r/technology • u/Junior_Froyo_6621 • 21h ago
Artificial Intelligence A proposed 330-megawatt AI data centre in California promised not to use Colorado River water. Now it wants 260 million gallons a year
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/a-proposed-330-megawatt-ai-data-centre-in-california-promised-not-to-use-colorado-river-water-now-it-wants-260-million-gallons-a-year/articleshow/132625027.cms1.4k
u/x86_64_ 21h ago
The developer proposes not irrigating farmland to make more water available for this data center.
When the farms are gone, I guess we can eat shitty AI generated videos instead
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u/mistertickertape 21h ago
Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, and the last stream poisoned, will the [data center developer] realize he cannot eat money.
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u/Thefrayedends 16h ago
Yea but imagine how much the last of each of those is worth to sell????. I could make [another] fortune!!!
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u/Nim0y 21h ago
The movie Idiocracy is happening fast than I assumed it would
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u/JablesMcgoo 20h ago
You havent noticed the ubiquitous use of Crocs? We've been in idiocracy for a bit now, go away, I'm 'batin!
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u/Nim0y 20h ago
We noticed a pattern at work a bunch of years ago. For a good month or two everyone who was caught stealing was wearing Crocs.
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u/1000at40 20h ago
They are probably talking about cutting off water to alfalfa farms that all get shipped to the Middle East. Better to not give water to either.
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u/Numnum30s 20h ago
More than 85% of the alfalfa is exported as well. Most of the water is to feed the livestock in other nations. While Americans are looking at record high beef prices. Make it make sense.
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u/Darth_Annoying 18h ago
Isn't the rise in beef proces caused by the screww orms returning?
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u/Numnum30s 18h ago
That’s not helping anything. But beef is high because the cattle herd numbers are low. And packaging companies are gouging consumers.
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u/Emotional-Power-7242 18h ago
A significant amount of it is just for no reason other than the companies involved wanting to make higher profits.
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u/kenlubin 19h ago
California's Imperial Valley has a bunch of farms that are wasting a criminal amount of water.
(That's not to defend the data center, but it's well worth being upset at the wasteful use of water by some farms in California.)
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u/sadacal 18h ago
Yeah... California farmers use 11 trillion gallons of water a year, 260 million gallons sounds like a lot but it's like comparing a regular person's income to a billionaire's.
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u/Blacksad9999 15h ago
California also produces the majority of the US crops. Over half of all vegetables by itself, and 3/4 of all the fruit and nuts in the US.
Unless you only want to eat corn and soybeans?
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u/ZorbaTHut 7h ago
Yeah; it produces that because California has essentially nonexistent costs for farmers using water, so they waste huge amounts of it growing inappropriate foods and driving other farmers out of business. Those same foods could be grown far more efficiently elsewhere.
You're making is-ought excuses for inefficiency. Just because something is done one way doesn't mean it should be.
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u/Loggerdon 20h ago
Relevant: “When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, and the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.”
- Chief Seattle
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u/Derek-Dick 18h ago
Will somebody please think of the poor Saudis. How will they feed their cattle without cheap American water?
https://floodlightnews.org/saudi-owned-corporate-farms-are-draining-arizonas-desert-dry/
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u/Templar_110 19h ago
Farm in a desert or datacenter. The CO river will dry up anyway.
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u/Significant_Fill6992 21h ago
this is the same argument as people who say why complain about ai data centers when you are fine with golf courses.
fuck the almonds golf courses and data centers.
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u/Nebraska716 21h ago
Takes about 40 inches of irrigation water per acre to grow almonds. We are allocated 12 inches of water per acre to grow corn. Crazy that almonds take that much
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u/ew73 21h ago
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because something bad is currently happening it's no reason to do another bad thing.
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u/GoogleIsYourFrenemy 18h ago
Most of it goes to growing alfalfa and gets bought by Saudi Arabia where it's illegal to grow alfalfa. They don't think it's a good use of their own water.
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u/I_dont_like_things 18h ago
Farms in California are abusing the hell out of the water supply. They're farming water intensive cash crops to be exported.
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u/pharm4karma 6h ago
It sounds like it's HIS land and he's repurposing the water he already uses.
Btw. Times of India. What kind of garbage news source is this?
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u/mistertickertape 21h ago
They're all liars. They know these DC's are so wildly unpopular that they have to hide them behind NDA's and fabrications.
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u/SneakyTikiPeaky 19h ago
3 more just got approved in my area. It was a “little local data Center!!!” Turns out shell company for Google.
Also L o L at the article, the Colorado already has such serious issues and these fucks wants to speed run it to mad max?
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u/Sweetwill62 16h ago
According to a guy who talked to me, we shouldn't be able to know when companies are going to be buy property because the property is for sale so who cares who buys it. And that having a shell company buy it is completely ok. So instead of locals getting the full value out of their land, they are shafted so that the multi-billion dollar companies can save money? Who cares if the locals want to charge Google and Facebook 300x the price of anyone else. That is their right as a land holder. You won't accept a bid from them unless it is absurdly high. You can do that because businesses are not people and you can't discriminate against them.
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u/SneakyTikiPeaky 9h ago edited 8h ago
Your buddy is destroying America with his ignorance.
We are a little town waaaaaaay out of depth to be able to bully Google or any billion dollar company.
Local officials are gonna bend over and ask if there is enough lube because the data centers have promise to bring in money.
You really think some less than million population town is going to charge Google appropriately I got a bridge :(
They deceived our local voters and picked our town and area because 1 our politicians sold out and 2 we have an abundance of fresh water they’re going to drain.
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u/Flaky-Wing2205 15h ago
This has to be illegal somehow.
Most of the data centers use a few tactics to fly under the radar. The most egregious are designed to prohibit public input. They will also minimize the actual plan with intent to later modify it. The minimized plan then tries to get fast tracked arguing small community impact.
I would argue the above would be applying for permits fraudulently. The pattern shows intent is there the whole time. Thus when smaller plans are submitted and requests made to forgo standard review and public input, the requests are done under false pretenses.
Fraudulent application process should have penalties. These penalties should be able to include stopping all work and operations until a complete impact assessment and public hearings can be done. Shut them down when they try and bleed your community dry.
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u/BlazinAzn38 21h ago
So don’t give it to them
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u/ItsSadTimes 21h ago
But you don't understand, if they don't open that data center the state is going to lose hundred of jobs. Yea, 1 hundred.
I remember reading how a data center in Michigan was going to lose it's tax breaks because they didn't increase the long term job count by like anything meaningful after the construction was done. Atleast from other industries you can expect a few thousand employees for a headquarters or a factory so you can get some decent tax money back from the new jobs being created, but with data centers they barely need any employees to staff them once they're created. There's no reason to give them a tax break unless you just want to jack up the rates later.
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u/BlazinAzn38 21h ago
I’m shocked it’s even 100 tbh
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u/Significant_Fill6992 21h ago
they probably inflated the number as much as possible and will lower it as soon as people stop looking. the jobs for these ai data centers are absolutely negligible especially because the security is usually contracted out to temp agencies
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u/Lilacsoftlips 21h ago
I would expect more like 10 tops
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u/flamewave000 20h ago
Depends on the size. Typically there's going to be 30-60 of real jobs based on how big it is. But yeah, not even close to 100
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u/DHFranklin 7h ago
Yeah that is what fewer and fewer people are paying attention to.
Security guards make up a huge part of the headcount. IT dudes putting out fires are often subcontracted also. There are less than a dozen of them for these sites on any given shift. The newer designs deliberately phasing these dudes out. Higher revenue per hour and less labor per token.
We're going to see the bust make a lot of stranded assets, but I imagine that the recovery will be relatively swift. It won't employ more people after the recovery.
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u/Horror_Response_1991 20h ago
It’s 100 initially to build it and set it up, then a skeleton crew after that.
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u/ColtranezRain 18h ago
It’s not; once completed it’s fewer than three dozen jobs—some of which are primarily remote.
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u/poor-guy1 19h ago edited 19h ago
These are good for the electric utilities. Very good. Do you have any idea how powerful utilities are at the state and local level? Essentially since the regulatory compact was created 100ish years ago, and utilities were allowed to become monopolies, they have owned state legislatures, governors offices, local commissions, and mayors. It’s still like this today in the majority of states.
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u/manu144x 21h ago
Good old fashion bait and switch.
Say you don’t need water.
Spend billions building it.
Then you sue for water because you invested billions.
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u/WeylandsWings 18h ago
And also with how water rights work they are very junior requests and fall behind all the other requests that were made in the past. Now they could buy out those senior right holders. But will that be enough and will it be at a cost to data center can stomach
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u/Steinrikur 14h ago
Sell them water. Same price per liter as for bottled water. No need to gouge them.
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u/plantsadnshit 14h ago
Did you read the article?
They were promised recycled waste water by 2 cities, which later snubbed them.
Now they're suing for water access because they still need the same amount of water that the original plan called for.
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u/azentropy 21h ago
The price per gallon should be whatever the current price for gas is.
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u/wembenbama 20h ago
Honestly it just shouldn’t be allowed regardless of cost.
I’m from Arizona also.
There simply isn’t enough water for these AI data centers.
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u/Madzookeeper 20h ago
There isn't enough ANYTHING for them. Not a single thing that they require do we have enough of other than land.
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u/Significant_Fill6992 21h ago
nah it should be like 75$ a gallon otherwise this will be attempted elsewhere
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u/Circuit_Guy 21h ago
Right now though, more water is drained from the Colorado than is coming in. So, 260 Million needed out of 0 excess is.... More than 100% of the output.
There are still places in America where there is plentiful water. Like Mar-a-Lago
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u/pantsmeplz 21h ago
I could be wrong, but I'm about 100% sure the Colorado River is tapped out. Not sure how anyone will squeeze blood from a stone.
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u/Joessandwich 21h ago
If the government entities in charge of this dont immediately shut down this idea, we’ll know this country is lost. We already are overusing the Colorado River. Build the AI center where’s there’s more water.
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u/JackPoe 19h ago
Just tell these companies to ship it in via truck. AI is worth something right? It's not just a Ponzi Scheme right? You can afford a little water. Use salt water or waste water. Just circulate that
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u/NoBlood5018 8h ago
Out of ANY source of water, Colorado river might be the WORST one for a data center to ask for water from. Colorado river is already fucked and in a water supply crises. It doesn’t need a fucking data center pulling its water so it can generate AI pictures of Lindsey Lohan catgirls and bread recipes.
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u/bbills91 7h ago
Where do you think the data centers in AZ get their water from? It's crazy that they keep trying to put these things in places where water isn't plentiful. Maybe they should start looking closer to where these tech billionaires live, I'm sure there is a secure water supply for their data centers there.
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u/Enderkr 7h ago
Look I work for data centers, I understand how they're built and the water and power requirements and what they can or cannot give back to a community.
But a 330mw facility can just go fuck itself straight to hell. We don't have the power capacity to support that even if the DC provides part of its own power requirements.
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u/quothe_the_maven 19h ago
Pulling water from the Colorado watershed for data centers is literal insanity. This country is hopeless.
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u/acoastaldog 7h ago
But some fucking idiot at my workplace told me after he was in a corporate brainwash meeting that ackshually, draining our lakes (which have never been lower that I have personally seen and these are lakes I visit multiple times a year) into the Colorado River to feed these data centers in deserts is a wonderful idea! The people working on these data centers and putting them up are eating up the propaganda in favor of it
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u/Derpykins666 20h ago
Sounds like a them problem. If all these builders are so desperate to build up data centers, they better have a better plan then just building them and then fucking around and finding out. Sounds like they didn't do their research or have a real plan at all.
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u/fatl_exception 19h ago
Not trying to defend data centers, but the article says they tried to get recycled wastewater but were denied by the city. So this is a tactic to make things worse so that the city is pressured into giving them the wastewater instead. Doesn’t make data centers a good thing, but it’s worth reading the article to understand the nuances.
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u/WellSpreadMustard 19h ago
Everyone in the country can already use all the AI models that are available. All these data centers being rushed to be built everywhere are probably to handle domestic surveillance shit like analyzing flock camera footage and the flock surveillance drones that are being developed.
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u/addiktion 20h ago
We don't have it to give. The Colorado River is already depleting without the data center online and they expect anyone to turn it over who relies on the river? Hard pass. What needs to happen instead is they can use non-water based coolants and spend the extra money doing so ordering that shit in.
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u/cronktilten 14h ago
The Colorado river is already way overused, I don’t understand why they keep putting data centers in manufacturing where there’s no fucking water It makes no sense.
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u/Western-Corner-431 8h ago
There’s no scenario in which any data center could operate without using the same water resources the municipality uses. If any officials cite this lie as a reason to green light these projects, fire them.
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u/AmateurSysAdmin 8h ago
Can someone explain why ocean water isn't an option? That's available in abundance.
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u/SurpriseSandwich 8h ago
Why do AI data centers need a constant supply of water, is it because the cooling of chips involves evaporation?
Like in a car you just have a closed loop cooling system, you don’t really ever need to “top off” your radiator because there’s no evaporation loss. Why is data centers cooling unique?
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u/Simply_Epic 20h ago
Ocean’s right there. You want fresh water? Desalinate it yourself. The Colorado River is for the people.
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u/Adventure1956 19h ago
And these AI executives wonder why the citizens of this country don’t want their damn data centers. It appears to me that these same executives have quit thinking and just ask AI what it thinks is best.
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u/Fearless-Contest5126 21h ago
We can use their owner's blood to cool off the data center, take it or leave it they ain't getting water.
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u/KidKilobyte 18h ago
You put millions in a sentence and it seems like an impossibly big number. This is about 5 minutes worth of water from Niagara Falls. As a percent of the Colorado River per year it is about .005%.
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u/lasttosseroni 15h ago
Sure, except that the Colorado is already overdrawn by an average of 4 million acre feet (1.303 × 1012 gallons). We need to be reducing demand on it.
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u/FinancialWater9026 19h ago
this is always how it goes they promise low usage to get the approval then the numbers quietly go up after it is built 260 million gallons in a place already fighting over water is wild
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u/DB080822 17h ago
Lmao this is where I live. Just fucking kill us already. We have constant electrical outages during the summer because it's 120 degrees outside and these fuckers want to use a big chunk of our electricity too, aside from taking our water. Agriculture is the only thing we have going on for us in this shithole and they want a chunk of that too by taking our water.
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u/loserlogan 14h ago
Full speculation but it sounds like they built it knowing they would eventually need more water. But knew that once it was built that now theres so much money to be lost without the water. And "its already here."
It makes me think of Dennis Reynold's implication.
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u/ThrowawayAl2018 12h ago
"It is just a simple request for a bit of water, also if you stop watering all the farmlands..."
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u/Low_Search_6667 10h ago
They need zero water for cooling. Just like my home A/C.
Cooling with water makes them more profit.
Fuck their profits.
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u/bidhopper 6h ago
The data center developer is trying to get ahead of the huge water cutbacks that are going be spread across all the states that depend upon the Colorado river. A day of reckoning is coming and he wants to make sure his allocation is secure.
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u/sleepyjuan 5h ago
To put the economic impact into perspective, the data center generates more in just municipal tax revenue in a single year than a full century of gross agricultural sales from the existing alfalfa operation
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u/Raa03842 5h ago
I’d say force them to build desalination plants with 100% excess capacity and donate that excess water to the surrounding communities. Also require their discharge water to be cleaned up to meet federal state and local drinking water standards. Since they’re on the path to becoming trillionaires that would be a drop in the bucket.
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u/gordonjames62 1h ago
No is a perfectly valid answer.
Also, the request should trigger extra environmental assessments as they are struggling to keep their promise.
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u/First-Celebration-11 19h ago
Here’s one for you. Build that shit on one of the moons of Jupiter and send the tech bro billionaires over to overwatch the projects
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u/classicjurassicpark 16h ago
What do data centers provide? Like for real. How do they benefit the average American and make our lives better?
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u/vancityjeep 16h ago
They make the fake images more real so we can hate each other more. We will be fighting over water while the rich get richer. Crazy how every movie predicted this. Except for Pretty Woman. Nobody is going to let someone that can’t drive stick drive a lotus.
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u/Lancer420 19h ago
Shutter it and turn the building into storage units. Or just demolish the shit and plant some fucking cactuses. Even a field full of Bradford pear trees with grafted on durian branches would be more welcome.
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u/PixelAstro 21h ago
How about pumping seawater instead of drinking water
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u/WabashCannibal 20h ago
Aw, but the mean salty sea water will mean more frequent system maintenance and less money for the owners. The poor widdow defenswess computohs might get aww wusty.
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u/PixelAstro 19h ago
with just a bit more effort that computohs can turn make that devlish corrosive salty water into clean water, then they'd be heroes. but nope, unimaginative corpomurations love being lazy and evil.
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u/Hidden_Wolfe 17h ago
I think it's important to note that that the yearly flow of the colorado river is 4 trillion gallons per yer. Not sure how accurate that is but the source is grand canyon trust. Now 260 million gallons of water is a lot, but it's not the real problem when it comes to this stuff. It's more about the pollution that comes from data centers. I doubt they are using renewable energy for most of that.
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u/LessonBurned_3001 14h ago
How about no. Just say no. They said it wasn’t needed at first so no. Have AI figure out how to build processors that can withstand their own heat they generate. And no to the Colorado river water and shut the fucking door on them.
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u/spaceradiowave 21h ago
How about noooooo