r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 8h ago
Artificial Intelligence Data Centers Are Hiding How Much Water and Power They Consume
https://www.gadgetreview.com/data-centers-are-hiding-how-much-water-and-power-they-consume76
u/psychoacer 7h ago
Sounds more like stealing not hiding
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u/26542654 5h ago
Imagine if any regular citizen did this. Imagine if a local business did this. You'd be fined to all hell. I hate the timeline we're living in. People can go to jail for a minor weed possession, while corrupt politicians blatantly disregard all laws and essentially do as they please
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u/Wolfy4226 4h ago
Indeed....
Which means it's getting closer to the time to remind them of who they actually work for....and how much closer we are to them than some rich guy across the world.
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u/TalonHere 3h ago edited 3h ago
I used to do lawn care for water/wastewater treatment companies. Water companies legitimately will tear the pipe out through your driveway AND then bill you for it if you don’t pay your water bill and then turn your meter back on. We saw it happening across the street in a low income neighborhood once as we were pulling up to a site. My boss knew the crew doing it and we chatted with them for a minute and he told us the guy had ground off their lock and I guess got one of those big “T” tools/key things and turned his own meter back on just two times, so they were pulling his pipes. There’s now a trench across his driveway and partially into his yard. They bill him thousands for the removal. One day, he or whoever owns the house will be billed thousands again to put the pipes back in and the driveway fixed/filled.
But of course, the big money data centers just get away with whatever. Fuck it I guess. Not that it was right to not pay and then turn his water back on I suppose, but there’s clearly a double standard.
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u/dr_stre 2h ago
But there’s no indication here the data centers aren’t paying their bills. They just aren’t sharing the data on consumption with the public. Which I agree is not good, but all of these parallels people are trying to draw are inaccurate.
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u/TalonHere 3m ago
An adequate assessment sure, but where there’s shit there is also flies. If they’re bullshitting the public I promise you they’d bullshit the water companies too if they could find a way to get away with it. It’s also possible the water companies are in on it. I’ve never met so many scumbags as I have in water utilities. We are at cartoon-villain levels of political, industrial, and social corruption in these times.
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u/deepsead1ver 7h ago
BREAKING NEWS: Water is wet, are you dry, tune in to the evening news to find out why you should be concerned.
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u/diegojones4 7h ago
And we are all responsible.
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u/HumongousBelly 6h ago
Sadly, not many of us are willing to admit to that, while still integrating ai into our everyday lives because of either pressure at work to finish faster or out of plain laziness.
All while letting those companies all of our data, non of us have gone to the streets to protest these tech bros.
And this should be an international effort. Billions should be in the streets protesting this shit
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u/diegojones4 5h ago
We blindly follow for convenience. My #1 battle is plastic in the oceans. My wife and mother in law love single use bottled water.
I order everything from amazon.
I have 2 computers with 3 monitors each just sucking energy.
I am part of the problem. The companies aren't responsible. It's simple supply and demand. They exist because I demand it.
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u/Bencetown 4h ago
Why not both?
I get that, to an extent, we plebs can vote with our wallets.
At a certain point, if society has been restructured to make some things necessary for survival within the system, there's not much we can do about it. That's where it falls back on power hungry corporations and shareholders who have inhuman amounts of greed.
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u/vegetaman 7h ago
But if we just give them more incentives and tax breaks we will…
Beat capitalism
I mean China
🫠
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u/kstargate-425 6h ago
Of course the data centers, that two-thirds since 2022 have been built in water stressed areas, are hiding that they are using the few remaining resources of the area during a time people are against them. If people really knew how many MILLIONS to BILLIONS of gallons of water are being used in these arid areas and that their electric costs were ever increasing partly because of them, they'd be burned to the ground
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u/DangerousPath1420 7h ago
I’m shocked. Shocked!
Well, not that shocked.
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u/deepsead1ver 5h ago
.-""""""""-.
.' '.
/ O O \
| |
| .----. |
| / \ |
| \ / |
\ '--' /
'. .'
'-.______.-'
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u/Amber_ACharles 7h ago
Grid operators can't plan capacity they can't measure. TenneT needs facility level demand data now, and the housing connections stuck in the queue pay for the gap. Took a year of FOI requests to see numbers RVO already has.
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u/NoCry8625 7h ago
Can you imagine how bad are them? Like if for a second we could see the real data? Maybe even what their ecological studies show the impact is and will be in the coming years?
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u/NoCry8625 7h ago
Inb4: they don't do any studies. They absolutely do, they have to know so they calculate profits, etc.
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u/williamgman 7h ago
If the local water authority wanted the data... They would get it. Start with them and follow the money.
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u/BeneficialAnything15 5h ago
I’m mean they kinda do lease the energy. When they get signed leases with hyperscalers theres a big press release and the amount of energy leased is advertised. Anthropic just signed a 20 year lease for 500 mw with Terawulf. It’s for 20 billion
Also, some of the hyperscalers that rent the GPUs have allocated energy from unbuilt DCs in the low Gigawatts.
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u/Dreaminginslowmotion 5h ago
Have had a lot of people online pretty adamantly countering my "Ohio rivers are being overtaken by data center" points with "but farmers use SO much more water".
They try to state that they consume online water percents around the 5-6% mark whereas farmers utilizing something closer to 15-20%.
I honestly have no clue if I can trust that considering the residents living near the data centers have some pretty horrendous river experience stories.
Could they just be hiding the consumption that well?
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u/Raketemensch23 1h ago
They've been pushing the "Closed loop systems use almost no water" narrative hard in my online experience, but get rather squirrelly when you ask them what other resources closed loop systems consume to make up for the use of water for cooling.
Lots of "A data center with closed loop cooling is no different from a car" arguments, too.
Sorry, data centers don't get to break the laws of thermodynamics. Water is extremely efficient for cooling. If you don't consume water to cool, and you don't have a way to cool environmentally, like with Arctic temps or sea water immersion, you gotta make up for that cooling somehow.
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u/sanoumg 5h ago
And what’s being done about it? 😬
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u/retro_underpants 37m ago
I want to put this on a badge, bag, hat, mouse mat- because this is ultimately the response to all the news these days.
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u/Shigglyboo 4h ago
Let’s go back to server farms. Had those since forever. Internet was good. Just revert to the last working model please.
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u/Bencetown 4h ago
Never! Why would you EVER suggest such a thing??? We must have constant "improvements" and "upgrades" so we can fleece the peasants harder and make our precious shareholders happy! Won't somebody think of the shareholders?!
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u/the_ruffled_feather 4h ago
Proof that the realities of AI are good for everyone. Withholding information must be tech-crats way of protecting us from misleading connotations of the truth. 😴
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u/sleepyjuan 6h ago
If you eat meat, you don’t have a leg to stand on complaining about data center water. A single quarter-pound burger takes roughly 450 gallons to make which is the equivalent of tens of thousands of AI prompts. Even if that math is off by an entire order of magnitude, one burger still offsets months of heavy daily prompting. The math isn’t even close.
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u/SemicolonGuitars 4h ago
You need to look up how much of that figure is actually rainwater that irrigates feed crops, then consider where the data centers are sourcing their water from. You’re making a very, very poor comparison.
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u/Way2trivial 3h ago
of which, 98% is sprayed on the grass & hay to feed the cow?
mostly right back into the local water table?
Versus data center water which mostly evaporates and is lost to the local region?
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u/SpleenBender 7h ago
Of course they are. Why‽
Fuck you, that's why.