Fuck AI

The 264 billion gallons absorb enough energy from the data center to evaporate. They turn into a gaseous form and rise into the sky where they become clouds. The clouds will eventually precipitate and turn into rain, but it might take months and months, and it probably won't happen in dry areas with low rainfall. It might even happen over the ocean, turning the clouds into undrinkable salty seawater.

It evaporates. They could cool it back down and reuse it, but that would increase costs even more and corporations like money.

Also, "but it remains part of the water cycle" is irrelevant. Of fucking course it does; we're not talking about nuclear fusion here! But what matters isn't how much water exists, it's how much usable water exists and when it evaporates it stops being usable.

https://www.joburgetc.com/news/ai-data-centers-fresh-water-usage-cooling-recycled/

TLDR: They use evaporative cooling, so the clean drinking water is taken from the water supply and distributed to the air. Yes, the rain cycle works and the water isn't destroyed, but the water molecules are distributed places that are no longer readily available. Drinking water supplies like aquifers, reservoirs, etc. are depleted, but weather patterns do not necessarily replenish them, particularly weather patterns distorted by climate change.

You’re right about the rain and evaporation in general. It’s the rate of evaporation and source of water that is in question.

This is a simple answer and there’s a lot of factors but generally, it’s the rate of usage.

Farms in California are facing drought - the water cycle hasn’t stopped, but the water source in the mountains is drying up as climate change impacts are felt - so they extract groundwater (which is not replaced at the rate of extraction). This groundwater evaporates or leaves inside the vegetables they grow and falls as rain but not where it was extracted from.

A datacentre in Wisconsin pulls water from a Great Lake, is used for cooling, the water evaporates, and rains somewhere else. The Great Lake shrinks. It’s the same effect.

Plus, the water may be treated (contaminated) by the datacentre. It may be using treated drinking water.

First of all, in general it depends what kind of water is used - river, lake, ground water - but in this case it's almost always easily accessible river and lake water, because it's the cheapest (surprise, surprise).

This is actually much better than it would have been with underground aquifers, because those take long years to refill.

However, whenever you collect river or lake water and evaporate it, it'll almost never return as rain in the exact same place. Partially because that's just how it works, and partially because climate change is affecting rain patterns almost everywhere.

So if you quickly use up half of an entire river - a good amount of the water will return as rain, but away from the river, so the river will still shrink. This is bad, because ecosystems depend on rivers and lakes, including people. It also doesn't mean new rivers or lakes will be created elsewhere. All our current lakes and rivers have been created over millenia. Depending on where all that extra rain falls - the water may not even have a positive impact, e.g., because it'll cause a flood.

Depending on the specific geographic location, some of the water may be completely wasted, because the rain will fall into the sea. In the middle of the country (US) it's pretty much 0%, but closer to the shore it may be nearing 100%.

There's also the problem of some data centers ignoring ecological regulations, and dumping all kinds of waste into the same rivers they use for cooling. There was at least one case of an xAI data center seriously polluting a river.

The single biggest issue is just the scale of water extraction. Most of humanity's water use has been slowly growing over thousands of years, with appropriate infrastructure built and ecological research conducted. Not exactly true in the US (go figure), but I'm simplifying.

Big cities obviously use a lot of water, too. But they were built and populated over up to 300 years (or much more outside North America).

Now imagine adding several big citties worth of water consumption, all in just a few years, without any ecological oversight.

Copying from another thread on this, but the focus on water use over electricity and emissions of datacenters does not make sense. It's just helping datacenter by focusing on the wrong environmental issue because they are not a major contributor to water use.

Agriculture, and animal agriculture specifically, are the super dominant water users. Even in water scarce places like the Colorado river

https://archive.is/Gpibv

Animal agriculture also pollutes ground water, and at a far higher rate and frequency. They create toxic algae blooms are from the runoff which means high nitrate levels in the local water level. Cancer rates are elevated nearby animal farms

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935126006286

Meanwhile electrical usage is delaying fossil fuel plant closure, leading to new ones, leading to backup generator use, etc. Datacenters are projected to go from 5% of electricity use to 15%. I keep seeing 5x the number of posts on the water usage than emissions. It's letting datacenters get away with their super high emissions with so much less attention to it

As a kid (long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It’s my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.

Yeah the water used in evaporative cooling on the data canter roofs does later condense as rain somewhere again, but the issue is that it will be far away from the location by then, so that's no relief for the local water network that is taxed by the demand.

Some of this is that there is only so much to consume at a time. It's a problem for a while with farms in California and why there is rationing.

A very simplified example.

Say there is a high ground point. All of the rain falls there. It runs down a stream to the ocean, where it eventually evaporates and goes back to the high point where it rains again.

Basic cycle.

Say it rains 1000 gallons per day. Which is probably ridiculously low, but, again, simplified example.

Along the flow to the ocean route, 10 people build farms, each farm needs 100 gallons of water for their crops each day.

So it rains, the water flows, each farmer pulls their 100 gallons, nothing reaches the ocean anymore but it all still evaporates and goes back to the high point where it rains.

If an 11th farmer comes along, now things get broken, because the new 11th farmer also needs 100 gallons, but it only rains 1000 gallons a day. The farmers make it work, maybe they import a bit of water each or they make due with 90 gallons instead of 100.

Now let's take a new data center. They build right next to the top, and consume 900 gallons of water per day. The 11 farmers downstream, are now turbo fucked, along with the food they produce.

This also does not get into potential contamination, which should be filtered out as it evaporates because the contaminates don't evaporate, nor does it get into possible misleading claims about how "the data center does not use that much water" while omitting the power generators next door that are technically a third party company that technically are not "part of" the data center, that actually consume the water.

Hahaha, future historians. Rich.

It's worse than the image describes... This senseless, STUPID waste of water and power drives up costs and also eliminates jobs.

It's pure downside for everyone but the companies building them.

Put a straw in your hand.

Get a mouthful of ice cold water

Blow it through the straw out the other side.

Feel it cool your hand? See how its dispersed out to god knows the fuck where? Never returning in any significant volume to replenish the cup it was drawn from

Thats basically whats going on.

Billions of gallons of drinkable water, wasted because data centers didnt want to pay the extra cost for a closed loop cooling system. putting enormous strain on water systems that are already at or beyond their breaking points and are not able to replenish at even a fraction of the rate that they are being drained from.

It evaporates in cooling. A closed loop system would avoid this, but it's more expensive, so we destroy ourselves instead.

The people who build these know how bad it is but they just do their job.

The people who program those know the damage and insane risk it poses but they keep doing it because it's their job.

Some CEOs are downright saying it out loud how damaging and dangerous this can be but they don't stop because they are responsible to provide shareholder value.

They're all working on building the equivalent of a giant bomb that might destroy the planet and can't stop because they might fall behind their competitors who are doing the same thing and miss out on making more money before someone inevitably detonate theirs and destroy the planet.

Everyone knows it is a bubble that props up the economy and that it will create a huge recession when it pops because everyone knows it will never generate the income it needs to achieve a profit.

And yet investors are still pouring billions of dollars into it to keep it going because it has pretty much achieved the status of meme stock. They're using is to make money out of thin air in a giant Ponzi scheme.

Self regulation clearly does not work. And the government still doesn't want to regulate it because they were told that they might fall behind their enemies if they do.

For crying out loud, we controlled and regulated the crap out of nukes. Why can't we do the same here?

Future historians will just reiterate the same shit that has preceeded any man-made catastrophe. A relatively small group of men sought neverending power with bottomless greed at the expense of resources and everyone else.

Simply: almost all of it precipitates in the world's oceans, where it is practically useless.

Water is drawn from a source and then evaporated. This is to cool down any large heat source rapidly. This is used both by combined-cycle natural gas power plants and by data centers. Computers turn 99.9% of the power they consume into heat, and data centers usually have about a 15% to 20% energy overhead. So powering 1MW of computers consumes about 1.2MW of power and produces 3.4M BTU per hour.

The water absorbs that heat and evaporates. Many data centers are built to consume water from massive underground aquifers. They drain the aquifer faster than it refills. So the water is being displaced, which means whereever you place a DC you are depleting the local water supply.

In addition, though, evaporation causes concentration of any solute. The evaporation tanks develop highly concentrated sludge of whatever was dissolved in the water when it was drawn from the aquifer. This concentration is usually high enough to be harmful to most life (very salty) or create harmful runaway biological processes (from phosphorus and nitrogen).

There's ones that use evaporative cooling, meaning they draw water off of a river/lake/creek (or domestic water supply) and cool through putting that water into the air. Lots of power plants do this exact thing, especially nuclear power plants.

There's ones that use closed cycle cooling, like a bigass water cooled PC. The water generally stays inside. It periodically needs to be cycled.

There's also measures out there that account for all of the water needed to produce all of the components. The water used for that is one time usage.

Are these things "using up" water? Sure, some of them are in the sense they are accelerating evaporation. Some are using very little water.

Future historians? LOL… after this blunder, mankind is going right back to the 18th Century and they’ll be bitches in the fields again or starve.

I wish when people report the use of DC, it's not just to make AI vids, it's to track you and make a profile of everyone.

nah they will be having a field day with all the crazy fascism.

that's if there's anyone left after the burger reich is done.