this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Current datacenters are much more concerning environmentally for their electricity usage. The previous 20 years before the current LLM boom, their electrical usage was more or less flat. In the US, it's now estimated to go from 5% of the US electrical demand to 15% in the next few years and is delaying fossil fuel plant closures


The water usage is concerning in some local situations (often more so from pollution from poor construction) for various data centers, but agriculture and especially animal agriculture really does dominate water usage in water scarce areas and is enormously wasteful with water. For instance, in the American West, it's mostly all going to animal feed where plants for human consumption use significantly less

https://archive.is/GnPy9


This is not to say it's good that it's using this water. Just that we really should actually also be very much concerned about the agricultural impact because it's horribly inefficient. Producing animal products is massively inefficient

[–] stopdropandprole@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

great graphs and summary. ty for sharing

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

the water used on farming does not disappear into a vacuum tho, it's literally recycled into the environment one way or another.

[–] Kumikommunism@hexbear.net 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You do not understand water use in farming. Which is fine, go read. But don't comment on it until you do.

Modern farming uses way too much water in very bad ways.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

And that place is not where we want / need the water to go. I.e into the plants moved elsewhere and into the air carried away. It depletes these waterways

Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs