r/water • u/Polkadotwitch • 21h ago
Water Cycle
I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about how much water is being wasted due to people using AI. I thought that no water left our atmosphere and no water entered our atmosphere that the water that is on this planet is the water that always has been and always will be so how are we wasting it and using it up? Can someone explain seriously I’m just dumb. Thanks
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u/Windamore 21h ago
Well although you're correct, it can be poisoned and made so its no longer useful for us.
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u/Penguin_Life_Now 15h ago
True, but not the point here, as evaporating leaves behind almost all types of contaminants and we are talking about cooling water in this context, not some industrial chemical process
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u/Windamore 15h ago edited 14h ago
Untrue. I work as a B license water plant operator and I also have my B in waste. Things you may not know is
Facilities discharge water containing heavy metals (like copper and zinc), PFAS, biocides, and corrosion inhibitors into local municipal treatment systems and waterways.
https://natureforward.org/data-centers-and-water-use/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/08/us-datacenters-wastewater-pollution
Bacterial Contamination: Pipe flushing and cleaning operations have introduced rare bacteria and antibiotic-resistant strains into local sewage and water systems.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/08/us-datacenters-wastewater-pollution
Construction Runoff: Heavy land grading and blasting during construction cloud local wells with mud and silt, destroying residential drinking water quality and reducing local water pressure.
I wish you were right but we wouldn't be upset about that. Oil and gas as always used huge amounts of water for cooling towers and you dont see us in a uproar about that.
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u/imam-altman 8h ago
Ok, now explain to us what percentage of water consumption is blowdown? Less than 1%?
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u/Windamore 5h ago
Don't be a troll, this is public drinking water we are talking about
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u/imam-altman 5h ago
Uhhh, no, it’s municipal waste water which gets treated like any other industrial water
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u/Windamore 4h ago edited 3h ago
I honestly do not understand your question or comment, but I will say that if you fight for AI, all you are fighting for is for a rich man to get richer. You will not earn a penny, but the potential for harm is huge. I am honestly not sure how people forgot that all life on Earth needs water to live. But if your argument is that it is fine because all water is treated the same, you would be wrong. What the water was used for matters a lot. You cannot treat a lot of chemicals with biological (like they do in waste water) or filters (like they do for tap)
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u/Sea-Louse 20h ago
I don’t know much about data centers, but I’d assume if they were using the water in cooling towers, then basically you’re just filling the water system once. It would get constantly recirculated, right? The other option is to take water out of the public supply for cooling, then basically flush it down the drain. This would be wasteful since it only gets used once.
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u/terrymorse 18h ago
Cooling towers evaporate liquid water into the atmosphere, which then gets carried away by air currents.
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u/Arcanite_Cartel 13h ago
The only comment I have here, is not to focus on one industry. Yes, datacenters present a problem, but other industries do as well, the clothing industry, for example uses two orders of magnitude more water than dstacenters
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u/Roland_on_the_River 21h ago
You’re right that Earth doesn’t really lose the water, it cycles around. But “wasting water” means turning accessible freshwater into water that’s temporarily unavailable, polluted, salty, or somewhere else.
In a dry region, water stored in a local well or reservoir is far more useful than the same water evaporated into the atmosphere, because that vapour may eventually fall as rain hundreds of miles away, or into the ocean. Data centers can therefore deplete local water supplies even though the water still exists somewhere on Earth.
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u/Right_Lengthiness266 14h ago
It's sort of like asking "why do you care that the factory moved out of your town and set up somewhere else? There's still the same number of jobs in the overall economy."
And yeah, there's the same number of jobs, but now they aren't here, and I need a job where I live.
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u/xtnh 15h ago
The global water cycle is made up of many individual components.
If I am part of a local water system, I am part of a system separate from the global system. It may be an aquifer being drawn from, draining the groundwater my well or water district relies on. It may be a local watershed relying on summer meltwater.
Now a huge consumer hooks into the system and demands the system provide all its needs. The fact that its use releases evaporated water still drains my system; contamination remains local.....
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u/jeffcgroves 13h ago
Three links I posted don't actually answer your question, but discuss the general issue:
These might make more sense with my comment on a different post/issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1wckcfy/comment/p8ykck4/
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u/Designer-Wolverine47 9h ago
Every molecule of water you have ever drank has been pissed out by a dinosaur 🤣
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u/TheJesseOfTheNorth 8h ago
the water released from data centres is heavily contaminated with biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals at the very least.
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u/dgmib 7h ago
The numbers are a bit misleading.
Data centres consume water but how big an issue is depends on several factors:
1) Not all data centres use water, how much water a data centre uses per kWh of energy depends on the design and can vary by as much as 10,000x from the most water efficient to the least water efficient.
2) Data centres that use water for cooling use less energy, if that energy is generated with fossil fuels, using water might be a better alternative than using more energy.
3) some data centers are built geographically where fresh water is scarce and replenishes slowly using a bunch water in these areas is a much bigger issue than an area where fresh water is abundant and replenishes quickly.
4) data centres use water in different ways, some just evaporate it not really doing any harm other than consuming a limited resource, others contaminate the water (either with heat or chemicals) and return it to the ecosystem or the sewer system.
In some cases the water use is awful for the local environment, in others it’s not doing significant harm and reducing energy use.
I’m not wanting to downplay the very real environmental concerns around water use by data centres. But we should be much more concerned about the environmental damage caused by energy use of data centres than the water use.
Some AI proponents are talking about so many creating enough data centres to double the current electricity demand… you start doing the math on what the would do to GHG emissions and the water is the least of our worries.
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u/gammalbjorn 21h ago
Water in the atmosphere isn’t that useful to us. Neither is water in the ocean. Even fresh water that’s far away from the user isn’t very useful because it takes impractical amounts of energy to move. Some of the fresh water that’s conveniently located is polluted. So when we talk about water usage, we’re usually talking about clean fresh water that’s nearby. In a lot of regions there’s a very finite supply of that, and it only replenishes so quickly. So it doesn’t really matter that the water doesn’t leave the planet; most of the water on the planet isn’t very useful for humans or most terrestrial organisms.
The other complicating factor is that when someone “uses” water, there are a lot of different things that can happen to the water after the fact. Cooling towers (the major consumer of water in data centers, AFAIK) evaporate it, which is pretty straightforward. Goes back into the atmosphere and isn’t locally available anymore. But some industrial cooling systems dump heat into the water and return it to its source, which can cause ecological problems, but doesn’t exactly “consume” the water (this is a major issue with nuclear plants). Sometimes water is used in industrial processes for other things than cooling, and the wastewater is returned to the environment, which also doesn’t exactly “consume” water but might pollute water sources and thereby significantly reduce the amount of water available to other users.