equipment, but I have yet to see _actual_ reporting demonstrating newer AI-centered datacenters produce even near the amount of noise OP was claiming.
> Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB.
edit: just understood what "Extra zero" meant. The original comment before being edited said 100m and that's what I was quoting.
- explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)
- played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient
- showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas
- did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record
- did not disclose the actual dBA / dB SPL values
- kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.
If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research, at least in this context.
1.2kw is power, not energy (which would be kWh).
Edit: The average household in the U.S. uses 10500kWh of power per year. 28.76kWh per day.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.
I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).
I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1uleoa2/sound_...
Sound meter shows "only" ~60 db, but that constant audible hum is, IMO, the data center actually assaulting those residents and apparently doing so 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
If someone who lived near that place set fire to the data center and I ended up on the jury and heard these recordings I would do everything in my power to nullify because that seems like a completely justified response to me in the face of the company running the data center not shutting down until the problem is fully fixed.
tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.
Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.
This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.
I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1tes0rr/ai_data_cen...
[1]https://global.honda/en/environment/initiatives/data/
[2]https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv...
[3]https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/health-care.p...
[4]https://electricityplans.com/how-much-electricity-does-an-ap...
[5]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5058574/ for water usage per square meter for hospitals
[6]https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2017/1131/ofr20171131.pdf for water per person per year
People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say "No, actually we're not, here is the numbers", because Google doesn't want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I'm sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was "obvious" they couldn't divulge how little/much water the place uses.
It's probably more that they don't want to tell competitors anything they don't absolutely have to.
They published a lot of less specific info (PUE numbers, water efficiency, etc)
They were very sensitive about any site specific numbers.
Totally not a new robber baron era at all. That's just fake news guys.
/s
This is right up there with being able to predict a competitor's total manufacturing capacity for the next year because you have hard numbers on their raw material purchase.
Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything."
... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.
[0]: https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delf...
[1]: https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/dat...
A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.
1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.
A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.
Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.
The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.
We hear about their tax breaks though. Why don’t they get treated the same as other local businesses, and pay the same rates?
Or here, in this comment from below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958135
Now where's the data for the popular claim (which as you conceded is not what you just posted, where it's specifically the overall burden that is too big)? I'm amenable even for a complex mix of cases, where some of the local impact is too much. Would be good to know what share of it is true, even if only a sliver. Although this wouldn't change the bullshit conclusion.
If they are using over a certain percent of any public utility (and yes ALL utilities are public) the utility should force it to be disclosed.
Correct. But they can't so easily without Google's (or other big tech companies) big legal departments to make challenging the excuses difficult.
They carefully hid things so they could expand for as long as possible, knowing that having the necessary footprint for services, cloud, and AI would be key to winning the race. When I worked at Google, our leaders were always "proud" they had built such a huge fleet (originally for search + ads but rapidly growing to a wide range of products and research) without competitors knowing just how large, because they figured eventually AWS and MSFT would realize they had to build out massively to handle the coming loads.
So they hide these things to stave off complaints for as long as possible.
I think the disinformation is people thinking that data centers directly use vast quantities of water. What happens is the power use stresses water supplies in local areas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-a...
Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.
This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.
Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
Are they drawing from a flowing source or an aquifer? Is it depleting a limited resource?
Is it evaporative or does the waste get discharged?
Is the waste water treated for the metal that it leaches from the cooling system?
Is it allowed to reach thermal equilibrium first or is the water discharged warm which can cause algae blooms or other problems?
They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas fired steam turbine. And one such installation was proposed for this city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.
Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.
Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.
Given the current power consumption of states, I find it hard to believe.
The tax breaks are well-established in the media, see for example [0].
That’s the root of the problem.
Even if the data centre raises billions in revenue and pays billions in taxes, that isn’t paid to any government entity close to where the building is.
The locals get replaced by machines, the revenue is pocketed far away.
It’s the equivalent of big mining companies “investing” into mine automation in some developing country. The locals do not benefit!
Sure, some temporary jobs during construction, but I bet it’s nothing like a retail store or factory in operation…
As for taxable revenue, how does that help the community beyond property tax assessments?
Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that's going to impact the company's profitability, but by then your stock options will have already vested - so that's a problem for someone else!
The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]
Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.
But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.
1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
Not even close to a true statement.
EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].
According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.
For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. Robert Moses dam in Niagara Falls does about 2,700MW.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh).
It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.
I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.
This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity...
The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
Hasn't it been common knowledge for a while -- as in since well before the ai boom -- that those reviews are in practice mostly tools for obstructionism (I don't want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we'll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?
Is that's even half true, I don't think the "unforced" there really applies.
Shady backroom deals are bad though, and selectively choosing to apply the rules to some and wave them for others isn't cool, in either direction.
Tonto, dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.
I am not really aware of the laws around walking down a public sidewalk with a beer in hand. It is certainly gauche but a done-thing to sit at a bus stop and have a Fireball or two.
However, any drinking establishment that serves alcohol will stop you at the door and won't permit anyone to carry drinks outside of their premises. That's a strict thing. My apartment community bans drinking in walkways and stairwells, which was probably done more by non-residents than my neighbors. So there are a lot of bans on public drinking, even if it is not blanket-outlawed.
A couple of major developments at the shopping mall, though: traditionally all American movie theaters were dry, but that rule has been relaxed, and even the major chains are serving alcohol now. At the mall there has been instituted a "sip & stroll" policy, where designated bars can serve you a plastic cup, and you can roam around the mall with drink-in-hand, as long as you observe the borders of it, where you can't walk into the parking lot or off-premises with your booze.
In general, I have seen many liquor-related laws be relaxed and lightened across my county and state. It seems that there's a general lack of will to crack down on the demand-side, when there is lots and lots of profit to be had on the healthcare-side, where you will get a diagnosis and medication and treatment, whether that is IOP or in-patient, so why not encourage more drinkers to overindulge? Broken window fallacy FTW!
Do you have a link for this? I'm interested in learning more about why Masley is wrong on heat islands.
> Just few months back
Just a few months more, and the public was still often making Epstein references.
It's not well-paid enough to be immune to kool-aid etc, and it's not on the sociopathic management level either, so we can expect a certain degree of very human rationalization going on.
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6121776-gop-worried-data...
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
Do you think people look at big facilities and calculate that they're spending whatever times the medium wage on a crucial service and get mad about it?
Converting things into median wages is a way to put them into scale. They spent this many wages for construction, they spend this many on supplies, they sell this many in product, they hire this many people to work there. If anyone thinks its bad for anything a company buys to exceed a median wage, that's a very silly expectation and I wonder where they got it.
Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.
See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...
It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.
In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.
Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.
Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it's not efficient in terms of time to transport.
> Attacking them for size
I didn't attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don't care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.
It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.
If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.
Alphabet could have named the company “google data center 083941, llc.”
But Alphabet deliberately obfuscated its control of the facility.
That makes it very clear he was an employee of Google working at the data center.
Written communication is hard
It offers the compelling counter-narrative of "yes, we're evil, but hell yeah this is lucrative af". That makes the ego even happier, as in that story, one is the clever mastermind playing the system, so we can reasonably assume that that path will be taken.
If that path is unavailable, and cognitive dissonance sets in, the other path left is actually drinking the kool-aid. The corp must be nice, after all.
(This all assumes that people do in fact want to do good and have a conscience, but for those that doesn't apply to, there's the sociopathy path as mentioned in the previous comment. Reality is slightly more murky and dynamic, but I'd argue that this rough if-ladder exists as described.)
hint: An individual 18-hole course uses between 300,000 to 1 million gallons per day
If we can close 1 in 3 golf courses and have all the water we need for data centers - and then some - would that be acceptable to our society?
Do we desire so much golf that we'd prefer to stress our water systems instead?
This is a choice, alternative approaches do exist but we should definitely not assume that datacenter water usage is _always_ benign.
You understand, the water isn't used up? It's not even used up in agriculture. Even when you drink a glass of water, the water doesn't actually disappear, soon someone else will be drinking it. The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today. No need to panic about someone using water.
The only reason to be concerned is if someone is mixing the water with other chemicals at a rate faster than the natural filtration and then not paying for the treatment to purify the water again. But that is not an issue with data centers. Merely using water is a concern only for people who don't understand how matter is preserved, but a school physics book should dispel those concerns.
> Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.
The linked article talks about >500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It's nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it's such a common thing to do then why isn't it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?
However, the source of the water can be "used up" faster than it can be replenished, such as in the case of some aquifers
Nope. Plants turn water into oxygen and (the H part of) hydrocarbons, and animals turn those back into water. And after that, the result is different water than the cycle started with.
One shouldn't assume that evaporated water comes back into the system in the place you want it to. Water management orgs try to reduce loss from evaporation for a reason!
So while pointing to agriculture and saying look there - those guys & gals way more than us it’s a red herring because we need food.
Sure improve efficiency of ag, but a better comp for water usage should be made. Reasonable people tune out.
I think there's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
Of course, they'd like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won't get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.
Water use has locally been an issue in places where municipalities were taken advantage of and their local water supply management laws weren't set up to account for a giant consumer to just roll up and start pulling past replenishment rate. But there's nothing about datacenters that demand that be the case; those places were cheap to build in (and why they were cheap to build in should probably be its own graduate political theory thesis / series of fraud and mismanagement investigations and prosecutions).