short answer: many datacenters have evaporative coolers that shove the water into the air

Yeah anything that's flushed through dirty industrial cooling pumps is going to pick up lubricants, dust, pesticide, microplastics from parts rubbing against each other, basically all the industrial stuff that works it's way into the system which will get worse with age, and they'll have to put nasty chemicals in it to keep slime from growing.

Basically it's not drinkable and you wouldn't want to shower in it and nothing except slime can live it until its diluted enough.

Will they clean it before dumping it back into the environment every time they flush the system? The answer is no. They won't.

And the idea that it won't use that much water because they'll "recycle" it in a closed system is also bullshit. They will have to flush it all the time because water that's kept like that will foul no matter what you to do it and it will start to clog filters and cause issues. So yeah lots and lots of clean water in and lots and lots of nasty water coming out.

Oh yeah, and when the dumped dirty water evaporates, all the contaminates are left on the ground and will start to concentrate until it starts to be a bigger and bigger problem. It will get blown around into people's yards and crops and into food, pets, etc.

"Chillers and cooling towers are at the heart of most large data center cooling setups. The chiller cools down water, dropping its temperature before it heads to CRAH units or other cooling coils.

Cooling towers push this heat out to the open air, usually by evaporating water. Pairing these together lets chilled water systems handle much bigger loads than just using CRAC units alone.

Key components include:

• Chillers: Make chilled water for cooling coils
• Cooling towers: Get rid of heat from the chiller’s condenser water loop
• Pumps: Move water around between units and throughout the system

Chilled water systems are efficient and can scale up, but they do need a big upfront investment and regular maintenance. They’re the go-to for hyperscale and enterprise data centers where uptime and energy use really matter."

In industrial cooling applications, chilled water is run over massive radiators to dissipate heat more efficiently. This usually causes a good portion of the water to be evaporated. The problems with these massive data centers is that they can pump millions of gallons of groundwater a day only to be evaporated to the atmosphere. They end up pumping more groundwater than can be restored naturally, causing groundwater levels to fall which leads to all sorts of other issues.

Technically it's been used for light industrial purposes, which makes it non-potable after usage. It needs to be run through the treatment and testing cycle again to be fit for human consumption.

That would be a bigger issue if people were expecting to drink from the cooling tap, or if most of them didn't use grey water to begin with.

The water has moved through tubes not necessarily rated for human consumption, and exposed to moderate temperatures.
Most is used in the construction of the datacenters or for air conditioners. It's not used per query at all.

Me: prompts a frontier LLM one time to do 30 minutes of my work in 45 seconds

Randos on the internet: "omg you're killing the planet"

Me, who once left a Minecraft technic modpack game running in the background while I had a 2hr goon session, consuming orders of magnitude more power for nothing productive:

Yeah, there are lots of reasons to hate AI, and resource consumption is absolutely one of them; but people seem to miss the forest for the trees when it comes to exactly what parts are problematic

Anyone complaining about AI water usage that doesn't also complain about golf courses and water-intense crops grown in deserts is, to me, not actually upset about water usage. They just hate AI and have latched on to the only thing that can justify their hatred without being abstract or complex.

When a single almond uses more water than over 500 AI prompts, maybe we should be focusing on other things.

Saying animal agriculture is needed for food is like saying private jets are needed because people need to commute

The private jets and yachts need to be stopped first if people are actually serious here but it seems like everyone fucking forgot tay tay requires multiple jets for no reason the moment ai datacenters popped up.

I’d say one poor person prompting a stupid image is no where close to as bad as these fucking vehicles the rich use. If people are serious, go after them first. Prove you mean it.

+1. The least we can argue is, well, you consume food and get calories that you need to survive as you said.

What does AI solve exactly? Putting some very limited usage of it in scientific fields aside, what do we really gain by using AI?

I'm old enough to experience the "evolution" of the internet, even 20 years ago, we had issues with bots, automated emails/scams making everybody's life unnecessarily difficult. Then came captcha, then cloudflare dominated the scene and is slowly becoming a monopoly, and surfing on the web is a hurdle in these days. Solve this, move this puzzle there so we can confirm you're not a bot, give us your phone number (that has no legal base, just a corporate policy) so we can IDENTIFY you and that you're not a robot. Then came 2FA causing people getting locked out of their accounts, then any mainstream company decided to get rid of their customer service agents because money and replace them with AI... The list just goes on.

Genuinely, why do we need AI in our fridges, wash machines, in everything? We just don't. It causes more issues than it helps.

Shit like this makes me trust humans less because so many are willing to lie.

I've been having a hard time finding videos with any human on certain subjects lately. I'll see a video with a ton of views and a few seconds in a realize the voice is too perfect and vacuous sounding, and that the entire thing is an AI. I'm not even sure if the comments are humans either.

With video or written media I've started looking for imperfection as a metric for quality. It feels so good to watch a YouTube channel that is a normal dude with a shitty camera talking about something interesting.

It can't be trusted with foods, medicine dosages, or basically anything with a hazard rating.

I fucked up a concrete mix last month because I was in a hurry and trusted the Google ai summary instead of my own intuition. Lesson learned, hopefully

Okay, while I do suspect the 16oz number is pulled from someone's ass (or just very old, many efficiency improvements ago), there are a couple of things to consider:

a) A single B300 won't even run frontier models. It only has 288 GB of HBM. The DGX B300 server has 2.1 TB, which I suspect is not enough either (running Qwen 3.8 Max lossless (BF16) requires 4.9 TB just to load the model). But these are run in clusters anyway and any single user's prompt only uses a tiny percentage of the compute from tons of servers. OpenAI and Anthropic are going for size with their models so the most expensive ones probably need even more than Qwen.

b) While the GPUs themselves are directly cooled by closed loops, the water inside those closed loops is often cooled by evaporative coolers, or even AC and evaporative cooling in tandem (that allows the evaporation to happen outside the datacenter itself). That's because evaporative cooling is the most energy efficient form of cooling.

There are companies offering very complex heat systems that take advantage of multiple forms of cooling because they're making 100+ kW racks these days and talking of 500-1000 kW racks in the future. Ridiculous numbers, honestly.

This is from some company's website that offers cooling solutions: Notice the outside "cooling tower" - those can be dry or wet. In a hot and dry climate, you'd want wet. It'll cool really well. In a colder and more humid climate, dry might work better. They also optionally let you heat the aquifer apparently, which is bound to cause issues for everyone living nearby over time.

You're talking about closed water cooling systems, which are ethical and more expensive.

Now can you guess how many data centers use those?

I believe the paper was looking at total footprint including building and running data centers with open evaporative cooling, and the water "used" by civilian power stations.

I don't really see more water in the air as the most pressing environmental issue around data centers. That's better than the water being destroyed or contaminated.

The main environmental hazard of data centers is the rapid expansion of them. The running of them for months on end in the training of models... And above all else, the fact billionaires have chosen to power them in the least environmentally friendly ways (gas and disel):

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dirty+power+ai+data+centers+powered+by

There's also data centers using closed loop systems, they don't lose water

I think you're right about the number being nonsense, but water not being destroyed doesn't mean you haven't converted potable water to non-potable water, and it is still important at the actual scale of water that data centers are using for cooling to the localities they operate in.

The extremely dumb thing here is that the water use is totally fine. California alone uses ~11 TRILLION gallons of water per year for farming. And so what, that water cycle returns via precipitation (assuming we don't go so hard to fuck up the aquifers, but you know what I mean). The water is fine. Plus that farm water runoff is even kinda hazardous, with pesticides etc. It's still fine

This is a totally recyclable resource. You can probably use it to water plants after it's been through the data center, or it may have just evaporated away as part of the cooling process

Meanwhile, the obvious dart to throw is the fact that the power need is absolutely ridiculous and only growing, leading to every major tech company investing extensively in energy tech. Eventually they will become a new generation of utilities that supply power (and compute) to everyone. So the opportunity is to force them to reinvent energy in a clean way rather than, say, burning an utter shitton of oil to do it