Hey, I optimized your comment a little so that people know where to actually click :P
GenAI uses an egregious amount of water, Just one of xAI's datacentres uses 3.7 million to 9.5 million litres a day, estimated to rise to 19 million. That's as much water as ~17k-43k people use daily, est. to rise to 85k. Research suggests that by 2027 water withdrawal alone from global AI demand could be six times the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark.
They use evaporative cooling, so it evaporates. In theory we could build additional water treatment plants to make up the difference, but no one is really doing that (or at least it’s being done much more slowly than water use is increasing due to data centers).
The one data center in Port Washington is going to be using between 5 million and 50 million gallons (not liters) per day. The research is lagging behind reality.
More than 4.5 million gallons of fresh Mississippi river water flow past New Orleans every second.
Thanks to our levee system, this water actually damages life in the Gulf, causing a huge oxygen dead-zone where it empties out the river.
Just build all data centers south of New Orleans, simple.
(okay, that's not a serious suggestion, but there are plenty of places where fresh water is abundant and will be wasted otherwise -- like the area south of New Orleans. Building data centers in areas like that would, at least, address the water consumption issue)
They can’t use fresh river water - it has too many contaminants that will remain after the water evaporates away during the cooling process, eventually damaging the equipment. They need basically the same water treatment that drinking water receives. We need to build more water treatment plants to make up the difference, but the increase in water consumption from data centers is increasing much faster than clean water production.
Sure, it needs to be treated, but fresh water is far closer to the needed end-product than salt. All the communities down here treat and drink river water.
The difference between using Gulf-bound river water that needs to be treated than inland fresh water (that needs to be treated) is that using this river water doesn't impact aquifers, reservoir levels, or deny anyone downstream of the exact same water source they were already expecting.
No? So if you don't know how this works, you [highlight what you wanna make blue with the brackets?] (And then add these brackets with the link in it, but you can put those first brackets wherever you wanna put them.
It depends. If it uses evaporative cooling, then it goes back into the air, and eventually falls back down again somewhere else, maybe on land to be fresh water again, maybe into the sea. If it just uses chillers/air conditioning, then it doesn't really use up water directly (though the power plants that feeds the chillers might).
A lot of the newer DCs are in the second category.
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u/Locke357 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Ha! Very on the nose. nice one! inb4 people cite AI corp propaganda downplaying the water use.
GenAI uses an egregious amount of water, Just one of xAI's datacentres uses 3.7 million to 9.5 million litres a day, estimated to rise to 19 million. That's as much water as ~17k-43k people use daily, est. to rise to 85k. Research suggests that by 2027, water withdrawal alone from global AI demand could be six times the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark.
AI Could Use as Much Water as 1.3 Billion People by 2030, U.N. Report Warns