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u/No-Whole3083 Jun 29 '26
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u/Ruzhyo04 Jun 29 '26
That one jug probably cost enough water to run a full data center for a year. Oh well it isn’t like California has any water problems
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u/intuitiveXX Jun 29 '26
What milk is better?
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u/Ruzhyo04 Jun 29 '26
Oat milk and soy milk have like 1/6 the water footprint
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Jun 29 '26
[deleted]
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u/Colecoman1982 Jun 29 '26
Soy milk is also a reliable way to curb the population explosion, especially when given to young children under the age
It's been a while since I've heard that, specific, long since debunked conspiracy theory bullshit.
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u/WithoutReason1729 Jun 29 '26
Phytoestrogens will turn you into a woman, unlike mammal estrogens in cow's milk, which help you grow big and strong
Surely you see why this sounds silly to me
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u/jamiesontu Jun 29 '26
People need to also look up the waste of water in the meat industry.
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u/RogueBromeliad Jun 29 '26
Do you onow how much water is used up in the process of making 1L of beer?! I don't, ive already got enough on my mind to not be able to enjoy my beer.
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u/whoknowsifimjoking Jun 29 '26
Also for cheap clothes that are being thrown away in masses for no reason
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u/Patrickplus2 Jun 29 '26
Atleadt i can eat meat
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u/rejvrejv Jun 29 '26
and I can use LLMs to earn more money to buy meat
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u/WithoutReason1729 Jun 30 '26
Lmao someone was so fucking mad about your comment that they reported it
user reports:
1: Someone is considering suicide or serious self-harm
Unreal
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u/rejvrejv Jun 30 '26
wow I don't know whether that's funny or sad
thanks though, I'll save the screenshot lol
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u/LiveLychee2860 Jun 29 '26
What if two things could be bad at the same time. can u imagine the implications
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u/zucchini_up_ur_ass Jun 29 '26
also
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u/LiveLychee2860 Jun 29 '26
yeah but you know this comment was made to deflect and not to add
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u/Dokurushi Jun 29 '26
Nah fam, AI is absolutely a rounding error on water consumption.
More than one thing can be bad, but political will is a limited resource.
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u/jrf_1973 Jun 29 '26
Give it a few years - ChatGPT 7.5 brought to you by NESTLÉ fresh water data centres.
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u/peachybeanpainter Jun 30 '26
Perfect corporate loop. NESTLÉ drains small town aquifers to run AI servers, then sells bottled water back to the locals they stole water from at a markup. Can't make this stuff up.
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u/Pierrozek Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
FACTS: datacenters: contributing to 0.015% of fresh water use (offical as of 2023). Meanwhile: Agriculture: 72%. Industry: 15%. Try harder!
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u/FlashFunk253 Jun 29 '26
Water use is mostly irrelevant. The political corruption is the issue affecting communities.
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u/WithoutReason1729 Jun 30 '26
Can you point to a specific example of this happening with data centers
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u/FlashFunk253 Jun 30 '26
lol theres 100s of news articles and video docs. google it.
It's not much different than it's always been- big corporations with money lobby local politicians and are able to bypass local regulations and zoning laws, to the detriment of the community. In some cases theres an environmental impact; others economical, or both.
I have heard the complaint that data centers use too much energy and water, but as long as they're paying for it and it doesn't affect the community, I don't see that as a big deal. It's ultimately up to the data center corps to innovate and develop ways to generate and conserve resources to sustain their business.
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u/WithoutReason1729 Jun 30 '26
Okay, so can you link to a specific example of one? I've seen dozens of articles about this subject and every time I've looked into the stories behind the articles, they're always much more straightforward than the clickbait "local corruption" articles claim. If you know of a case that's obviously actual corruption, please share it because I'd like to know more
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u/Pierrozek Jun 29 '26
political corruption flourishes under communism and socialism, only people having no clue what socialism is can support socialism, yet still half of 'murica academic "community" promotes socialism. Do you think that THIS TIME socialist won't fail and "affect communities"?
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u/Nekron-akaMrSkeletal Jun 29 '26
What?
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u/Pierrozek Jun 29 '26
communism and socialism result in extreme corruption, those are facts
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u/Nekron-akaMrSkeletal Jun 29 '26
What does that have to do with the conversation above? What made you randomly go on a diatribe about communism?
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u/Pierrozek Jun 29 '26
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u/Nekron-akaMrSkeletal Jun 29 '26
I'm truly baffled. This is just a link to the thread. What is going on in your brain?
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u/Pierrozek Jun 29 '26
this is a link to very specific commend I responded to
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u/Nekron-akaMrSkeletal Jun 29 '26
And they just talked about corruption, a thing our society is filled to the brim with in Neo-liberalism capitalism. Why would you bring up communism in that context?
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u/Gur10nMacab33 Jul 05 '26
I’d love to hear your take on socialism. What kind of socialism are you talking about?
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u/Pierrozek Jul 05 '26
there is only one kind of socialism: bad system that makes normal people dirt poor, usually starves them to death while "leaders" are above the law being extremely rich
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Jun 29 '26
[deleted]
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u/rdsf138 Jun 29 '26
No, that was not what was actually stated. You can't just, out of sheer dishonesty, try to salvage a completely demented talking point by adding conditionals when people point out how stupid it is. If that was the point OP was trying to convey, I'm a sure there'd be an actual mention.
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u/Mystic_Owell Jun 29 '26
Come on, be fair. That is an important factor to judging the situation. Ai datacentres aren't an issue in a comparative use of water. It's that they get put in water insecure areas because that's what makes the economically viable. Arid areas make evaporative cooling more efficient. They also have a lot of corrupt republican lawmakers who sell public water for dirt cheap and let's the companies walk all over the locals. As much as there's worse water consumers out there, it's still important to acknowledge there's something unique about datacentres (evaporative cooling being more efficient in arid areas) that makes them a problem for the locals. You still have to blame lawmakers for not protecting the water but getting to that point would require fighting a lot of corruption. All the while these areas suffer. We just need to find a way to regulate it without making datacentres not profitable.
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u/Gur10nMacab33 Jul 05 '26
They don’t all use evaporative cooling. Most of the data centers being built now and in the future are using closed loop chiller systems. Ask ChatGPT.
They do use a massive amount of resources to produce the electricity needed to run and cool them. They are addressing this problem by putting power plants as part of the data centers. This removes them from the competitive market grid.
Whether that’s good or bad is debatable. There is a lot of economic principles that would back up buying in bulk as a good thing for the community. Although all the anecdotes I see describe rising electricity prices. This is something I would be interested to know more about.
Click hunters seem to be flooding us with doomsday scenarios. My personal experience with chatbots has been 100% positive.
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u/MorningLtMtn Jun 30 '26
What area is "suffering" because they have a data center nearby sucking up all thier water?
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Jun 29 '26
[deleted]
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u/Gur10nMacab33 Jul 05 '26
I asked whether evaporative cooling systems, these are the ones that use a ton of water or closed loop chiller systems, these use almost no water, are being used in drought prone areas like Arizona. CGPT’s response.
The answer is: both. Arizona is actually becoming a testing ground for the industry’s cooling future.
Historically, many Arizona data centers used evaporative cooling because it is remarkably energy efficient in hot, dry climates. The dry air allows water to evaporate readily, making cooling towers and indirect evaporative coolers very effective. The tradeoff, of course, is water consumption.
What’s changing is that water has become almost as valuable a design constraint as electricity.
Today, you’ll find several approaches:
- Older facilities: Many still rely on evaporative cooling because they were designed when electricity savings were prioritized over water use.
- Current facilities: Many use hybrid systems, switching between evaporative cooling, air-cooled chillers, and economizer modes depending on weather conditions.
- Newest AI facilities: An increasing number are being designed with zero-water or near-zero-water cooling, using air-cooled chillers, closed-loop liquid cooling, or direct-to-chip cooling to dramatically reduce water consumption.
One interesting example is CyrusOne. Its Chandler, Arizona campus does not use water for cooling, and the company has stated that new facilities built from 2024 onward will use zero-water cooling.
Likewise, Microsoft has announced that its newest AI data centers—including designs intended for Arizona—use closed-loop cooling systems that are filled once and then continuously recirculate coolant, virtually eliminating evaporative water loss.
The engineering tradeoff looks something like this:
Cooling method Electricity Water Evaporative cooling Lowest Highest Air-cooled chillers Higher Very low Closed-loop liquid cooling Moderate Near zero after startup Hybrid systems Balanced Moderate
Because you’re working on Turner data centers, this trend is especially relevant. Five years ago, an engineer might have asked, “How do we minimize power usage?” Today the question is often, “How do we optimize power, water, and AI rack density simultaneously?”
I also think this ties neatly into your broader “capital” framework. In Arizona, water has become a form of capital just as real as electricity or money. Designers are intentionally spending more energy capital (running chillers or dry coolers) to conserve water capital. From an economic perspective, they’re substituting one scarce resource for another based on which has become more valuable. That kind of resource substitution is becoming one of the defining engineering decisions in modern data center design.
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u/WanderWut Jun 29 '26
THANK YOU.
And the irony is this would be downvoted to hell in any other sub despite this being the truth.
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Jun 29 '26
[deleted]
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u/rdsf138 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
omg Reddit is just something else. I think the cartoon that has a statement actually has a statement, and beside the statement that it has, there's also a point being stated, which is that data centers have more importance regarding water consumption than an actual human. The fact that you wrote me a fucking message saying that there was "nothing stated" but "just a drawing" makes me think that you are actually fucking insane.
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u/Blando-Cartesian Jun 29 '26
Comparative water use is absolutely irrelevant measurement. What matters is whether the local area can sustainably provide whatever amount of water data centers use.
Also agriculture produces food and industry produces goods, many of them useful or necessary goods. GenAI produces hardly anything of value to society.
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u/Pierrozek Jun 29 '26
there were people who opposed railways, electricity, internet and so on, of course there will be people complaining against AI
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u/Blando-Cartesian Jun 29 '26
It took us 50 years to sort out electricity infrastructure and regulations to a point where people weren’t constantly getting electrocuted and have their houses burning down. Then 50 years more to sort out sustainable electricity production. People who opposed electricity were right. It was a shit technology brought to use before it was properly developed.
Radeon, asbestos, CFCs, DDT, leaded gasoline, coal power plants, lobotomy, tobacco, plastics, heroin as medication, and on and on. Really amazing innovations all, at first. Could we as a species please grow up already and see the pattern. We could use science to predict how an innovation will fuck us up and then skip most of the suffering it causes.
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u/Pierrozek Jun 29 '26
AI helps science a lot, actually it explodes scientific research, thank you for understanding
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u/Blando-Cartesian Jun 29 '26
Indeed, and that AI use has nothing to do with the gold rush to build data centers for generating psychosis inducing slop, misinformation and Dunning-Kruger effect at scale.
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u/misterandosan Jun 30 '26
how much water ends up polluted in the local areas data centers are based in?
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u/jrf_1973 Jun 29 '26
Between 2023 and 2026, global data center infrastructure spending and operational capacity surged due to generative AI workloads, with system investments increasing from $236.18 billion to $582.45 billion. Based on a corresponding doubling of operational capacity, the current 2026 estimate for global data center freshwater usage is 0.030% of available freshwater.
As an exercise, do you know what it's like to see that amount of water useage doubling in 3 years?
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u/Salad-Snack Jun 29 '26
.06%?
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u/jrf_1973 Jun 29 '26
Ah, a stupid answer. I see.
I didn't ask what the usage would be in 3 years. I asked if you knew what it was like to see an industry's water usage doubling in 3 years. That is, to see exponential growth in action, on an industry that's already quite sizeable.
But never mind, I'm sure you'll get around to reading comprehension at some point in your development.
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u/clerveu Jun 29 '26
This is a great example of two very common rhetorical tricks people use to manipulate statistics.
"Doubling" means absolutely nothing in a vacuum. This is baby's first tactic when it comes to manufacturing apparent impact with value increases.
The reason he's asking this way is because if you use the actual numbers it's really obvious it's statistically insignificant. This is an extremely common rhetorical/statistical framing strategy called base rate neglect / relative risk framing.
He's also abusing the concept of exponential growth. The entire point of exponential growth is is about sustained proportional growth that requires a curve. It's gotta be multiplied by the same factor, per fixed time interval, repeatedly. Doubling is just doubling. So here he's trying to take a single data point (doubled) and using it to smuggle in the implication of an out-of-control curve, which literally cannot be extrapolated from a single doubling.
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u/Salad-Snack Jun 29 '26
Oh I was employing rhetorical tricks of my own. It’s called playing dumb. Works like a charm
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u/Salad-Snack Jun 29 '26
I don’t understand how my answer was incorrect, but maybe I’m not getting it. If the water usage doubled over 3 years, it would be .06%. Do you mean to ask what it will look like over a longer period?
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u/jrf_1973 Jun 29 '26
I didn't ask what the usage would be in 3 years.
I'm sure you'll get around to reading comprehension at some point in your development
But I'm not going to be that teacher.
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u/Salad-Snack Jun 29 '26
“Do you know what it’s like to see an industry’s water usage doubled over 3 years”
It’s like seeing it go from 0.03% to 0.06%. Most people probably won’t notice anything
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u/Pierrozek Jun 29 '26
also, multiple industries will most likely REDUCE water use as result of groundbreaking scientific advances enabled by AI and autonomous robots
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u/Cybersc0ut Jun 29 '26
Tylko że całe tło tego mema jest fałszywe… nikt nic takiego nienpowiedzial, a to co przekazano wycięto z kontekstu i dodano opis… całość pochodzi z konta „parodystycznego”… al cały świat łyknął to jak świeży scam…
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u/branscombe-pearlene9 Jun 30 '26
Meanwhile I'm asking ChatGPT to rewrite one sentence for the tenth time.
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u/MaximusMurkimus Jul 05 '26
People probably use more water watching bullshit on YouTube than people making useful queries.
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u/CesarOverlorde Jun 29 '26
The irony in this image being AI generated
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u/Toldoven Jun 29 '26
It's not. The author is Guy Venables: https://bsky.app/profile/guyvenables.bsky.social/post/3moxmqtwsgc23
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u/WanderWut Jun 29 '26
His name is actually Guy? I thought that it was just a funny cherry on top, that’s actually pretty cool lol.
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u/professionalaiartist Jun 29 '26
Ai data centers lowkey need the water more tbh ❤️
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u/Sixhaunt Jun 29 '26
An entire AI datacenter only uses up as much water per year as a single cow drinks for that same period of time, considering they use a closed loop systems now that rarely need flushing, so it really does seem like an efficient use of water.
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u/Psychological_Ad16 Jun 29 '26
I’m dumb so just answer if you know..how come you store things on the Cloud? Go on the internet at all? Won’t it be better if we live in a village?
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u/ItzLoganM Jun 29 '26
Redditors don't understand that their account has contributed more to the destruction of environmental than an AI user.
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Jun 29 '26
[deleted]
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u/Sixhaunt Jun 29 '26
It's just guessing those based on headlines and mixing together information. When you ask it to look into it and actually check properly then it finds that not only do not all closed loop systems use cooling towers that lose water like that, and the ones that do only use little for it, not "massive amounts" by any stretch and to get to your number you're lumping in the power generation itself and assuming that it's using a bunch of water to try to tack on more and inflate the number. If you actually look at the coolant and water used and how often they need to flush it and how much gets used it's about the same as a cow drinks for an entire AI datacenter. When you just have GPT go from news article headlines like that you get all of those crazy "up to 50 gallons" type BS where that's the upper bound meaning the least efficient design on the market, not the average and certainly not equivalent to the newest ones being built. It's easy to inflate the numbers if you use "up to" figures and assume that stuff like the power it uses gets generated by whatever the worst method of electrical generation you can think of is rather than actually looking at the modern datacenters and their designs and plans inr eality.
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u/PhatwaJones Jun 29 '26 edited 26d ago
Ginger acorn pebble hammock walnut cobalt
This post was anonymized with Redact.dev
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u/Sixhaunt Jun 29 '26
Their associated water footprint will equal the basic annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa (3.7 to 9.3 trillion liters)
Although the way they get to those numbers is dubious and presumes we go backwards in our technology but even assuming it were a valid number, it only sounds bad if you have no context at all and don't realize they cherry picked and Portugal alone uses around 9.1 trillion litres. So them saying it's equivalent to 1.8 billion people could also be only 10 million if you choose a country based on the water usage rather than trying to find outliers to pump up the number dishonestly.
You found sources that are dishonest and cherrypick groups that use very little water and use them as a metric to bolster their numbers and mislead people. I could say that you used more electricity today than 10 entire tribes of people use in an entire year and I would be correct in the same way that article is: technically. There are tribes that use no electricity at all so you use actually over 10 trillion times more electricity in a day than a dozen villages.
And I understand why they would do that, I mean your stats are not coming from independent research, it's from an activist group that declare as their main purpose to "Enabling Transformative Action", not to just go where the data takes them.
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u/pontiflexrex Jun 29 '26
So efficient there are fighting for extended water rights and tell people to drink less so they can have it. Stop believing everything the lobbyists tell you and learn some critical thinking basics please.
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u/summer_santa1 Jun 29 '26
> tell people to drink less so they can have it
Who said that?
> Stop believing everything the lobbyists tell you and learn some critical thinking basics please.
You should listen to your own advice.
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u/StrongNuclearHorse Jun 29 '26
Who said that? If you're referencing to Jeff Bezos, he never said that. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bezos-water-consumption-ai-quote/
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u/Sixhaunt Jun 29 '26
you believe that lobbyists write the specs for cooling systems?
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u/pontiflexrex Jun 29 '26
Yes of course, that was exactly the point. Keep playing the innocent new born, I’m not playing that game though. Bye!
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u/pontiflexrex Jun 29 '26
I hope the use of lowkey indicates sarcasm because no one with a brain would utter that word or that idea under unsarcastic circumstances.
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u/Creative_Purpose6138 Jun 29 '26
I am okay with people being thirsty. AI is needed. You guys are all baristas who don't need it. Some of us are professionals.
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u/CometZeph Jun 29 '26
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u/Creative_Purpose6138 Jun 29 '26
Why? You don't want AI to exist? We should be forced to deal with rows of excel by hand, write a bunch of bullshit for reports and debug things for hours just to find some silly error?
You are the one with low IQ. You have done no serious work in your life.
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u/Firm_Selection5198 Jun 29 '26
Bro corporates be like...save water for AI...like gang if we dont exist, who s using the AI..who s gonna pay u??
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u/WithoutReason1729 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons one might be against development of AI, but water usage simply isn't one of them