I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
adastra22 4 minutes ago [-]
Those reasons aren’t obvious to me. Why not just be transparent if that’s the case?
cogman10 34 minutes ago [-]
Did your datacenter consume 9GW?
I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.
The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
T-A 20 minutes ago [-]
> Did your datacenter consume 9GW?
I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.
> I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.
The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]
Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.
But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.
Along those lines just a reminder folks, China is installing about 1GW equivalent of Solar power per day [1]. Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries [2]. These are not zero-regulation, socialist wastelands.
All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?
For most datacenters the actual largest source of water use is indirectly from power generation (coal, nat gas). Solar reduces that a lot also.
adastra22 3 minutes ago [-]
The water isn’t actually used. It is slightly warmed.
23 minutes ago [-]
embedding-shape 15 minutes ago [-]
> But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.
I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.
jmmv 10 minutes ago [-]
Google never wanted to share details about their datacenters because they thought (think?) their power efficiency was a competitive advantage. So it'd be lower than you expect.
Also, they didn't want you to be able to guesstimate how many machines / computing power they had, for similar reasons.
embedding-shape 3 minutes ago [-]
Right, they're so power efficient they don't want to tell the people around them how little water they consume or "not consume"?
People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say "No, actually we're not, here is the numbers", because Google doesn't want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I'm sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was "obvious" they couldn't divulge how little/much water the place uses.
1 hours ago [-]
michaelt 1 hours ago [-]
> I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
Eyas 56 minutes ago [-]
Worth considering in the current climate. My impression a while ago is that the exact water and power usage of any large company's data center is seen as a trade secret of sorts; if a large company invested to become XX% efficient, it might not want competitors to know it hit a certain efficiency target.
bix6 44 minutes ago [-]
Yeah that’s a bullshit justification. Your efficiency is not a trade secret and a community deserves to know the impact.
Noticeably they initially shared this info and then stopped. It seemed to stop around the time researchers started investigating the projects.
junofan 33 minutes ago [-]
It’s already permitted and operating. Presumably they want the $XX million tax rebates, which haven’t yet been paid out according to this article. Maybe that’s the case in other places too.
Why not get people riled up over water under the bridge and not unpaid rebates? What can anybody do about it? Send the sheriff to lock out the facility?
bix6 32 minutes ago [-]
Sorry but large companies forcing NDAs with public servants does not fly.
The data tables start on p. 90, but to understand what some of the numbers mean, it's helpful to start at p. 69.
vmg12 56 minutes ago [-]
Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it's low) and people don't believe him.
dspillett 25 minutes ago [-]
Largely because of how many times it could have been stated prior, given it had been a talking point for some time, and the lack of actual evidence (him saying something is not often taken at face value…).
Of course, they'd like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won't get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.
bluecheese452 55 minutes ago [-]
How can you tell he is lying? His lips are moving.
vmg12 40 minutes ago [-]
Exactly my point
minimaxir 1 hours ago [-]
That would not be good PR because a) it would be seen as flippant and b) no one would believe Google.
Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
therealpygon 57 minutes ago [-]
Data centers tend to be higher security facilities for a reason. Publicizing any of their technical specs isn’t really beneficial, especially when any numbers that are provided will be dismissed unless even more information is provided to back them up.
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
bliteben 50 minutes ago [-]
Absurd! every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.
If they are using over a certain percent of any public utility (and yes ALL utilities are public) the utility should force it to be disclosed.
dspillett 23 minutes ago [-]
> every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.
Correct. But they can't so easily without Google's (or other big tech companies) big legal departments to make challenging the excuses difficult.
bix6 43 minutes ago [-]
How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?
dekhn 33 minutes ago [-]
The big hyperscalers always knew that eventually the tide would turn against them (for example when local towns noticed that the DCs didn't actually need very many locals to run the facilities).
They carefully hid things so they could expand for as long as possible, knowing that having the necessary footprint for services, cloud, and AI would be key to winning the race. When I worked at Google, our leaders were always "proud" they had built such a huge fleet (originally for search + ads but rapidly growing to a wide range of products and research) without competitors knowing just how large, because they figured eventually AWS and MSFT would realize they had to build out massively to handle the coming loads.
So they hide these things to stave off complaints for as long as possible.
bluealienpie 51 minutes ago [-]
It’s not high security if everyone is mandated to do it. Power consumption, energy sources, water usage for coolant, waste water treatment plan, etc.
I think the disinformation is people thinking that data centers directly use vast quantities of water. What happens is the power use stresses water supplies in local areas.
Google has some custom hardware, so directly reporting it could be an issue.
Now that it has been, though…
PunchyHamster 1 hours ago [-]
It is worth remembering that it heavily depends on cooling system involved.
Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude
But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.
Marha01 57 minutes ago [-]
> it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.
It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.
jacquesm 40 minutes ago [-]
And who exactly would they be astroturfing for?
fragmede 53 seconds ago [-]
China and Russia.
stvltvs 34 minutes ago [-]
Big Labor j/k
quietsegfault 30 minutes ago [-]
People looking for something to run against?
hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
LinkedIn CV says 8 Years working for google as a Data Center Facilities Technician, so. Yeah.
Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.
david-gpu 1 hours ago [-]
Biased, or well informed?
hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
In that specific position probably leaning more towards biased than towards well-informed, though both components likely do exist.
It's not well-paid enough to be immune to kool-aid etc, and it's not on the sociopathic management level either, so we can expect a certain degree of very human rationalization going on.
petergs 58 minutes ago [-]
How would being high paid help make you immune to kool aid? In my experience in low paid work, it’s a lot easier to hate the company…
hypfer 54 minutes ago [-]
Being paid well enough gives the mind an out from cognitive dissonance that doesn't involve actually believing the company narrative.
It offers the compelling counter-narrative of "yes, we're evil, but hell yeah this is lucrative af". That makes the ego even happier, as in that story, one is the clever mastermind playing the system, so we can reasonably assume that that path will be taken.
If that path is unavailable, and cognitive dissonance sets in, the other path left is actually drinking the kool-aid. The corp must be nice, after all.
(This all assumes that people do in fact want to do good and have a conscience, but for those that doesn't apply to, there's the sociopathy path as mentioned in the previous comment. Reality is slightly more murky and dynamic, but I'd argue that this rough if-ladder exists as described.)
sapphicsnail 33 minutes ago [-]
Have you ever talked to people with a low paying job?
hypfer 31 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I find it a lot more pleasant than most of this industry.
gspr 1 hours ago [-]
Also outright dishonest to not add that as a disclaimer!
williamtell 1 hours ago [-]
>> During my career there
gspr 54 minutes ago [-]
I certainly read that as "there" being the town, not the actual data center!
tzs 28 minutes ago [-]
" I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient"
That makes it very clear he was an employee of Google working at the data center.
hypfer 41 minutes ago [-]
Same, but revisiting it with context, it does seem mostly obvious enough.
Written communication is hard
dotancohen 41 minutes ago [-]
He specifically said he worked there. Did you think perhaps he possibly worked for the outsourced cleaning crew?
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
The use of the word "we" seems pretty clear to me.
bix6 1 hours ago [-]
Ok and? This wouldn’t be an issue if google et al would just share the numbers instead of hiding behind NDAs and whatever else.
fastball 1 hours ago [-]
Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something. Giving those people concrete numbers is not gonna change such misconceptions (and that's assuming they look at such numbers in reasonable relative terms in the first place).
tzs 11 minutes ago [-]
The majority of current large data centers use open-loop evaporative water cooling which does in fact consume water.
Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.
This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.
Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].
Seems easy enough to report multiple numbers and be clear on what water comes in (can even separate initial filling/construction from ongoing usage) vs what gets lost and what comes out as waste. I think people can understand this and it isn't a good enough reason to not share the numbers.
TehCorwiz 41 minutes ago [-]
There are so many facets that numbers alone don't cover:
Are they drawing from a flowing source or an aquifer? Is it depleting a limited resource?
Is it evaporative or does the waste get discharged?
Is the waste water treated for the metal that it leaches from the cooling system?
Is it allowed to reach thermal equilibrium first or is the water discharged warm which can cause algae blooms or other problems?
Lanktion 16 minutes ago [-]
It is consumed because they evaporate it away and remove it from the local environment.
They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
fastball 4 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
bix6 51 minutes ago [-]
Fair point. But if I had initially learned that google was putting data centers in and it recycled water and it was a minor amount I would be more receptive than hearing that google is bullying communities and hiding details behind NDAs.
embedding-shape 13 minutes ago [-]
> Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something.
Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.
anigbrowl 1 hours ago [-]
Not sure why this is being downvoted. If you noticeably distort the local economy then people are naturally going to want to know what resources you're consuming.
but trade secrets
I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
WarmWash 52 minutes ago [-]
The irony is that it is unlikely datacenters would hit that "above a certain size"
The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
jacquesm 38 minutes ago [-]
People do just that.
bix6 47 minutes ago [-]
Industrial use should never get to hide. It’s such impactful use so every aspect should be scrutinized.
bluecheese452 54 minutes ago [-]
You have some very motivated people with deep pockets who do not like negative press. Say anything negative and the downvotes will roll in.
WarmWash 46 minutes ago [-]
Surely the people who have worked in tech, with datacenters or even in them for decades are wrong, and the people who learned the word "datacenter" 6 months ago are right.
tptacek 2 hours ago [-]
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
mrb 1 hours ago [-]
Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
quietsegfault 24 minutes ago [-]
My state's gasoline refineries use about ~13 million gallons of water each day. It's about .7 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline refined.
bix6 42 minutes ago [-]
Remind me median income?
WarmWash 29 minutes ago [-]
I don't know if you mean to be reinforcing that it's nothing or not
maccard 1 hours ago [-]
I live in a country of 5 million people and we lose 40 times that a year to leaks.
dom96 6 minutes ago [-]
Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?
1 hours ago [-]
demibabs 2 hours ago [-]
“Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion… reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption”.
I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.
XMPPwocky 2 hours ago [-]
It looks to me like there's two Google DCs with different LLCs?
> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.
> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.
> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.
tptacek 1 hours ago [-]
Even that 765 is like 0.04% of the water needed to irrigate Nebraska's ethanol corn crop alone. And ethanol is basically an agricultural proof-of-work function.
grebc 1 hours ago [-]
You can’t eat your algorithm.
So while pointing to agriculture and saying look there - those guys & gals way more than us it’s a red herring because we need food.
Sure improve efficiency of ag, but a better comp for water usage should be made. Reasonable people tune out.
arccy 1 hours ago [-]
you can't eat ethanol either, you burn it to create more global warming
logicprog 1 hours ago [-]
That's why they talked about ethanol.
nradov 36 minutes ago [-]
How does it compare to the water used growing alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia?
hexasquid 11 minutes ago [-]
"... and keep your hand up if your ethical, water saving stance means you've become vegan."
motbus3 1 hours ago [-]
Please elucidate if I'm wrong, but, isn't the problem the distribution of the water and not the amount? If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.
I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
TeMPOraL 51 minutes ago [-]
> If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.
Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.
Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
bryzaguy 44 minutes ago [-]
This feels like an important point! People comparing to leaks (or other distributed examples that aggregate similarly) are not thinking about how the amount of water used in a single location changes the scale.
JKCalhoun 1 hours ago [-]
Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.
tptacek 24 minutes ago [-]
Do I understand the logic here to be "if there's an LLC with an obscure name involved, it must be using too much water"?
christophilus 51 minutes ago [-]
That’s more of a convenient way to distribute and isolate risks than it is anything nefarious.
zetsurin 23 minutes ago [-]
You see, that is nefarious. Not taking responsibility is nefarious.
bluecheese452 49 minutes ago [-]
Or to shift blame and hide wrongdoing.
gspr 1 hours ago [-]
What I now wonder is why the hell they're trying to hide it then. If the numbers are strongly on your side, why hide them?!
TeMPOraL 56 minutes ago [-]
Because nobody reasonable believes water use is any issue, but these numbers are proxy for the usual stuff companies don't disclose for usual reasons (ones that rhyme with "competition" and "stock market")?
gspr 52 minutes ago [-]
They sure as hell aren't making it easy for the "reasonable" to take their side when their response to the "unreasonable" is "the numbers you claim are bad are actually good, but you don't get to see them because they go to a different school".
bluecheese452 47 minutes ago [-]
We have perfectly good reasons to hide behind shell companies and ndas! Anyone who disagrees is a hater!
deckar01 2 hours ago [-]
Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.
tptacek 1 hours ago [-]
No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.
deckar01 1 hours ago [-]
I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.
tptacek 23 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't seem insignificant. It is in fact insignificant. And it supports one of the most popular and widely used consumer products of the last 100 years, so it seems like a pretty incredible bargain.
linsomniac 1 hours ago [-]
>they are not meaningful users of water.
How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.
Yes. GP is literally saying that 1-2 million gallons of water is a pretty small number not meaningful to anything at scale.
It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.
ordersofmag 38 minutes ago [-]
Please compare 1 million gallons to the 1 quadrillion gallons in the aquifer, or the 31 trillion that falls from sky each year in Nebraska and get back to me.
AlotOfReading 35 minutes ago [-]
Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.
dekhn 1 hours ago [-]
Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
fasterik 26 minutes ago [-]
The concern around data centers looks a lot like a moral panic. They've been around for decades and nobody cared before the backlash against AI. They're like any other industrial building, subject to the same resource constraints and zoning laws. I suspect if the owners of that land built a steel mill, a semiconductor fab, or anything other than a data center with similar power and water requirements, nobody would care.
therein 16 minutes ago [-]
It is very cute and convenient that you're equating old datacenters with the ones that are being built now. They don't have the same density, do they?
Just because both are called datacenters, they must be the same. Funny.
Similar argument is being tried to quench the outrage against Flock/Axon. We always had cameras. Yeah, right.
Get out of here. Either you have a simple mind or you are commenting in bad faith.
fasterik 6 minutes ago [-]
I find it more and more common that people who disagree online respond by attacking the commenter personally instead of addressing their arguments. You should explain why a building full of computers is fine if it's 100 acres but not if it's 1000 acres. You should also explain why we shouldn't oppose comparable scale manufacturing or warehousing facilities.
Cameras are different than data centers. Trying to connect the two is a rhetorical technique, not an argument.
floro 3 minutes ago [-]
Regardless of the comments below there seems to be a crazy ideology forming about being completely pro or anti AI. On both sides people are either under or ober reporting how much power these datacenters actually use
eleventen 1 hours ago [-]
There is sometimes incorrect conflation between what the datacenter is permitted for and what the datacenter actually draws.
> Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1]
This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either.
Why is Masley "problematic" and what's he been wrong about?
bluecheese452 44 minutes ago [-]
He won’t toe the official line. You will always get a vague claim of being “problematic” if you don’t challenge the status quo.
eleventen 46 minutes ago [-]
He’s a Pro-AI ideologue who engages in the same motivated reasoning he complains about others using. His piece on heat island effects fell over under scrutiny because he just doesn’t have the analytical background to actually do these investigations.
matteoraso 24 minutes ago [-]
What? I follow him on Twitter, and he's pretty open worried about AI existental risk. He just wants accurate reporting about the situation.
bix6 1 hours ago [-]
Ok but if you are permitted for some obscene number you could at any point draw that down no?
1-6 2 hours ago [-]
You can get better cooling performance at the cost of slight water usage or you can use more energy without using water at all.
The greener solution is to use water.
XMPPwocky 2 hours ago [-]
Seems like it'd depend a lot on e.g. carbon impact of the marginal watt v.s. environmental impact of the marginal gallon? Might depend on the individual site.
fastball 1 hours ago [-]
Is there much impact of a marginal gallon? This is evaporative cooling, no? It's gonna come back down as rain and refill wherever datacenter took it from.
ordersofmag 36 minutes ago [-]
This is entirely dependent on where you are geographically in terms of rainfall and weather. Both water and energy are abundant. The trick is getting them where you need them. So the where is what matters.
strstr 9 minutes ago [-]
Roughly 40 acre feet of water for the Lincoln DC. An acre of corn uses maybe a couple of acre feet a season. Corn irrigation alone uses tens of millions of acre feet of water per season in the USA.
se4u 28 minutes ago [-]
I dont like the olympic swimming pool comparisons so I converted to immigrant population comparisons. How many people's worth of electricity and water are the data centers consuming , of course all the analysis was done on gemini since we are talking about google data centers :) here's the output
> Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska.
> Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
devindotcom 49 minutes ago [-]
kind of confusing numbers here. the 13 million gallon figure refers to one specific datacenter, but you add on five more datacenters and the number grows to... 765 million gallons? The datacenter in Papillion accounts for 548 million of those. Is it bigger? Is it less efficient? not a lot of info apparent in this report.
If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
bryzaguy 39 minutes ago [-]
> Agate LLC reports expecting a refund of $55,822,472 from 2025 taxes. Fireball LLC is expecting a refund of $39,171,573.39 from 2025 taxes. Westwood Solutions LLC, the Google-owned data center in Omaha, is expecting a refund of $22,558,881 from 2025 taxes.
Wow!
42 minutes ago [-]
motionlessveloc 1 hours ago [-]
I don't really understand the hand-wringing about data centers and water. Unlike fossil fuels, when you "use" water, it doesn't go away, it goes back out into the environment. And since DCs use it for cooling, not some industrial process, it doesn't even contaminate the water in any meaningful way.
The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
blensor 1 hours ago [-]
I think the bigger issue with water usage ( if it's actually an issue ) is when the system is not able to handle the additional demand ( drying up wells, etc. )
Especially during the summer where water supply is already strained in some areas.
Yes water goes eventually back into circulation but that does not help in the place where the system is already at it's limit
ordersofmag 31 minutes ago [-]
True if you're using a closed-loop system. But if you're using evaporative cooling (which is the main cause for concern) then the place where the water 'comes back into the environment' may be quite far away (at least in a useful sense).
debatem1 1 hours ago [-]
I would love to see a real breakdown of aquifer water usage.
bix6 1 hours ago [-]
IMO the water thing is a distraction. It gets people quibbling over water instead of asking bigger questions about the data center.
Ancapistani 26 minutes ago [-]
Mostly, but not entirely. It is a huge issue in the Southwest, and it seems like a lot of DCs are being proposed and/or built in areas where water is far from abundant.
0xbadcafebee 1 hours ago [-]
Fresh water supply has been on a downward trend for years. We are already looking at a future without enough fresh water, before the new datacenters come into play. The datacenters are being installed in some of the driest areas of the country that were already water stressed. In some cases they can also contaminate local water systems.
bix6 59 minutes ago [-]
I’m not disagreeing with that but it fundamentally feels like a misdirection. It’s easily hand waved away eg “it uses less than a golf course” and yet it’s still a constant media talking point.
eesmith 1 hours ago [-]
Your use of "into the environment" is too broad.
If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.
For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.
Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
nradov 25 minutes ago [-]
The problem in California is that competition for water doesn't raise prices. Much of our water supply is allocated based on property rights rather than as a commodity so prices for some users remain artificially lower than the market price. This causes waste and shortages. Eventually we'll have to reform the system but there's no political will to do so.
0xbadcafebee 1 hours ago [-]
The water for the datacenter comes from the same place residents, farmers, etc get their water. If there is already not a lot of water, the datacenter can cause running out of water. Sending used water downstream doesn't magically reappear upstream.
rileymat2 31 minutes ago [-]
In some cases there is no stream involved at all, which is more problematic, but is pumped from groundwater.
userbinator 58 minutes ago [-]
This is also likely insignificant compared to how much water is constantly evaporated by a large lake.
pavel_lishin 2 hours ago [-]
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.
Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.
persedes 2 hours ago [-]
That's wishful thinking, I know, but would love a breakdown of those metrics into what actually goes into AI inference, training versus just TikTok / YouTube streaming, or just a Google search...To have some perspective. My hypothesis that prolonged video streaming might contribute similarly to AI usage? (But CDN etc might make that tricky to calculate...)
tptacek 2 hours ago [-]
It's not terrible at all. It's dwarfed by common municipal demands, let alone industry or agriculture. It's an amount of water that's basically not worth talking about.
jimjimjim 1 hours ago [-]
From a redaction point of view: I can't believe this is still happening. Surely by now all government and local government offices have a data/records person and policies about information handling. I guess it's not really sensitive info like the name of a government informant. Maybe they intentionally leaked it with a 'whoops, we tried' excuse.
If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that.
If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
i_love_retros 1 hours ago [-]
Seems like a lot of water to me. And what does society get back from google in return?
vmg12 36 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us?
api 2 hours ago [-]
It… doesn’t look that bad. Electricity use is sizable. Water which usually gets all this screaming is, well, look up how much a golf course or a large hotel uses.
rileymat2 33 minutes ago [-]
It varies pretty greatly, but our golf course uses untreated water from a relatively dirty river that is not used for drinking. It looks like Google is using ground water from the aquifer. These are significantly different beasts.
mitxela 2 hours ago [-]
Concern about water use is the distraction they caused in the media so we'd too busy thinking about fake issues to think about the real issues.
0xbadcafebee 1 hours ago [-]
Excess water use is actively harming people right now.
YetAnotherNick 2 hours ago [-]
Not a conspiracy theorist, but wait that really sounds effective. Just few months back I was wondering why were big datacenter companies not trying to sway the public that the water usage is low per query or whatever metric.
There will be protests and cases related to water usage of AI, but none of them would hold any ground. And winning the water case would just make the argument in their favour.
dylan604 1 hours ago [-]
Which begs the question of who was the source of the water/electricity FUD?
DANmode 1 hours ago [-]
You don’t have to create unrest, sometimes you just have to let it go unchecked in the right spots.
DANmode 1 hours ago [-]
Flood the zone.
> Just few months back
Just a few months more, and the public was still often making Epstein references.
drnick1 1 hours ago [-]
So what? Water used for cooling doesn't disappear.
ordersofmag 26 minutes ago [-]
Historically large data centers used evaporative cooling. So the water disappeared in sense that it's no longer available in a useful form in it's original locations. That's changing with growing use of closed-loop systems.
minimaxir 1 hours ago [-]
A lot of people think it does, surprisingly. People memed too hard about "querying ChatGPT drains lakes" and anyone who contested it was deemed a booster, so it stuck.
It doesn't mean the water goes back into the same sources it was pulled from, though
alcomatt 49 minutes ago [-]
no it doesn't but it doesn't go back to where it was taken from either. So it does affect local aquifers.
webbrainiac 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
This document was created after the Epstein redaction debacle and yet they still leaked redacted data. People will never learn. <facepalm>
bluecheese452 1 hours ago [-]
If everything was on the up and up they wouldn’t be hiding things behind shell companies and ndas. The water and electric usage is the least of our worries. These things will make cancer alley look like a Sunday picnic. There is a reason executives won’t live anywhere near the hot zone.
Rendered at 22:01:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.
The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.
https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...
https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...
The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]
Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.
But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.
1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
[2]:https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.
Also, they didn't want you to be able to guesstimate how many machines / computing power they had, for similar reasons.
People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say "No, actually we're not, here is the numbers", because Google doesn't want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I'm sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was "obvious" they couldn't divulge how little/much water the place uses.
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
Noticeably they initially shared this info and then stopped. It seemed to stop around the time researchers started investigating the projects.
Why not get people riled up over water under the bridge and not unpaid rebates? What can anybody do about it? Send the sheriff to lock out the facility?
https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
The data tables start on p. 90, but to understand what some of the numbers mean, it's helpful to start at p. 69.
Of course, they'd like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won't get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.
Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
If they are using over a certain percent of any public utility (and yes ALL utilities are public) the utility should force it to be disclosed.
Correct. But they can't so easily without Google's (or other big tech companies) big legal departments to make challenging the excuses difficult.
They carefully hid things so they could expand for as long as possible, knowing that having the necessary footprint for services, cloud, and AI would be key to winning the race. When I worked at Google, our leaders were always "proud" they had built such a huge fleet (originally for search + ads but rapidly growing to a wide range of products and research) without competitors knowing just how large, because they figured eventually AWS and MSFT would realize they had to build out massively to handle the coming loads.
So they hide these things to stave off complaints for as long as possible.
I think the disinformation is people thinking that data centers directly use vast quantities of water. What happens is the power use stresses water supplies in local areas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-a...
Now that it has been, though…
Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude
But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north
It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.
Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.
It's not well-paid enough to be immune to kool-aid etc, and it's not on the sociopathic management level either, so we can expect a certain degree of very human rationalization going on.
It offers the compelling counter-narrative of "yes, we're evil, but hell yeah this is lucrative af". That makes the ego even happier, as in that story, one is the clever mastermind playing the system, so we can reasonably assume that that path will be taken.
If that path is unavailable, and cognitive dissonance sets in, the other path left is actually drinking the kool-aid. The corp must be nice, after all.
(This all assumes that people do in fact want to do good and have a conscience, but for those that doesn't apply to, there's the sociopathy path as mentioned in the previous comment. Reality is slightly more murky and dynamic, but I'd argue that this rough if-ladder exists as described.)
That makes it very clear he was an employee of Google working at the data center.
Written communication is hard
Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.
This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.
Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
Are they drawing from a flowing source or an aquifer? Is it depleting a limited resource?
Is it evaporative or does the waste get discharged?
Is the waste water treated for the metal that it leaches from the cooling system?
Is it allowed to reach thermal equilibrium first or is the water discharged warm which can cause algae blooms or other problems?
They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.
but trade secrets
I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.
> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.
> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.
> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.
So while pointing to agriculture and saying look there - those guys & gals way more than us it’s a red herring because we need food.
Sure improve efficiency of ag, but a better comp for water usage should be made. Reasonable people tune out.
I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.
Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.
See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...
It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
Just because both are called datacenters, they must be the same. Funny.
Similar argument is being tried to quench the outrage against Flock/Axon. We always had cameras. Yeah, right.
Get out of here. Either you have a simple mind or you are commenting in bad faith.
Cameras are different than data centers. Trying to connect the two is a rhetorical technique, not an argument.
> Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1]
This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either.
[1] https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?ope...
The greener solution is to use water.
> Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska.
> Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
Wow!
The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
Yes water goes eventually back into circulation but that does not help in the place where the system is already at it's limit
If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.
For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.
Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.
If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that.
If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
There will be protests and cases related to water usage of AI, but none of them would hold any ground. And winning the water case would just make the argument in their favour.
> Just few months back
Just a few months more, and the public was still often making Epstein references.