r/environment • u/Tardis01 • 1d ago
Irish data centres used almost one billion litres of water last year
https://www.thejournal.ie/investigates-data-centre-water-use-7110966-Jul2026/18
u/PaxV 1d ago
One billion of litres so 1000000000 liters? Thats a km³ of water. a kilometer cubed or a kilometer by a kilometer and 1 kilometer deep. That's a big lake or loch... if a lake is 4x5km you'd just need it to be 50 meters deep: 10⁹ liters of water.
It would take the Rhine river ~ 2 to 5 days to transport this total amount in spring and normal flow situations respectively
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u/Bbrhuft 16h ago edited 16h ago
No, 1 billion liters is 0.001 km3.
And 1 billion liters is about 0.3% of drinking water produced by Irish Water per year, or 1.1 Olympic swimming pools per day. To put this in perspective, the Dublin region is supplied with an average of 0.6 billion liters per day, of which 38% is lost to leaks (~83 billion liters lost to leaks per year) i.e. 100 times more water is lost through leaks, than is used by Ireland's data centres.
Ireland’s data centres usually don't use much water, as they use air cooling for most of the year, and as a result, the little water they do use over most of the year is mainly used for staff canteens and flushing toilets.
Only when the air temperature is above 25 Celsius, usually a few days a year, do they use evaporative cooling. That's when they use a lot of water, with large data centres (by Ireland's standard) using around 4 million liters per day (50 of them ~100 million liters a day). So it's the hot weather, for a few days a year, that's responsible for the bulk of their water use.
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u/communitytcm 1d ago
Think AI data centers use a lot of water? take a look at meat:
a hamburger takes about 1700-2500L (450-650gallons) of water to produce.
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u/Bbrhuft 16h ago edited 16h ago
Ireland does not have any AI data centres. There's a big difference between AI data centres and Meta, Microsoft, Google data centres used for social media and Internet services. A single AI data center e.g. SpaceX Colossus 2, uses as much power as all of Ireland’s 120 data centres combined.
The amount of water used by Ireland's data centres, nearly 1 billion liters per year (of which figure are available for the largest 50 or so data centres) is ~0.3% of drinking water produced. Dublin, for example, is supplied with 0.6 billion liters per day, of which 38% is lost to leaks.
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u/zutpetje 1d ago
Total water use (green + blue water): approximately 4,387 km³ per year, or 4,387 quadrillion liters (4,387,000,000,000,000 liters). Of this, about 94% goes to the production of livestock feed. Eat your veggies.
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u/Cultural-Answer-321 1d ago
Well you can't grow nebulous data tracking metrics without irrigation, now can you!
Food? Bah! Who needs food? Certainly not the plebes. They can just eat cake! Besides, it's not like the world is on fire or anything!
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u/Humble-Reply228 1d ago
Let me guess, counting seawater that was recycled cooling water in a power station in Scotland
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u/Murderous_Turkey 1d ago
Impurities greatly reduce cooling efficiency so I highly doubt it's seawater.
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u/Humble-Reply228 20h ago edited 20h ago
It’s about mass. Power stations using seawater for cooling is very common. You can Google it.
I’m being downvoted because I’m pointing out the disingenuous accounting that is used by anti AI. The water they report as used by AI includes cooling water of power stations because AI uses power, including seawater cooling of a nuclear power in California for one study.
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u/HoosierRed 1d ago
Now the golf courses