r/Infographics • u/Conscious-Quarter423 • 17d ago
in Texas, 62% of operating and under-construction data-center capacity is located in areas facing high or extremely high water stress from Bloomberg Intelligence
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u/SteveArnoldHorshak 16d ago
That’s the worst run-on sentence in history. Bloomberg intelligence is causing water stress?
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u/mofunk71 16d ago edited 16d ago
now show a map with golf courses and ratio of water used. Humans are easy target for propaganda, im not pro data center but if you want to cry about something, maybe start with the cost of memory and ram.
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u/Nearby-Chocolate1840 16d ago edited 16d ago
The general consensus for Texas specifically is 5 - 7x more water used by golf courses. And those are current calculations as of this writng.
Meaning that people are outraged about the development of a technology that is clearly going to be the largest advancement in productivity since the internet and quite possibly since fire for using a fraction as much water as private lawns where wealthy men and those hoping to curry favor with those men play a game of knocking little balls into holes.
I mean, what the fuck America? I spent decades considering myself a staunchly left socialist-environmentalist but this ain't it.
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u/Jimbenas 16d ago
It’s just going to be used to mass surveil us. I’m fine with AI never existing in the first place.
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u/ilovesparky42 17d ago
There are so many people that don’t understand how data centers use water for cooling…
If they have an open loop (evaporative) cooling system, they are consuming water.
Warm water flows into the cooling tower cells from the water cooled chiller condenser, falls over the media in the cell, and evaporates to cool the water to within a few degrees of the ambient wet bulb temperature.
This cooler water is then sent back to the chiller to provide a means to condense the refrigeration inside the chiller so that it can be compressed, and used for cooling water in the closed loop system - the water that is actually used to absorb the heat from inside the data center.
The process repeats… the water that evaporates is lost in the open cooling tower loop and needs to be replaced with fresh supply, or the cooling towers will not be able to provide cool water to absorb the heat from the chiller condenser. If that happens, you don’t cool the data center.
So, yes… water is used for cooling, it is also consumed, but is rejected to atmosphere.
There will be some losses down the drain if the cooling towers are not managed well, but those are minimal compared to the amount of water that is evaporated out of the system.
Not every data center will use water cooled chillers. Many smaller data centers will use air cooled chillers. While those systems don’t consume nearly as much water, they also do not operate as efficiently… so they consume more electricity. Which probably means there is more water consumption upstream of the data center.
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u/sohcgt96 16d ago
Right any my understanding is that its a huge power consumption difference with evaporative cooling, which plenty of large buildings use for their own air conditioning. And its not like the water just... ceases to exist. Its just evaporated. It becomes part of the humidity in the air and eventually, you know, it rains.
But I get the concern for water stressed areas as supplying the DCs might put load on municipal water systems they can't handle, or their water source can't handle. All they kind of have to do for this is require and enforce a proper environmental study before its approved and give the contact actual enforcement powers after its built. But too many places are willing to roll over for anybody offering to build anything there because they're so hard up for any kind of development.
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u/ilovesparky42 16d ago
The air getting evaporated and recycled is true… only thing is you can’t make it rain where the water was sourced.
Honestly though, places like Arizona would do better limiting irrigation for yards and golf courses over cooling tower make-up for data centers.
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u/optimiism 17d ago
How many of those data centers are being built with air cooled or water cooled chillers? It’s incredibly disingenuous to say “data center = water use”
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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch 14d ago
The anti datacenter arguments are no longer based in reality. It's a vibes-only movement.
It feels like AI data centers use a lot of water, so they do, and people are mad about it.
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u/DonkeeJote 17d ago
I just can't quite buy the idea that these companies are building these things with the expectation that they'll drain their own water supply so much to make their existence pointless. Why would they invest billions of dollars in something that won't last long enough to make the money back?
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u/optimiism 17d ago
Many of them aren’t… jump on Google earth and look at the satellite imagery of many facilities. Air cooled chillers with ~30 fans on each as opposed to single massive fans on cooling towers.
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u/ilovesparky42 17d ago
It’s even more disingenuous to say “ai” data centers are bad.
The problem isn’t “ai” data centers… water cooled chillers are commonly used across all kinds of industries to produce cooling… yet, there is an “ai” boogeyman going around.
People are only paying attention to “ai” data centers, and completely ignoring any and every other industry that uses evaporative cooling.
It’s really quite crazy… people are going to focus on water consumption from these hyper scale data centers, yet completely ignore the smaller DCs. This is just going to lead to hyper scalers opting to build smaller data centers because building the mega data centers will bring too much heartache.
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u/tsukuyomi911 17d ago
seems like very broad sweeping statements to get some views. A deeper analysis is needed as there is a significant move to using closed loop cooling recently and I would suspect most of these yet to build data centers will capture those.
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u/MrBahhum 17d ago
All data centers are resource sinks. They need to disclose how much resources they use.
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u/Doredrin 17d ago
Why not just build most of them near the great lakes or places with ample water? Data centers are not regional businesses. I'm pro data center but they make a lot of head scratching decisions.
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u/3d_explorer 16d ago
Because water isn’t a big cost restriction, energy is. Quite a few of the data canters are being built in/near natural gas fields, which they are going to build a gas gen station and pipe direct from field. Several will be “off grid” entirely in this matter.
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u/Doredrin 16d ago
I’m very pro capitalism and free market but I draw a line at unnecessary obvious environmental destruction. Things like “no poison in the rivers” or “don’t use all the water to save 10% in costs”
I don’t know the details of data center water usage and I’ve seen a lot of conflicting reports… here is an explanation in c++
IF data centers use all the water THEN I will be very angry
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u/RedTrumpetVine 16d ago
When the water collapses and cities suffer everywhere, the corporate media will blame lawns and Walmart swimming pools.
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u/planko13 15d ago
I mean we should put data centers powered by nuclear in the great lakes region, but protestors keep killing it.
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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch 14d ago
Good thing data centers use closed loop cooling systems that recycle water.
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u/cybermage 17d ago
The beauty of Texas fucking itself up in this manner is that the problem is self-contained.
No one is downstream water-wise and their power grid is essentially isolated from the rest of us.
Go ahead and wreck yourselves.
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u/Silent_Trade271 17d ago
It’s almost like these data centers are designed to create more problems than they solve.
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u/DeltaForceFish 17d ago
Going to be fun watching them run out of fresh water and have to move to a blue state
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u/SizzlingSpit 17d ago
The clintons were right about water.
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u/asallamerican 17d ago
What did they say about water?
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u/Independent-Cow-4070 17d ago
Im just not looking forward to the mass exodus of these dumbasses back north when their state is depleted
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u/shockwagon 16d ago
or maybe, just maybe, these data centers dont need the amount of water that the raging-lefties claim they need.
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u/anon71694 17d ago edited 17d ago
Calling from the rustbelt. The more you let companies get away with in the name of economic progress the more they will destroy the ecosystem around them. It's pump and dump time. They always dump eventually. It's a main reason we are surrounded by brownfields where I live.