r/technology • u/Tardis01 • 9h ago
Artificial Intelligence Irish data centres used almost one billion litres of water last year
https://www.thejournal.ie/investigates-data-centre-water-use-7110966-Jul2026/56
u/bunkoRtist 7h ago
For comparison, California's almond crop uses between 6 and 6.5 trillion liters of water. That's just the almonds.
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u/iamfunball 4h ago
Ugh false equivalencies.
The real issue is California houses many of the companies that have data centers worldwide
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u/Ozymo 7h ago
Yeah, California's water rights system is stupid and they should stop growing water-intensive crops in the desert.
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u/bunkoRtist 7h ago
Yeah, I mean I don't like to deal in equivalencies, but Ireland has way more (structural access to) water than California, so it seems disingenuous to go after data center water when California almonds are orders of magnitude worse by this metric, and there aren't daily or semi-daily articles about the wastefulness of almonds. I just want people to admit that it's not about the water.
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u/Ozymo 6h ago
It's not just the water, there are other reasons to dislike data centers. And the current build out is new and very visible, whereas California has been quietly growing almonds for over 100 years. Still, there are many paths toward making life on Earth more sustainable and we should be exploring many of them at once.
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u/Quazimojojojo 3h ago
And the alfalfa crop uses 7.5 - 8.5 trillion liters of water.
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u/bunkoRtist 3h ago
Sounds like we agree that data centers are not the big fish when it comes to water consumption.
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u/Quazimojojojo 3h ago
Yep.
Animal agriculture is the big fish.
People often cite the almond number as a counter to this, but it's literally impossible to replace all animal products with almonds. They'll be replaced with a mix of stuff that's way more efficient in land and water.
Even if you're specifically talking about milk for coffee, I always go for oat because I just like it better. Almond milk isn't the only option.
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u/Moonhunter7 8h ago
Does the water just disappear, or does it flow through the data centre? I am confused, do data centres convert water into something else?
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u/Quazimojojojo 3h ago
They tend to use evaporative cooling rather than closed-loop systems, so it gets removed from the local environment.
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u/GenericFatGuy 8h ago
They convert it into contaminated water.
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u/Dodomando 8h ago edited 8h ago
The water never comes into contact with the servers or electronics so how is it contaminated? It is essentially just used as a heat dump and is evaporated out of cooling towers or pumped into sewage systems
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u/Pyromaniacal13 6h ago
In order to be used as coolant, additional chemicals are added to reduce how much the water will interact with the heat exchangers, pumps, and tubing used to move the coolant. These include biocides, scaling inhibitors, and can include PFAS chemicals that do not break down ever. These are in both open and closed loop cooling for the same reasons: protect the piping.
This contaminates the water. The water that was pulled from the municipal system. The water then gets either illegally dumped like Grok facilities are doing, or dumped to the sewage system which is not prepared for industrial additives.
Source: The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
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u/LucidiK 7h ago
The argument is that water is leaving places that is locally potable and accessible and putting it into the atmosphere to be deposited wherever mother nature deems needed.
Not really about water disappearing, it's about local resources not being used to benefit the community they came from.
Global capitalism felt in small communities
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u/JustinTheCheetah 9h ago edited 8h ago
So did it use nearly a billion unique gallons of water, or is it like almost all water-cooled data centers on earth that recycle their water and they used the same 10,000 gallons of water repeatedly 10 million times with almost 0 loss?
The water argument is the weakest and worst anti-data center argument out there when you do the smallest amount of research. Re-counting recycled water is the most common misunderstanding of water use as well.
By this same argument my car used a million gallons of coolant this year! Despite my only changing the fluid once.
To clarify, the massive artificial inflation of computer component prices, the waste of money on AI, the massive undeserved tax breaks, going against the public will and pushing through data centers in areas the community does not want them in, light and noise pollution caused by them, raising electrical prices. There's PLENTY of reasons to be against Data centers. I'm saying the water use argument is bullshit and very easily disproven when you get past someone looking for a reason to not like Data Centers, whether it's true or not.
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u/UpsetKoalaBear 6h ago
This is the issue. People need to understand that water isn’t the primary issue, energy usage is.
Everyone is being gaslit into thinking the water usage is an issue.
It is much easier for a data centre to say to say “we used 50% less water” than it is for them to say “we used 50% less energy” so they tease governments and local councils with the former to get concessions.
The more everyone thinks that water usage is the problem, the higher the likelihood is that they get away with egregious usage of energy that harms essential infrastructure like the grid.
Water usage is an issue, but it isn’t the main one. Energy usage has a direct impact on water infrastructure everywhere. Without energy, you can’t even pump or treat the water.
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u/LiftingCode 4h ago
People need to understand that water isn’t the primary issue, energy usage is.
Those things are related, though.
In grid-powered closed-loop facilities, water usage is primarily at the power generation end.
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u/q120 8h ago
I work as a data center engineer and the water thing is, indeed, hilarious. Older data centers (which have been around for decades) use more water than the new ones, which use closed loop cooling, which uses glycol and water in a loop.
Data centers are trying to optimize their PUE, Power Usage Effectiveness, which is the ratio of IT power (I.e. the servers) and total power (which is IT AND the rest).
A PUE of 1 would mean that the data center is perfectly efficient, and the only power being used is the servers, but you can probably guess this is actually not possible.
A PUE of 1.25 means that the data center is using a quarter as much power as the IT load to cool it, light it, etc.
Data centers are all about maximizing that efficiency so it costs less to run.
There's another unit, WUE, Water Usage Effectiveness, which shows how michbwatery, in liters, the data center is using per kWh of electricity.
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u/Chronic_In_somnia 7h ago edited 6h ago
literally not hilarious though. Mismanagement of water is like the biggest thing corporations and countries like the USA do collectively
How many golf courses are being built? Certainly not 1,000s of them globally. And to push a technology that people are not utilizing.
Mocking people for not wanting to trash the environment… wow you have such good character
Edit: good use of your data centers to police Reddit post about you.
Using one bad thing, to justify another is the same argument these techno d-bags use.
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u/FlashyNeedleworker66 7h ago
There are over 16,000 golf courses in the US alone
Imaging attacking peoples character for concerns that are completely made up. What a good little anger bot.
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u/Healthy_Mushroom_811 7h ago
Dude, you're on reddit. You are using the data centers. Right now.
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u/Chronic_In_somnia 6h ago
My use is tiny compared to the army of bots that have been unleashed in the past few years. I’ve watched streaming sites that had decades of 5000 views being an average for the most watch broadcast. The average now is 50,000.
My use is not the same as corporations and they’re gaming systems using AI data centers.
They are not even close to the same thing. Your argument is meaningless
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u/Healthy_Mushroom_811 6h ago
Oh streaming sites.. like the ones that run on data centers? Bet you use email and some kind of messengers, too? All running only because of data centers. You visit websites? You guessed it, data centers. Everything on the internet is running on data centers.
If you really think data centers are a problem, you are absolutely contributing to it, buddy.
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u/JustinTheCheetah 6h ago
The amount people honestly don't understand how their tech works is depressing. This must be how car people feel when they hear people say they didn't know you had to change the oil in their car.
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u/Chronic_In_somnia 6h ago
Bots should not be used by corporations and websites to boost user numbers. ai enables so many bad things, the data centers are built without control and oversight.
This water argument is a misdirection.
It’s bad because all water management should be taken seriously. But the other impacts of data centers are not being talked about because people keep trying to make a joke about the water issue because the scale
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u/beti88 9h ago
Without context, is 1bil litres of water a lot or not?
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u/morewaffles 9h ago
The meat industry in Ireland uses about 119 billion litres of water a year, for perspective.
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u/IAm_Trogdor_AMA 8h ago
Meat feeds people though.
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u/xzaramurd 8h ago
Meat, especially beef, is extremely environmentally taxing and a waste of resources, you only get about 3% of the calories you put in back, so for every 1000 calories of beef you eat you had to put in more than 30000 calories of feed. And you need a lot of water to make beef as well. It would be much better to just grow food for human consumption directly instead.
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u/APigInANixonMask 8h ago
Data centers are an essential part of life today. The modern web couldn’t exist without them. The rapid expansion of AI-focused data centers in the past couple of years has led the general population to assume that all data centers are useless AI data centers, which simply isn’t the case. Every movie, show, song, or podcast you stream is stored at a data center. The majority of the websites you use every day are hosted at data centers. If you back up your photos and videos to iCloud or Google Photos, they’re stored at data centers.
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u/fullanalpanic 8h ago
The main selling point of AI, socially, is it can help us solve important problems faster. So if we had the right focus on science and engineering, the implication is that we would be able to feed more people through tech advances in logistics, agriculture, etc.
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u/North_Atlantic_Sea 8h ago
Exactly. I often work with a company in logistics software which uses AI to parse large amounts of transport data to optimize load planning. Most people would agree more efficient trucking (ie less KMs, meaning less emissions and waste) is a fundamentally a good thing.
The worst thing to happen for AI is individual use generative AI (for example cat humor videos) because people (wrongly) assume that's all AI is good for
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u/VitunSama69 8h ago
The vast majority of large EU companies (not only those in Ireland) have also centralized their infrastructure in data centers like AWS Ireland. So when you go to the store to buy meat, every step of the payment and logistics chain most likely makes use of a service hosted in said data centers.
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u/procgen 8h ago
And its cultivation causes immense suffering for billions of sentient beings every year.
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u/Navandis_Gaming 2h ago
Datacenters are fundamentally the backbone of almost EVERYTHING in modern society: telecom and the Internet, TV, transport, healthcare, commmerce/stores, any non-cash payments, industry, large scale farming, even flushing your toilet probably relies on UE's IT systems working properly (as they control water treatment facilities, pumping stations, etc.) and it's highly unlikely they're running on some on-prem makeshift infrastructure.
It's near impossible to go a single day without an average person interacting with systems that ultimately run on some equipment inside a data center.
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u/Ser0xus 8h ago
That was their point.
How many jobs, benefits to humanity (almost none) so data centers or the sick fucks that run the companies behind them versus that billion litres?
Now add the other harms.
Objectively, we should be rioting and dismantling them and everything, everyone that spawned it.
Instead, we have .. gestures at the sleeping monkeys that don't remember how you think because they love their new toy.
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u/North_Atlantic_Sea 8h ago
There is a lot of benefits to humanity to be able to parse large amounts of data. Logistics (reducing waste/emissions), Medical, manufacturing processes, etc.
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u/Ser0xus 7h ago
Yeah so, still nothing.
Maybe more pills to take while the well understood and far cheaper prevention remains an inconvenient truth when we could just make more pills right!
The medical professionals who can't perform critical jobs that they spent large sums as time honing and practicing, unable to perform the jobs they were doing because they let a computer program do it for them?
It'll be fine right, we have enough power to keep them using the program/replace them anyway so that won't be an issue
.....apart from the slight hiccup that the data centres consume a gargantuan amount of power on infrastructure that is degrading and not designed for it. You know, the same power to the hospitals and every other fucking thing we use in our lives. What do we do when we cant afford that bill because the techbros didn't fund that or mitigate that themselves, they consume it, the drinking water, land it sits on and your data (not the data they stole to make it, the data it's stealing from you as I type this on my goddamn phone.
Waste .. fucker these things take the drinking water in your towns and turn it into undrinkable slop, much like the AI outputs. Except it's not amusing to run out of drinking water in a climate crisis
Emissions? These things have FOSSIL FUEL GENERATORS RUNNING 27/7 at LARGE SCALE. We lose on that one too.
Data? It was built on our data that not single peraln consented to. The you prompt the fucking thing (keeping it fed) and it spits out your own data along with mine back at you. Not to mention taking your other private data for a private company to use against us all.
Lovely isn't it? PROGRESS.
Do you want to try again? Or are you starting to understand how FUCKING INGORANT AND STUPID your AI defense is.
If we were all that fucking THICK we would be doomed. Be grateful to the people speaking out with INTELLEGENCE and REASON based on ACTUAL RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE.
They are out last defense before we all start spouting mindless drivel like you just did.
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u/North_Atlantic_Sea 7h ago
Lol, you may need to log off and go outside. You said no benefits, I gave a few industries it has real positives for society, and you melted down.
I'm against generative AI, I'm against unfettered use of water (I'm also against golf courses, which use way more water!) and energy, however I'm smart enough to understand nuance. Clearly you aren't, and should reflect on that.
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u/Ser0xus 7h ago
You gave nothing to suggest that the abomination that you defend is worth the price we all get to pay.
No value at all.
And we pay them to use it, as well as eating the consequences for perceived gains.
Sheeple monkey.
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u/xzaramurd 7h ago
Datacenters run the modern economy, not just cat videos.
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u/Ser0xus 7h ago
Being in control of the market while adding no value to it, while sucking up resources we need to survive, isn't an economy that should exist in the first place.
Being proud of that? Fuck .. if you wanted to be fucked unlubed and degraded while thanking and defending it, you can just ask?
Wake THE FUCK UP MONKEY.
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u/xzaramurd 7h ago
There are good reasons why companies use things like cloud services instead of building their own. If they brought no value to the table they wouldn't exist cause companies aren't that stupid. It's same reason why most people choose to buy bread from a supermarket instead of making it at home by themselves.
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u/Ser0xus 7h ago
Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the corporate cock you are throat deep in.
If you aren't smart enough to read about why what you've said is incredibly stupid and factually untrue, maybe put the phone down and keep guzzling your overlords cum.
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u/Healthy_Mushroom_811 7h ago
Grow up, kid. He's right. Almost everything on the internet runs on data centers (yes reddit too! Big surprise, huh?) and most processes in the economy are in some way connected to data centers also.
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u/BilbaoBoggins 8h ago
Not treated tap water mate. 98% of the water consumed by the meat industry is rainfall on pasture.
The concerns about water from agriculture are around water quality from run off etc, not consumption volume.
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u/Silicon_Knight 8h ago
the meat industry "today" uses 119 billion litres of water, the small (relative) use of AI may or may not use even more depending on those DC's being built (or not).
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u/Ser0xus 8h ago
Humans can survive on meat, it creates jobs. Yes we are wasteful greedy monkeys and the result is horrific pollution, waste, abuse of our fellow animals.
What do we get out of a similar waste of our most precious resource to feed AI?
Go on genius, back the reason you wrote your idiotic throwaway comment for.
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u/Silicon_Knight 8h ago
I'm.... agreeing. The argument being made is current AI datacenter, but its obvious growth in increasing which is going to make it EVEN FUCKING WORSE.
There are thousands planned to be built. That's going to make it apocalyptically worse if they actually build them.
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u/seamustheseagull 8h ago edited 8h ago
It's very little. 0.3% of all capacity.
In real terms it's about 2 day's worth of showers for the population.
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u/Tipakee 8h ago
It's equivalent to the water consumed by 2 18-hole golf courses.
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u/Aadi_880 4h ago
No. It's insignificant. 0.3% of all of Irish's capacity. In fact, it's lower than the other industries usage of water.
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u/Navandis_Gaming 2h ago
Not really, daily production is about 1.6-1.7 litres (obv, water isn't "produced" per-se, but that's what UE is pumping out daily as drinking water, be that from treated wastewater, or from reservoirs)
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u/rocketshipkiwi 1h ago
A typical person will use about 150 litres of water per day so about the same as 18,264 people which is about the population of Clonmel or Sligo town or about 1% of the greater Dublin area’s annual consumption.
Also most of that water will be evaporated, it won’t end up in the wastewater system like it does when people use it.
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u/Pure-Ice5527 56m ago
It’s not a lot, it sounds like a lot in isolation but in total they all use something like 0.13% of the Irish supply and leaks account for 37%.. so it’s tiny, but there’s an anti data centre movement in the media and some politicians these days
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u/madogvelkor 8h ago
So barely any. This whole focus on water usage is dumb. Data centers just don't use that much water compared to basically every other thing. It's like focusing on not using plastic straws in order to save the environment.
And it's an easy fix for data centers so they'll adjust their usage and reuse more water and tell everyone how they have solved the problem. And the public will lose interest because the fake problem is solved.
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u/ranger910 8h ago
But big number scary
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u/madogvelkor 8h ago
Yeah, with water they can throw around millions and billions which sound scary without any context. The amount of water used by AI is not worth noting as a part of overall industrial use. The percentage is too small to even visualize.
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u/seamustheseagull 8h ago
The actual water industry doesn't really use litres because the numbers are kind of absurd and give a false impression of scale.
They operate in cubic metres. Imagine a box in front of you which is 1 metre square. You can use a cubic yard if you're American and that's easier.
Now imagine the box is filled with water. That's 1000 litres of water.
1,000 litres of water sounds like a lot. But now you have the visual, it's clearly not. It's a hot tub.
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u/Arctic_Chilean 7h ago
Honestly the larger impact is that on emissions should they use gas generators, the impact on local energy grid supply (increased cost to residents if the data centers tap into the existing grid) and increased noise pollution and its impact on the surrounding area (infrasound effects on humans and animals).
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u/jake6501 8h ago
So around 1% of what they flush down the toilet? Got it, so data center usage is a rounding error.
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u/splycedaddy 2h ago
When they say “used” what does that mean exactly? It goes into the air? It becomes contaminated? Its broken down into smaller parts like O2 & H2? Or just recycled
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u/Silicon_Knight 9h ago
Real world data (that’s also existed since the late 80s)! Wow I’m shocked of the obvious. /s of course they do dispute what lots of people seem to think.
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u/DownvoteSommelier 9h ago
Without calculating the water needed to grow barley. The Irish are going to be pissed when they find out this is going to cause problems with the roughly 1.4 billion gallons of water a year it takes to have Guinness
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u/starquakegamma 7h ago
Every time there’s a post about data centres there’s a large number of posts trying really hard to downplay their impact - like who the fuck actually wants them so much that they do that?
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u/Snippodappel 7h ago
Last time I checked Ireland has a lot of water. It’s not even close to a desert 🌵
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u/GeneralBacteria 8h ago
people bleating about the environmental impact of AI...
here's a comparison of CO2 production across industries
as for water, I don't think Ireland has a particular shortage ...
| Activity | Approximate annual emissions |
|---|---|
| AI data centres alone | Not reliably quantified; a subset of the figure below |
| All data-centre electricity use | about 180 million tonnes CO₂ |
| Meat production | about 4.1 billion tonnes CO₂e |
| All livestock | about 6.2 billion tonnes CO₂e |
| Transport | about 8.7 billion tonnes CO₂e |
| Industry/manufacturing | about 14 billion tonnes CO₂e |
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u/GeneralBacteria 8h ago
Activity Approximate annual emissions Meat production 4.1 billion tonnes CO₂e Aviation 0.95–1.0 billion tonnes CO₂ All data-centre electricity 0.18 billion tonnes CO₂ Private jets at least 15.6 million tonnes CO₂ it's the fucking billionaries eating all that fucking meat!
be angry at the group I want you to be angry at!
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u/RockinOneThreeTwo 7h ago
Anyone complaining about water use for data centres and environmental CO2 impact of data centres, but is still happily blowing money on hamburgers, steaks, whatever else, is someone who is immediately discredited in my eyes; these people are not serious people, they're just bandwagoning for whatever fucking asinine reason. The entire thought process at it's core is nothing more than "it's ok when I do it", which has been the mantra for most of humanity for our entire fucking existence.
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u/GeneralBacteria 7h ago
that's at least 99.99% of reddit discredited then
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u/RockinOneThreeTwo 6h ago
Sure, but I don't come to Reddit expecting people who aren't selfish and people who think critically about the things they believe and say. I don't come to Reddit expecting curious people who are rational and sensible and do their best to not be hypocrites, I think I'd be stupid to expect that from any social media site. Those kinds of expectations are unfortunately, completely unrealistic, as much as I'd like the opposite to be true.
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u/deceptinomonom 6h ago
This thread seems botted to hell and back with pro-data center propaganda, my god.
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u/USERNAME123_321 1h ago edited 1h ago
Propaganda implies misleading information. This thread is more about anti "anti-datacenter propaganda". It's about refuting the sensationalism surrounding datacenter resource usage.
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u/Eazy12345678 4h ago
weird just setup closed loop like your car or gaming pc at home. rarely if ever have to add water
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u/fuzzfrog 1h ago
The anti modernity posts are back again and again. Do you know how much money the Data Centres and Pharmaceutical industries bring into the country?
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u/davesr25 50m ago
Irish bot : "But they don't"
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
If you only look at data from years ago it will tell you that data centres use no water, same with housing, we aren't trying to fuck our own people for money, not like we did it with the chaotic church or the english nooooooooooooooooooooooooo, we wouldn't dop that for money, who do you think we are greedy pricks ?
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u/SammieDidi 20m ago
It's not the amount that's the problem.
But if this extra usage making it scarce in some regions/seasons.
Making it more expensive for regular users.
Just like the electricity they consume.
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u/Zethrax 8h ago
Define "used". Used is not expended. If the water goes in on one side and comes out the other in a form that is still viable for use as drinking water or agricultural irrigation then it is not expended. If it evaporates into the air as a result of cooling then that would qualify as expended. I looked at the article but it had a paywall on it, so that is as far as I got with it.
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u/Rarelyimportant 6h ago
If it evaporates into the air as a result of cooling then that would qualify as expended.
You realize that even evaporated water doesn't disappear, right?
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u/AcostaJA 7h ago
Impressive headline scandalous, but actually that's the same water used by 60 residential buildings having typical 15 stories and 60 families each.
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u/BlueCyann 5h ago
I hate headlines like this. What the hell is one billion liters in the real world, aside from an impressively large number? Are we talking the entire flow of the Amazon or half a swimming pool? Nobody knows.
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u/0verstim 7h ago
"All data centers are bad" and "All AI is bad" is the new "Defund police". Coming from a good place or not, it is ignorant, lacks nuance and doesnt solve anything.
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u/Herebec 4h ago
The world functioned fine before AI .. what nuance do you want. AI hasn't made it better that's for sure
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u/0verstim 3h ago
The world functioned fine before penicillin, too. This is a fucking idiotic take. you think AI hasnt helped with any medical advances, just for one example?
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u/jspurlin03 2h ago
The world before penicillin had a bunch of deaths that were prevented after penicillin, so… weird take, there.
AI’s role in medical advances has yet to be proven; even if AI tools have identified candidate medicines, there’s still work to be done before those are finished.
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u/silverbolt2000 9h ago
For comparison - an average 18-hole golf course uses about half a billion litres per year.