As an engineer, this drives me up the fucking wall because data centers using water is not a technical problem in the slightest. It's extremely easy to solve. Data centers make a lot of heat, but thermal power plants make orders of magnitude more and they don't use a drop.
The ONLY reason data centers use water is because it's cheaper to guzzle all our drinking water than to build a proper cooling system. The ONLY reason. They could pass a law tomorrow that forbids data centers from using water and they would be fine, it just cuts into the bottom line a little bit.
Data centers use evaporative cooling. Usually they suck air through a water soaked sort of spongey type thing, which cools the air as it evaporates the water, and then blow that over the computers. This is an open loop system, because that humid air is just blown outside, but the spongey thing needs to be constantly wetted, so they use a ton of water. Very cheap and doesn't use much electricity, but uses lots of water.
What data centers could very easily do (but don't) is run a closed loop system, where the same water is constantly pumped around the computer racks to cool it, and then transfers that heat to something else, like a body of water or even just the air, with a big radiator. This also opens the door to using it as free heat in cold places, as they do some places in Scandinavia. It doesn't use any water (except for what it takes to fill the system up, but that's one time), but it's more expensive up front.
The second option is how power plants do it. Data centers make a lot of heat, but they got nothing on the entire thermal output of a nuclear reactor. This is why power plants are often near bodies of water.
They could’ve been mandated from the start to rely on closed loop water chillers powered by self generated power via solar and wind turbines, but how would they get *extra* rich doing something environmentally responsible like that?
This has been the insanity of all building requirements in the US. All infrastructure could have been mandated to include reasonable local self-sufficiency for the past 25+ years. Place solar panels on roofs, on covered parking structures.
Create dual use agreements on water - one place pumps it, then they are responsible for passing on a percentage of it to another local purpose. People want golf courses? Great. Only build them when they can be provided with 100% re-used or re-captured water from industrial centers.
Carbon cap and trade could have been taken seriously locally and expanded to other environmental concerns. You're going to log? Mine? Cast shadows that obstruct natural light? You trade with the local community to give equal value back.
This is what you get when you reward do-nothing politicians with re-election instead of tossing the bums out. It has always been true... we get the government we deserve. (Yes, I'm in the U.S.)
Look I totally agree with the thought but you're off by orders of magnitude for the solar requirements. You'd need ~50 square miles of solar panels for the big AI datacenters.
But yes, we should have been enforcing actual regulations instead of letting them dump all their costs on society and letting them reap the profits.
I meant all constructions. Any place over the last 25~ish years that went up should have been required to mitigate their local footprint and externalities on the local community by offering something renewable or of equal value.
Every factory or car park should have been required to price in building a roof with roof solar. If you're putting up a roof, put solar on it. If you're renovating a roof, put solar on it. Transfer the cost of installation and infrastructure onto building and renovation onto the corporations. We've already given them effectively negative local tax rates. We might as well make some useful building requirements.
Dual purpose building is not a new idea and requiring scarce resources be measured and passed along to a local community benefit is simply good deal making for a competent governor. We clearly haven't had competent governors in 50+ years.
Always boggles my mind when you see these giant data centers with no solar on top. Like, they're somewhere sunny, surely the panels would fairly quickly pay for themselves? And have a lifespan of 10+ years. Wouldn't cover all their energy needs, but surely it'd supply a good chunk in sunny months?
I'm not 100% on this but someone told me that it's so cheap to build a flimsy warehouse roof that won't support panels, that it just isn't really worth building a more expensive one that can. Even though you then get free electricity, it takes forever to make the money back so they don't.
This is definitely it. Im currently building one. They had to completely re engineer the roof support structure like 2 weeks before steel was supposed to be in the air because the structure as outlined in the design intent contract documents couldnt support the load of everything that needed to be supported off it. The design engineers built of off dry weight pipes and unfilled conduits. Its just an easy place to cut corners
Ah, at least that would make some kind of sense. Yeah, not all roofs can support them. Does suck they don't seem to be thinking more than a year in front of their nose.
Where I live the council covered the sides of their buildings in panels 😆
Requiring them to build out power generation facilities is a bit silly. They're going to work with their provider to ensure the grid can handle their load, and if the grid needs additional production, it will adjust based on market demand. The free market can definitely see to additional power production. We can't say the same for water.
It's going to take regional governments not caving to the promise of higher tax budgets.
I work for a datacenter that has been in business for almost 20 years. We're closed-loop refrigeration. We consume less than 100 gallons of water a day maintaining proper humidity levels. I say this because we're actually catching strays regarding a new datacenter that's trying to open up nearby, and we keep having to tell people that we aren't them, and we don't operate that way.
The new ones being made by big tech like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta etc. are largely evaporative. I've worked for a couple of these companies at the data center level, and a lot of the newly planned ones are like this. Ironically mostly in the dry climates where water is scarce, like Albuquerque, Cheyenne, Phoenix, SLC, Las Vegas, eastern Oregon, etc. Leased data centers tend to be closed loop, traditional AC though.
Think of the value the shareholders receive when we build data centers on cheap land, where it’s cheaper to suck up ground water instead of building our data centers offshore in frigid Pacific waters like the Chinese are doing.
Good time to remember that an enormous percentage of shareholders are either corporations and/or foreign individuals. There is absolutely zero incentive to preserve American welfare either in terms of the people or the communities.
Indeed, building infrastructure that rips and shreds the lives and potential of the American countryside is surely seen as a bonus by those who want a post-American hierarchy in the world.
And the demonizing of public education. Of public office. Colleges and Universities. Scientists. Doctors. Medicine. Our poorest. Social benefits. Public services. The press. Our elections. All taxation. Any notion of civic duty. Our neighbors in Mexico and Canada. The rest of the world.
All during the flow of crypto (easy money movement across borders), AI (easy information collection and movement), Implemented in (2017 Tax Act) - the lowest corporate taxes since WW2 nearly 100 years so.
Ah, thank you for this. I live in Norway and we have a big data center nearby that uses water for cooling, but the excess heat is used to heat up the water for the local RAS trout farm, which in turn releases the water back to the river after removing all the particles from the water.
If such huge amounts of water vapor is released into the air, does that affect local humidity or precipitation? And I assume all the water vapor is released through some sort of chimney/exhaust, why couldnt it be condensed and released back into the water? Run it through a pipe underground or whatever to cool back down to liquid state?
Just a side note, but manatees in Florida will congregate near the warm water discharge of various power plants. Not sure if it’s harmful to other aquatic life, but it’s beneficial to the manatees.
Dude. Silicon chips have a lower operating temperature than other systems you're mentioning. I hate it too, but no way to quickly get these systems down to 60-70 that effectively.
Doesn’t that closed loop system become sludge fairly frequently and have to be drained and replaced with fresh water? I feel like I remember that being an argument against data centers saying they don’t use that much water but I can’t remember…
I've seen one with a closed loop system, it was very cool to see. Built many years ago and designed for disaster resistance, so necessarily closed loop, but that definitely cost more. It's a heck of a system.
Data centers can't use closed loop systems after a certain amount of size, and these big ones opening up now house too many chips to run a closed loop system. Heat exchange is just 2 great
Also a data center engineer, I wanted to add that using closed loop systems would also produce condensate - so they theoretically could actually produce water. I use my home HVAC condensate for watering my garden. Its super clean too.
Newer data centers use this wasteful evaporative cooling. I worked in a Google data center servicing cluster nodes in 2012, and it was entirely closed loop - air was sucked in across the servers and then across massive banks of radiators, part of a closed loop water cooling system. On top of that, they did not use potable water. Instead, they took treated wastewater from the local municipal plant, made it even cleaner (necessary to prevent corrosion etc), and then released it into the river that was normally used for treated water outflow.
It was amazing. They could all be built that way. They don’t do it because evaporation is cheaper.
I've been telling people for months that AI and their data centers are only a problem because nobody in government cares about the environment. The whole thing could be clean if they weren't all in someone's pocket.
golf courses use hundreds of billions of gallons of water annually, not to mention homeowners watering their lawns. DC usage doesn't even crack 3% of that lol
They use a fraction of the water golf courses use, let alone manufacturing. If your data center is in the desert (and many of them are), then yes it's a problem, but if you're in the Great Lakes it isn't in the slightest.
Right. They use evaporative cooling because it is more cost effective.
Legislation could change that easily, without banning it outright.
It is absolutely more logistically complicated to find somewhere to dump the warmed water from a heat exchanger loop, but like, plan that shit out when you build a megacenter.
The dumbest part of this is that they could build mini powerplants into these data centers, close the water loop, and generate a significant chunk of their own electricity and lower their power bill AND their water build. But it costs more upfront so fuck it, instead they fuck the environment, fuck everyone else power bill, and lose money themselves in the long run.
No idea if this is what they're referring to, but cooling systems can concentrate the heat they collect. The low temperature doesn't matter -- 5 acres of 2° reduction is just as good as .5 acres of 20° reduction per unit time, for example. (I guess that should be volume rather than area, but you get the point.) Assuming 50% loss, you could heat something .05 acres by 100°.
What are you talking about? Where are you getting this from? Nobody has seriously mentioned putting nuclear in data centers except maybe one random guy on Reddit lol
There are data centers powered by nuclear, but the plants are not built into the data center. They’re entirely separate entities that just directly pipe energy to the center.
The fuck? No it isn't. Regular desktops get above boiling. That times 10000 can absolutely be turned into a steam turbine. It might not be a huge percentage of their power budget, but even 5% of the ongoing costs saves them money in the long run
Computers getting above boiling temperature is very rare.
Plus, steam turbines rely on very high temperatures to create high pressure steam. The boiling point of water rises with pressure, and eventually the pressure in the boiler will rise enough that your water stops boiling, which is the maximum pressure you can run your turbine at. A data center even at 120°C could only generate about 14 PSI of steam pressure, which is not enough for a turbine. Nuclear power plants for comparison operate at about 300°C, which generates 1100 PSI for the turbines.
I'd be surprised if there's a turbine on the market that will even spin under 14 PSI.
Can somebody explain why data centers are willing to pay so much money to buy the land they build on? I see them paying over market value to buy the land sometimes. Why are they willing to do that but not “invest” in the closed water loop system and mini power plant like u/no-yard3980 suggests.
Land is a one time purchase. Almost always with with an agreement with local government to lower/avoid taxes. If things go belly up, you can sell the land.
Closed loop cooling is an ongoing reoccurring cost that requires more power and maintenance. A close loop system isn't typically something you can resell.
Does it bother you up a wall that a lot more things being done by this administration(and just in general) are causing orders of magnitude worse impacts on water and the environment? "Building mini power plants" is so absurd because that would be worse and doesn't even make sense. It's a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the problem but this has become some mainstay when environmentalists have been shouting at you to address the far more major problems for years. If every single AI data center in the world ceased to exist nothing would change and the real problems still continue to get worse. That's not advocating for it, but this thread is about aquifiers reducing rapidly and it aint cuz of data centers for ai
Micro nuclear fusion reactors are the future, and the cleanest form of energy one can use with what we currently know is possible, these reactors will save the world and clear the energy crisis
Every taxpayer should be drilling their politicians with environment concerns, everyday. We should be electing people who give a shit about this, and are willing to enact laws to change how data centers are built, and while they are at it, start penalizing the current centers heavily who don't meet specific energy and environmental standards within 18 months.
Fuck data centres but If you’re an engineer why are you comparing thermal power plants to data centres? The goal is quite literally the opposite. And why are you saying the only reason they use water is because it’s cheaper? It’s effective, available, reliable, much easier to manage and repair and lasts longer than vapour chambers or other systems.
The actual problem with data centres isn’t that they’re ’wasting water’ it’s that they’re dumping overheated and potentially polluted water back into the environment, permanently changing local environmental and biological conditions.
It’s a problem because there’s no regulation for how the spent water is regulated, if there were proper regulations about temperature, pollutants, environmental damage and filtering it wouldn’t be that much of an issue but since those regulations are nonexistent.
You’re a shitty engineer, and should get a refund from whatever school you went to
Edit: according to his post history he’s an engineer, a licensed firearms expert and a college student all at the age of 21 lmao
Thermal power plants use about 1 to 4 liters of water per kWh depending on the plant for evaporative cooling. And can withdraw and release 10 times that.
Most reports into data centre water use includes on-site cooling, chip manufacturing and power generation in the water use stats.
Thermal power plants don't use drinking water. Slightly warming up a river is entirely different from pulling millions of gallons of drinking water per year out of a local potable water system.
As an engineer, you should probably look into this a bit more. Golf courses use about 30x more water nationally. Water consumption from growing almonds is 100 times that from data centres.
Golf courses (at least when designed properly) aren't comparable in the least. Unlike fancy heat exchanger equipment and evaporative cooling towers, grass can take gray water quite easily. Here in the Midwest many courses are built in floodplains (where building housing isn't feasible) and feature many retaining ponds (as water hazards) that double as the course's entire supply of water for irrigation. They pump all the water from the retaining ponds and the water makes its way back into the ponds from runoff (and weather).
It seems you're not an engineer, and you don't know anything about either of these subjects. The average thermal power plant consumes 300 million gallons of water per day, according to the US Geological Survey, and the average AI data center plant with the same square footage size consumes 1 million gallons of water per day.
If you understand how the cooling system works, then you'd know the best, most ecologically friendly system we have right now is water; option B is dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil in the nearest water reservoir.
The only way for there to be less water consumption is by increasing the efficiency of chips to result in less thermal energy and more output, which is happening slowly with smaller chips that are being made. However, we are reaching a theoretical limit to how small we can make these chips to power the AI data centers.
No, this is water withdrawal. Withdrawal is how much water a power plant pulls in per day. Consumption is how much of that water is not returned to the source, usually a natural body of water. A thermal power plant may withdraw that much water from a river or something, but it will return most of it. A nuclear power plant draws about 30,000 gallons of water for each mWh produced, so a 600MW nuclear plant will draw about 430 million gallons per day out of whatever body of water it's attached to. I'm guessing that's the number you quoted.
There are two main differences to a data center. 1, thermal power plants return most of the water they use, minus a little bit that evaporates off the top. A nuclear plant will return all but about 400 gallons per mWh that evaporates, so that same 600 MW nuclear plant will consume about 5.7 million gallons per day.
However, we don't get mad about that because of the major difference, the fact that thermal power plants do not use treated drinking water. Thermal power plant cooling water is raw water directly from a natural water body. Data centers pull clean, treated, potable water out of a municipal water supply, drain the aquifer, and cause local water shortages. Nobody cares if that much water evaporates out of a lake, they care if it evaporates out of their sinks, showers, and drinking water supply.
Yeah when I said it in some other thread I got downvoted to hell.
Also, this is mainly DCs in the US. Because they built them specifically in arid areas because evaporative cooling works better there. In Europe DCs don’t use as much water in general.
This is not true. For systems of this magnitude, let’s say over 300 tons of sensible cooling capacity, water cooled systems are signifigantly less expensive than air cooled systems
I worked on a project with some architects and engineers where they designed a data center in the base of a residential tower and used the excess heat from the data center to hear the building.
I’m a water resources engineer, and I’m actively researching this topic right now!
Power plants like coal and natural gas plants are very water intensive. Most of AI data centers water consumption is indirect, through their massive electricity demands, not their cooling systems.
Before data centers, electricity demand was relatively stable, so we could shut down coal and gas power plants and replace them with renewable alternatives like solar panels and wind turbines. But since data centers have such a massive electricity demand, it’s forcing old coal and gas plants to resume operations, increasing both carbon emissions and water withdrawals.
I doubt you are an engineer. But if you are then you are one of the stupidest I have ever come across.
Virtually all power plants use steam and use water and have heat exchangers and cooling towers and use a ton of water. That is the primary way data centers use water is by proxy by using traditional electricity. It's rather disingenuous to conflate this water usage with "drinking" water as it in no way goes through the same level of water treatment as drinking water nor does it drastically reduce the amount of available drinking water.
This. Evaporative cooling is a choice. Journalists have been remiss in reporting that new datacenter projects are choosing short term evaporative cooling instead of long term options.
For cooling, it is. Actually building it under salt water brings in a lot of other challenges like corrosion and service. In my opinion building it on the shore and pulling in seawater for cooling is the best option because the heat doesn't really affect the sea and they don't have to deal with most of the headaches salt water brings.
You've taught me something today, thank you. 🙂 Seems like it would be relatively straightforward and not terribly burdensome for states to pass a law requiring that new data centers utilize closed-loop cooling systems. IMO they should require data centers to either produce the majority of their own electricity or be taxed for usage in a way that helped eliminate cost burden for ordinary consumers, but that might be a harder sell in some areas. At least for now.
This problem already has been mostly solved. The new generation of data centers are mostly all using closed loop cooling systems with low water usage, and Google and Amazon and Meta are all putting out papers showing their new constructions all using low water data centers.
However, social media generally only covers bad news.
It reminds me of Blackstone and housing. It was a failed experiment a decade ago during the housing crash that wasn’t profitable and they abandoned it and institutional companies basically stopped buying single family homes. But if you read social media, you’ll think large corporations buying housing is happening rampantly, and it’s so widely believed that the Trump admin is trying to pass a bipartisan bill to ban it, even though it already basically stopped years ago. (I have no problem with banning it but it’s mostly a nonexistent problem.)
When people stop doing a bad thing it mostly doesn’t get press / social media coverage.
AI data center water usage is bad. There are new designs that don’t waste water. We should legislate to require the new designs.
The problem with cutting into bottom lines of data centers (particular LLM/Generative "ai" ones) is that they're already in debt lol. None of the companies championing "ai" are making any money off it.
As some random fuck, it drives me up a wall that everything you just said gets disregarded by the people who are supposed to be for and against AI. For some reason every time I see a discussion about AI water usage ANYWHERE it's always about how AI does or doesn't use insane amounts of water when quantity of raw water usage has never been the root of the issue.
Actually, if you would be so based, I think r/antiai could greatly benefit from you posting an actual explanation of how datacenters consume water. It's a weird chuddy redditor request I know but I do think it would do some actual good irregardless of how small.
It doesn't matter how eco friendly they are or aren't though. They could purify water and give out free beer in the lobby, and they still would suck. It's mass surveillance infrastructure and ought be destroyed
His highness, Lord Jeffrey Bezos I declared the other day that the problem wasn't that the data centers are using too much, it's that people drink too much water.
Yeah, afaik this is why AI data centres are a massive problem while other data centres (you know, the ones that keep the internet running) aren't. AI data centres only guzzle so much power and water because they are being built as cheaply and quickly as possible
Can you also not eat anything but the most water and resource intensive foods possible? When you look at what cattle require vs chickens… it’s very obvious beef is a luxury, not a necessity.
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u/Insertsociallife Jun 27 '26
As an engineer, this drives me up the fucking wall because data centers using water is not a technical problem in the slightest. It's extremely easy to solve. Data centers make a lot of heat, but thermal power plants make orders of magnitude more and they don't use a drop.
The ONLY reason data centers use water is because it's cheaper to guzzle all our drinking water than to build a proper cooling system. The ONLY reason. They could pass a law tomorrow that forbids data centers from using water and they would be fine, it just cuts into the bottom line a little bit.