And all of it will be laced with PFAS forever.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Why? What happens?
The water used in datacenter cooling has PFAS added to prevent corrosion.
I haven’t heard that before, where can I learn more about this? Also wouldn’t that be true of all power generation plants as well? (Except wind and solar of course.)
Isnt that water evaporated? Does PFAS stick around steam?
The majority are low volatility and stay in the plumping, and a certain amount of the water that goes through the evaporators (a little under a tenth generally, I think) is flushed through (usually into the local water treatment system) with as a more concentrated solution. Some PFAS are volatile enough to ride the water vapor up and eventually fallout again.
Edit: I forgot, some types still legal in the US are volatile enough to not fallout, and instead become strong greenhouse gases.
Apparently the F in PFAS is for flourine, which doesn't evaporate off with the water. PFAS stay behind.
Not in my building. We use closed-loop, RO, continuously filtered, deionized water. Like all of the others my company runs.
Whats your source?
Most recently, the EESI, but The Guardian started reporting on it last year.
Did you read your sources? They talk about fire suppression and manufacturing, not cooling.
According to those articles, the water-cooled systems don't uses pfas.
Good comment for asking for source. Also good on them for delivering.
Also glad the source didn't support the claim
Glad someone actually read those sources since I clearly didn't 😂👌
Wait what, why PFAS?
I swear to god, the powers that be are legitimately trying to fucking kickstart ecoterrorism
They said lizardmen were running the show. Then I learned that lizardmen was just a dogwhistle for jew. Now I'm back to thinking its lizards because they like it toasty
they’ll go bankrupt before then
Is this a conversion of or without the power costs?
The water footprint comes from cooling and powering the data centers, and the land footprint comes from the energy infrastructure and supply chains that go into building and running them.
Addressing AI’s environmental impact won’t be as straightforward as transitioning to greener sources of power, the report warns. Ditching coal in favor of bioenergy could slash carbon emissions associated with electricity costs by 70 percent, but cause the water footprint to surge by 30 times, and the land footprint by 100 times.
Assuming this is what you are asking, the water consumption (and land footprint) is calculated from all power use.
Has anyone calculated where the tipping point of no more survival for living things that need water, with their water consumption protections, that you know of?
Is that including the water going into everything a person consumes (it kind of can't be since AI would.be part of that)? Afaik including the water used for making all the stuff a person consumes increases that figure by an order of magnitude and a bit. So more like 70 million people.
Which isn't nothing, but most of datacenter water use is also just for cooling, so it doesn't need to be drinkable water in the first place (though it currently often is). The waste heat can really fuck with local ecosystems though.
Dude. Why the fuck are you trying to minimize the catastrophic harm of AI data centers?
It's not like your "corrections", if they're even true, make them anything other than a gigantic waste of resources both natural, economic, and societal, as well as a grotesquely severe environmental hazard.
And that's not even getting into the number of people who will either be unemployed or forced to waste ridiculous numbers of hours correcting AI errors for shit wages.
Because there's like 10000 things wrong with AI and we don't need to blow a comparatively minor (but still fucking dumb given how little we really get out of it, plus the fact that many AI datacenters do use municipal water supply which is kinda horrid) out of proportion. Particularly because this minimizes how much water we already use in general, which is a massive problem.
It's also just a sensationalist, intentionally misleading headline, and that's not something I want to leave unadressed ever. Shitty journalism is a huge part of how the world got into this state in the first place.
If you think sticking to facts is "minimizing harm" then idk what to tell you. The claimed 1 billion people have the same water use as around 100 million us-americans, going from the cited water use figure for AI in 2030. Home water use only, which again is usually <10% of total water used for everything consumed.
None of that means it's not one of the dumbest possible things to use this much energy (which is most of the water use) on.
That’s why bill gates wants to depopulate 1 billion people.