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.
michaelt 33 minutes 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 20 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 7 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.
vmg12 19 minutes ago [-]
Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it's low) and people don't believe him.
bluecheese452 18 minutes ago [-]
How can you tell he is lying? His lips are moving.
vmg12 3 minutes ago [-]
Exactly my point
minimaxir 25 minutes 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 20 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 13 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.
bix6 6 minutes ago [-]
How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?
bluealienpie 14 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…
41 minutes ago [-]
PunchyHamster 41 minutes 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 54 minutes ago [-]
it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.
Marha01 20 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 4 minutes ago [-]
And who exactly would they be astroturfing for?
hypfer 41 minutes 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 31 minutes ago [-]
Biased, or well informed?
hypfer 29 minutes 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 21 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 17 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.)
gspr 36 minutes ago [-]
Also outright dishonest to not add that as a disclaimer!
dotancohen 4 minutes ago [-]
He specifically said he worked there. Did you think perhaps he possibly worked for the outsourced cleaning crew?
williamtell 30 minutes ago [-]
>> During my career there
gspr 17 minutes ago [-]
I certainly read that as "there" being the town, not the actual data center!
hypfer 4 minutes ago [-]
Same, but revisiting it with context, it does seem mostly obvious enough.
Written communication is hard
Dylan16807 31 minutes ago [-]
The use of the word "we" seems pretty clear to me.
bix6 42 minutes 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 36 minutes 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).
collingreen 16 minutes ago [-]
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 4 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?
bix6 14 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.
anigbrowl 33 minutes 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 15 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 1 minutes ago [-]
People do just that.
bix6 10 minutes ago [-]
Industrial use should never get to hide. It’s such impactful use so every aspect should be scrutinized.
bluecheese452 17 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 9 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.
bryzaguy 2 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!
tptacek 1 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 43 minutes 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.
bix6 5 minutes ago [-]
Remind me median income?
maccard 47 minutes ago [-]
I live in a country of 5 million people and we lose 40 times that a year to leaks.
35 minutes ago [-]
demibabs 59 minutes 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 55 minutes 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 51 minutes 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 41 minutes 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 33 minutes ago [-]
you can't eat ethanol either, you burn it to create more global warming
logicprog 33 minutes ago [-]
That's why they talked about ethanol.
JKCalhoun 25 minutes ago [-]
Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.
christophilus 15 minutes ago [-]
That’s more of a convenient way to distribute and isolate risks than it is anything nefarious.
bluecheese452 12 minutes ago [-]
Or to shift blame and hide wrongdoing.
motbus3 33 minutes 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 14 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 7 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.
gspr 34 minutes 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 19 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 15 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 10 minutes ago [-]
We have perfectly good reasons to hide behind shell companies and ndas! Anyone who disagrees is a hater!
deckar01 53 minutes 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 49 minutes 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.
linsomniac 31 minutes 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.
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.
TeMPOraL 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
deckar01 25 minutes 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%.
dekhn 34 minutes 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.
eleventen 50 minutes 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?
eleventen 9 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.
bluecheese452 8 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.
bix6 40 minutes ago [-]
Ok but if you are permitted for some obscene number you could at any point draw that down no?
1-6 1 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 54 minutes 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 34 minutes 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.
amelius 6 minutes ago [-]
I thought that DC ran on tears from underaged children targeted by psychological warfare based advertising techniques.
devindotcom 12 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.
userbinator 21 minutes ago [-]
This is also likely insignificant compared to how much water is constantly evaporated by a large lake.
pavel_lishin 1 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 60 minutes 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 56 minutes 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 29 minutes 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 29 minutes ago [-]
Seems like a lot of water to me. And what does society get back from google in return?
motionlessveloc 50 minutes 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 40 minutes 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
debatem1 41 minutes ago [-]
I would love to see a real breakdown of aquifer water usage.
bix6 39 minutes ago [-]
IMO the water thing is a distraction. It gets people quibbling over water instead of asking bigger questions about the data center.
0xbadcafebee 37 minutes 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 22 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 32 minutes 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.
0xbadcafebee 38 minutes 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.
api 1 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.
mitxela 1 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 33 minutes ago [-]
Excess water use is actively harming people right now.
YetAnotherNick 59 minutes 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 52 minutes ago [-]
Which begs the question of who was the source of the water/electricity FUD?
DANmode 47 minutes ago [-]
You don’t have to create unrest, sometimes you just have to let it go unchecked in the right spots.
DANmode 48 minutes ago [-]
Flood the zone.
> Just few months back
Just a few months more, and the public was still often making Epstein references.
drnick1 48 minutes ago [-]
So what? Water used for cooling doesn't disappear.
minimaxir 29 minutes 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 12 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 42 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
dylan604 54 minutes ago [-]
This document was created after the Epstein redaction debacle and yet they still leaked redacted data. People will never learn. <facepalm>
bluecheese452 25 minutes 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 21:24:52 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
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.
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.
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.)
Written communication is hard
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?
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.
Wow!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.