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We ran out of drinking water because we needed to cool down the machines generating 4K AI fruit videos
(lemmy.today)
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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I'm as anti-ai as it comes, but this headline kinda flagged my bullshit meter. "Consuming" water is not as simple an equation as consuming things like oil is. The water isn't destroyed in the process, it's just heated. So then it depends on where the water was drawn from, whether the water was evaporated, etc. If they're doing evaporative cooling (which should be banned in my opinion) then it's essentially "consumed", but if it's open loop cooling, sending the heated water back into the body of water it was drawn from, then it's not the same as being "consumed"
I keep telling this to my local water utility but they keep billing me for drawing water from the municipal supply, regardless.
Dumping superheated water into the reservoir won't have any second order consequences, right?
You're paying for the filtration and delivery of it. Feel free to stop paying and go collect and clean your own water.
If the water is superheated, something has gone drastically wrong. The effects of that style open loop cooling do exist, and are well understood already from the power generation industry.
Rainwater Reservoirs Net Jail Time For Oregon Man
Read your own article. Wasn't in trouble for collecting rainwater; he got in trouble for damming natural waterways. Massive difference.
Have you tried saying your house is a data center?
I mean, I've got a homelab with a water-cooled CPU. So... a very, very small one, yes.
Can I tell my water utility this to get some kind of discount?
Most of these new hyperscaler centers have been doing evaporative because it's cheaper to install and easier to run so as you said it is effectively gone.
They're also being placed in numerous dry areas, such as Phoenix, Arizona, where the water crisis is so bad that even if 90% of the water makes it back immediately into the local water supply, that added draw is large enough to tip things too far.
Datacenters don't draw water from rivers. They take it from our drinking water supply through the supply network, and then dump it.
That water is as consumed as water flushed down the toilet. It's gone from the community, even if obviously it still exists somewhere.
The heated water is released back into the waterways and by extensions kills everything living there. This collapses the ecosystem and changes the water chemistry. This can result in contamination, invasive species taking over, etc... Do that on major water ways like the Great Lakes/Saint Lawrence and you fuck with people's drink water supply.
Only closed loop data centers are remotely feasible.
The great lakes are already using lake water for cooling nuclear plants. That's what I was referring to when I said we already know the effects. It definitely effects the local ecosystem, but what that effect is depends on the body of water we are talking about. It's definitely nowhere near as simple as "kills everything living there".
Ideally we would just quit building useless data centers all together, and this cooling question would be a moot point.
Yes, and nuclear power plants are built with the strictest oversight and environmental planning. Data centers are just built in industrial zones with minimal supervision.
Do you think people live close enough to them for the noise to be a problem?