As other commenters have pointed out, 13.3 million gallons = ~40.8 acre-feet and this being Nebraska, the obvious comparison is agriculture (Corn and Soybeans being the main crop).
The average Nebraska farm is 989 acers[1] as of 2022 and uses roughly ~1,200 acre-feet of water (or roughly 390 million gallons) per year[2]. So a single average Nebraska farm uses roughly 30 times the water the Lincoln data center uses per year. There are 44,479 farms/ranches covering 44 million acres, which accounts for over 90% of the state's total land area.
Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming (even in a state like Nebraska that gets a large amount of rainfall compared to Central or Southern California). I hope that the current data center environmental focus continues to shed light on our industrial water and electrical usage.
The most fair comparison of water use would include evaporated vs soaked into the ground vs run off into rivers vs contained in the final product. As far as I'm aware, data centers are 100% evaporated while farms are going to be some percentage lower than that(though still high). Evaporating extra water can be detrimental to an area if the rainfall isn't high enough, while soaking into the ground is fairly good.
Plants evaporate a ton of water. So much so that corn fields create their own weather. A corn stalk is a high surface area, water infused, porous object. It's sending tons of water into the air.
why would including evaporation make any difference to the water usage counts?
The water used, whether evaporated or returned into soil (which includes rivers) is unusable any more. Unless the runoff is collected and reused again, which is a form of recycling, and should also not count towards usage of water.
Aquifers maybe? Well water. The issues related to things like the California's central valley subsidence. Not sure data centers are at that scale though.
Do they? That's been a sticking point for many regarding this big push to build more. Evaporative is cheaper and these companies aren't going to spend more if they don't have to.
But they have to, if not spending threatens the continuity of their operations, e.g. by allowing public perception to get so bad that laws get changed due to misinformation about the ecological footprint. Data centers are investments, they take time to build and get operational.
Evaporative is cheaper and these companies aren't going to spend more if they don't have to.
There's a cost either way (electricity or water), but electricity is much easier to get to your data centre so the capex cost at the start is lower, and municipalities have this annoying tendency to ban cooling towers because they're not pretty enough.
I would imagine plenty of data centers use both? Last time I worked at one they had both industrial heat pumps and evaporative cooling towers outside. While the heat pumps are effective, the cooling towers are way cheaper on cool dry days, so it mostly ended up being which one cost less that day vs strictly one or the other.
A lot of estimates used online for datacenter usage at large scale actually calculate water dependency including power generation - to the point that they might include water used by hydropower plants. It does not mean the reports are wrong, the data is simply for specific use that is then misrepresented by people who didn't read deep enough (or who have an agenda)
It's very important to think about embodied energy and water in the construction project. Operating the datacenter will definitely use more water if the datacenter uses open loop evaporative cooling.
And so this "leak" could be a way of diverting attention from the issue now. And later when the datacenter comes online no one cares because it's already been "revealed".
> Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming
It's really just a matter of appreciating how much land is involved. Converting to metric, that's 370mm of water per year across the entire land surface. For comparison (per Wikipedia) that's about double the annual rainfall in Phoenix AZ, but considerably less than in San Fransisco (and way less than East Coast cities). Of course, that's in addition to the natural Nebraska rainfall, but you get the idea. It's not an absurd amount.
The only relevant difference between datacenters and agriculture is that we need one to survive as a species, the other is actively being used for malicious crimes against humanity.
For the most part our agriculture usage in the US is very wasteful. We grow corn to run cars and alfalfa to sell to China. All with heavily subsided water. We do not need this to survive as a species.
We could get what we need to survive on a fourth of the farmland if we kicked the addiction to meat, arguably a more malicious crime against animals and the planet
> We could get what we need to survive on a fourth of the farmland if we kicked the addiction to meat
100%
> arguably a more malicious crime against animals and the planet
Personally disagree, it entirely depends on your moral and ethical alignment though, of course. Generative AI will be used to divide and conquer us at a pace never seen before, it will destroy the internet/digital realm by burying it in generated content.
We don't need to be fatalists to agree that most people, when confronted with the realities of factory farming and the ecological consequences of our diet, would describe them as abject moral failures
Many people have a severe misunderstanding as to the purpose of morality, after all. They also cannot answer who decides what is right and what is wrong.
Do you want to explain it? I come from a country that has no farming subsidies and it is a competitive free market (as taught by the US economists like Milton Friedman).
If the data center building were a pool with a surface area of 6.62 acres, its annual water use of 13.299 million gallons would fill it to a depth of 1.9 meters.
To hold the 391 million gallons in the farm estimate cited above, the same pool would have to be 55 meters deep.
The mass of plants growth is roughly the mass of water absorbed plus carbon from the atmosphere, minus water evaporated from leafs. The nutrients from the soil don't adhere to much.
That's to say, farms basically convert water to food and CO2 to O2. I'd say this is the water well spent.
Certainly the vast majority of water is not absorbed by plants, but evaporates from the ground or drains off without being used. You can't just ignore that.
Water pumped into a field only to drain back into the soil cannot be equated with "recycled". If the crop wasn't there, would it have been sensible to pump the water there for "recycling" purposes? Are we regularly pumping water into the middle of dry areas for no reason? Of course not. Almost all of that water is being effectively discarded and it's a huge waste, which, no, you do not see at data centres.
Something like 1% of corn grown in the U.S. is used to feed people directly. The majority of it is used to inefficiently make gasoline (via ethanol) or plastic, because farm subsidies make it profitable.
And growing at that scale makes that 1% super affordable as a food source. all these 'we need AI data centers at crazy huge scales' people suddenly don't understand scale when it comes to feeding the brokies.
I never said that. The comment I replied to seemed to imply that water used to grow crops is used very efficiently, or at least as efficiently as water used for data centers. That is clearly not true so I objected. That is all.
Growing food on a scale that makes it affordable to and reduces hunger for the plebes? That's a waste according to AI bros. Good luck with your crime bots, no jobs, no real music, hunger for the masses propganda. Should be a real winner.
Yes, they are intelligent in some ways and must be to survive, but just looking at the steady long-term depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer [0] and the actual squandering of water as mentioned by GP, where spraying it in midday results in massive evaporation, they are clearly being stupid about usage [1], time-of-day optimization, etc. and dooming the area to soon become a barren wasteland.
The lack of drip irrigation used in more arid areas, jsut because they have water today, is kind of shocking, and stupid.
This isn't the 50s anymore, it's not mom and pops anymore.
I stand by what I say, 90% are brain dead, have 0 understanding of sustainable practices, only care about their bottom line, use absolutely outdated ways of managing and growing crops. They're basically brute forcing life with technology, destroying their own source of income year after year.
I worked for years in small scale bio farms, I can certify most farmers are clinically retarded
If it's fed to farm animals for meat, that reduces its efficiency by an order of magnitude. There's still plenty of discussion to be had if that is water well spent. It probably depends on a lot of factors.
Now can you scale out your argument for how many data centers for total water usage.
And then find out how much Oracle uses per site as I figure their provably running much less efficient operations.
Im with you being some numbers to the battle. Its either going to be obviously bad or non-issue. Next question is, what is the quality of the recycled water.
Final comment - you used Nebraska as a location - what about all the drought states?
It's always strange to me how many people have an opinion on the produce of farmers. If other products were looked a through the same lens, 90% of all products on Amazon should be removed, Social Media shouldn't exist and Javascript was never used for development.
They varies wildly between different crops. Ideally, farmers in drought prone regions should be choosing crops that don't just dump all the water into the atmosphere (but current economic incentives/excessively cheap industrial water mean this is not happening).
Also, a lot of water evaporates from the soil before it ever gets sucked up by the plants.
It's essential for the united states to be able to feed it's population. Keeping land fertile for farming and all the necessary supply chain intact is a national security issue.
Corn ethanol is a weird carbon subsidy that shouldn't exist.
It's a weird carbon offset for the fuel industry that isn't effective and it diverts huge amounts of farm land away from food crop usage. It ties farms to industry rather than supplying food, binding their profitability to the price of oil far more and that only exists because the US Gov mandates the ethanol blend.
It's supposed to be because it's renewable/sustainable using a biological product, but the industry is heavily dependent on synthetic fertilisers which come from refineries.
There are a great many reasons to get rid of the ethanol mix. Lower food costs being the biggest. Now that EVs are practical the need for trying to whitewash combustion fuel is overbaked.
Careful about that, much of agriculture does not produce human staple food. Production of almonds in semi-arid regions of California does scream "luxury" to me.
I don’t understand how his argument. Lots of those crops go to feed cattle or corn going into ethanol. Those are ok choices (people could eat less meat).
I'm gonna plug a recommendation here based on your comment: if anyone wants to marvel or horrify at the US' water development history, Cadillac Desert is an excellent read, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert .
Downvoted for the truth. Everyone recommending this book now is young because literally everyone who likes to read nonfiction was reading it in the 90s
It's just an emotional witch hunt at this point. I get it, societal implications of AI are scary, but protest _that_ instead of cosplaying like an environmentalist.
The only answer that would appease the general public is zero. If they said it used 100,000 gallons per year, people would be outraged because "number big", despite that being less than the typical US household's usage.
The general public really has no barometer for judging industrial scale numbers. Anything "million" to the general public is interpreted as "infinity"
An argument about factors of 10^-6 of a renewable resource, is not a serious argument.
We have real environmental problems, like excess CO2 in the air and forever-chemicals in our biosphere. The narrative must stay with those material issues and not be diverted by trivia.
We have additional environmental problems and water consumption is only renewable in a global scale not if you look at the local water resources.
Evaporated water becomes drinkable water again but not necessarily in the place it was consumed.
And don’t forget that consumption comes on top of the already existing consumption, so at some point you could reach the point of too much consumption. The straw that broke the camels back. There is a reason for that saying.
The saying usually refers to emotional load, and not physical load. Which is very apt here: datacenter water usage is an emotive issue, but one which is completely meaningless in actual environmental terms.
If the water consumption of a datacenter leads to more consumption than is provided back the environmental problem is real and climate change makes it more likely if rain periods and water ground levels change an glacier and snow periods disappear.
Agricultural consumption is already a problem but raising the consumption doesn’t help.
I don't think the "drinking water consumed by AI" is a given. Proponents and detractors of AI are both making mutually exclusive claims with confidence. I suspect few if any of the people making these claims have the background to interpret them.
Water and power use has implications for the amount of compute a given data center has and that may be regarded as a trade secret... or so the various data center owners and utilities claim.
> The case represented a major test of Oregon public records law. After The Oregonian/OregonLive requested Google’s records last year, The Dalles sued the news organization to prevent the information’s release. It argued Google’s water use was a “trade secret” exempt from Oregon disclosure requirements.
> Updates: Following the settlement reached between The Oregonian and the city of The Dalles, a Google spokesperson told the Associated Press that the tech company would no longer seek to protect its site-level water-use numbers as a trade secret at any of its data centers nationwide. And after the city turned over Google’s water-use data, The Oregonian reported that the tech company’s water use “nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city.”
> ...
> The Oregonian first requested records about Google’s water usage in The Dalles last September. But city officials denied the request submitted by business reporter Mike Rogoway, arguing that the records are “trade secrets” exempt from disclosure under the Oregon Public Records Law.
> The newspaper decided to challenge the city’s denial, asking the district attorney for Wasco County to weigh in. After reviewing the city’s rejection, the district attorney sided with The Oregonian, concluding that the city failed to meet its burden to show that Google’s water usage is a trade secret and ordering the city to disclose the requested records.
> The Google Data Center in Lincoln, named Agate LLC, claimed their electricity usage and water usage were trade secret information, citing Neb. Rev. State §§ 81-1527; 84-712.05 and NAC TITLE 115, CH. 2. In fact, Google did this for all three data centers, including their sites in Omaha and Papillion.
> In an oral ruling delivered during an August 17 hearing, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Ehlke found that the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) acted unlawfully when it denied a public records request seeking unredacted documents related to electrical load projections at Meta’s Beaver Dam data center. The PSC defended its refusal to release the information, claiming it was a trade secret. Judge Ehlke, however, was not convinced. He ruled that the information did not qualify as a trade secret because it lacked independent economic value, and he ordered its release.
1/4 of the cities water use is pretty impressive though the Dalles isn't that big. It is very dry though so I would be concerned about water use as a resident.
Yes, the vast majority to feed animals. Simply replacing meat consumption with plant-based protein sources by a small amount (say 10%) would offset the water usage of even a heavy AI user.
Datacenters don't sprout out of the land by themselves, as opposed to the plants. There were water resources consumed elsewhere that made building this one possible - manufacturing all the chips, metal, raw materials, whatever went into building one. Like we have concept of TCO, you'd probably need something like total electricity/water usage concept that would take into account all that spread into the expected lifetime of the datacenter, to compare apples to apples.
Make sure to do a fair comparison that includes fertilizer production, pesticides, herbicides, farm equipment and machinery, grain drying and all of the other inputs and processes.
isn't this comparison nonsense? When it rains on a farm, the farmer doesn't irrigate. When it rains on a farm, some of the water goes into aquifer. The remaining is runoff. Depending on farming strategy, this may be high in nitrates.
When a data center uses water, it's almost entirely evaporated away in an aeration pond.
So the datacenter uses as much water as 33.6 acres of farmland? And, um, how physically big is the data center? If it's more than 40 acres, it's using less water than what it replaced.
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.
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.
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.)
That’s not true. The AI side can afford more surely, but that doesn’t mean the anti-AI side is broke. Lawmakers are being lobbied, YouTubers are already being paid to make vids, seems unlikely it would stop there.
What makes you so confident? Do you have any proof of this? If so I would love to see it because it would explain some stuff I've come across, but could not place.
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).
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.
Great examples. I understand these concepts as a lay person and I think most others can understand them too and therefore think they should be reported.
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.
Evaporated water stays in the water cycle though. It comes back down as rain, and returns to the water sources that were depleted (assuming these data centers are generally not using underground aquifers, which I think is true).
The issue for most (well, at least those who are informed and not just bandwagoning) is that it raises the prices of utilities, in which case it doesn't really matter that it stays in the water cycle. If your local municipal water authority has to expand operations to keep up with demand, that is going to incur capital costs which will either raise rates or require tax dollars.
While this water usage might be not a big deal in places with abundant water, it could be problematic in some areas of the US.
> 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
Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas fired steam turbine. And one such installation was proposed for this city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.
Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.
> 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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
I've never seen a well intentioned person use this "everything should be allowed or nothing should be allowed" mentality. It's always somebody who knows they're doing something wrong. You know that the value of a golf course or paper mill is not the same to a community as a data center. You know there are so many levels of falseness to this dilemma that most people will not know where to start and will instead shut down.
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
I've been spending some time in Tasmania, Aus for the last few weeks and have been following the local debate regarding 3 data centres Firmus is planning on building here.
While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.
Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.
The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].
When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.
However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.
Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That may be true, but I have a feeling that even a third party audit wouldn't appease you. If they confirm Sam's numbers, you'll claim that they were bribed. So how can we solve this problem? Can we trust government officials? Are there any non-biased organizations that could do the audit?
Honestly, the water usage isn't the real issue - the electricity use during a climate crisis is. It's also a huge climate opportunity, because datacenter growth is basically gluing a giant pipe of financer money straight into datacenter and support buildout, and if we passed laws requiring the new electrical capacity be 100% renewable... They'd still spend the money, they're convinced this is the future so no cost is too high (an assertion I feel confident making because we're literally experimenting with putting datacenters in space right now).
Water use has locally been an issue in places where municipalities were taken advantage of and their local water supply management laws weren't set up to account for a giant consumer to just roll up and start pulling past replenishment rate. But there's nothing about datacenters that demand that be the case; those places were cheap to build in (and why they were cheap to build in should probably be its own graduate political theory thesis / series of fraud and mismanagement investigations and prosecutions).
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.
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 of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi/Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.
I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.
This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).
> But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use
Not even close to a true statement.
EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].
According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.
For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. Robert Moses dam in Niagara Falls does about 2,700MW.
It seems like the size criticism is one of proportionality-of-effect (in various domains such as energy usage, utility costs to citizens, and environmental effects upon water supplies and quality, land usage, noise pollution etc) upon the given locales in which they are proposed to be centralised.
> They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.
Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it's not efficient in terms of time to transport.
> Attacking them for size
I didn't attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don't care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.
> If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
>
Just some napkin maths. The best combined cycle gas powerplant (Nat gas + steam) have an efficiency around 60 %. So 9 GW of electricity requires enough natural gas for 15 GW (9/0.6 = 15). Natural gas is about 10 kWh/m^3, so in 1 hour, we need 15E9/10E3 = 15E6 m^3 of natural gas. In BTU this is 5.118E10 BTU. A year has 8760 hours, 4.483E14 BTU or 4.483E8 MMBTU in a year.
According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56380&src=%E... the average Nat gas residential consumption in USA is around 80 MMBTU. So these 9 GW of electricity for datacenter s represent the average Nat gas consumption of 5.6 million home in USA.
We know that by and large the biggest new proposed datacentres aren't intended to aggregate existing capacity but to add to it. Adding 26GW spread across three datacentres no doubt is more efficient than spreading 26GW across 26 or 260 new datacentres. But anything like 100GW or 400GW of total extra datacentre capacity, in the US alone https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2026/10/02/insid... , is enough of an increase that the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all, and some (I assume) relatively modest efficiency gains from taking datacentre aggregation to the next level surely won't have a decisive impact on that. We're certainly beyond the point where such questions are largely just a problem for the investors (or even for Americans), especially when it turns out that, whoops, the DCs are going to be powered by finite, highly-dispatchable and CO_2-emitting natural gas after all, not baseload nuclear stations.
Meanwhile from a local perspective the fact that a very large datacentre next door is hypothetically aggregating what would have been several other data centres, mostly built elsewhere, is not so reassuring. (Though the other side of that coin is that from the builders' point of view it may be politically easier to get a given amount of capacity built as a few very large plants in places which are less likely or less able to object: regulatory efficiency, distinct from energy efficiency.)
And also conversely, if the mega-DCs (deca-giga-DCs?) really are markedly more efficient, and if they do aggregate lots of new capacity, most especially if they do also end up aggregating existing capacity, that will worsen problems of competition and market concentration in the cloud computing market, at least once the money spigot is turned off again and it's no longer the case that any idiot can get financing for a new datacentre.
> the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all
If there is demand for it, it's "socially justified". We don't live in a command economy, and thankfully, there's not a panel of woke elders deciding what we get to build. One of the great things about capitalism (indeed, the entire purpose of the thing) is that it does a great job of balancing supply to demand.
The decision of whether or not to build one big datacenter, or a billion teeny datacenters is also well solved by competition, and doesn't need our help.
If built out. A single DC of this scale is driving Oracle, a giant company, so bankrupt their bonds have been downgraded to junk status and they're claiming force majeure to get out of paying their debts.
1 GW is about a single nuclear rector of the Zaporizhzhia powerplant in Ukraine. Other nuclear powerplants in Europe have about 600 to 900 MW per reactor. The newest generation have reactor of 1.4 GW. Just to give an order of magnitude. Every time a 1GW data center is built, to have a continuous supply and CO2 free, it would require to build one nuclear reactor. I find this insane.
That's what many data centers look like for a mid/large non-tech company that in-houses their datacenter operations. They're often otherwise a "real" datacenter with UPS, backup generators, multiple tier-1 carriers, chillers, raised floors /w hot/cold aisles, etc.
You see it less now since the shift to the cloud, but in the 00s this stuff was everywhere.
>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.
The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.
You're confusing MW with MWh. Older DCs did indeed consume on the order of 1MW of continuous power, like the one at [0]. The 2012-dated DC at [1] has a redundant 22kW power feed per 42U rack, so that's ~500W per RU - which for most pre-AI servers was plenty.
With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.
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?
In the Nebraska system, the water goes into the municipal waste channels and is treated like any other municipal wastewater, so the chemical additives are handled.
Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.
You understand, the water isn't used up? It's not even used up in agriculture. Even when you drink a glass of water, the water doesn't actually disappear, soon someone else will be drinking it. The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today. No need to panic about someone using water.
The only reason to be concerned is if someone is mixing the water with other chemicals at a rate faster than the natural filtration and then not paying for the treatment to purify the water again. But that is not an issue with data centers. Merely using water is a concern only for people who don't understand how matter is preserved, but a school physics book should dispel those concerns.
That’s not entirely correct. Overall water is preserved but local sources of freshwater can be depleted or contaminated, which raises the cost of water.
Sure the water is still somewhere, but its location is important for future use. US water reservoirs are at problematically low levels already.
> Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.
The linked article talks about >500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It's nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it's such a common thing to do then why isn't it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?
"Recirculating" water isn't thermodynamically the same. Evaporating the water is THE POINT of the system. You can make closed-loop coolers but they use more energy.
It's all contextual. If the energy inputs are carbon-free and local water is scarce, then for that given situation a closed-loop system might make sense. People are building such a thing in Tucson, Arizona right now.
> The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today.
Nope. Plants turn water into oxygen and (the H part of) hydrocarbons, and animals turn those back into water. And after that, the result is different water than the cycle started with.
The same one that is paying for their support for data centers and is shifting as a response [1]. Like I said, if political capital is being spent shifting peoples' stances, how much of a waste is it to know we could move them on this and we chose not to. Generational fumble.
> Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries
This is overstating things.
Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.
You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.
A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.
If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.
> 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.
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.
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.
Tbh this sounds perfectly normal to me. Companies often don't think it's worth defending themselves if theres no actual financial damage, and certainly don't want random employees to be doing it. It can be very frustrating, both for employees who want to defend their reputation and for the public who want the truth, but companies can be extremely conservative about chosing their public relations battles.
Yeah no you're right, if they'd like to keep that a competitive secret, it shouldn't really matter how much resources are being consumed where real humans live, those humans won't be there in the future and aren't shareholders in the company anyway so who cares.
You can assume that any company at a large scale will not want to divulge any information unless absolutely necessary. Doesn't matter if you or I think that it might not need to be secret or might not be competitive. Unless there is both an internal push, a need and a sort of proof dat the information can be released, it will never happen. You'll usually find thing that are simplified or aggregated for PR and marketing, or things that are required for legal reasons, but everything else stays internal.
Google considers pretty much everything in hwops to be a trade secret. The point is to keep the specifics unknown as much as possible from competitors; the public at large's knowledge is just collateral damage in that fight.
It tells them exactly how much they have to invest in hardware buildout to stay competitive with Google in terms of raw compute.
This is right up there with being able to predict a competitor's total manufacturing capacity for the next year because you have hard numbers on their raw material purchase.
It doesn't even have to be competitors their suppliers would love to know the total amount of widgets that they'll be buying. That way they know if they're the single supplier
A friend accidentally told me not just how many servers Google was deploying for Bard, but what they were putting in them and the volume of the scale up.
A competitor with that information might have made a rush on a supply-constrained component market or negotiated longer term pricing agreements.
The strategic advantage, by definition, is something you, as a company, don't know what it is. If you know, then people leaving your company take the information to competition and the it's not strategic nor advantage anymore.
So, given that you don't know what makes your company better then the competition, it's better to hide everything you can so you don't accidentally disclose useful information. God forbid competition discover your own strategic advantage before you do.
And this one in particular is a high-ticket trade secret; it has been for decades, long before the AI push.
Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything."
... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
This was more than a decade ago. Back then, the data center didn't even have public signage because Google was trying to be so secretive. Things have changed significantly since then and a lot of data is now published publicly.
Very few datacenters run by companies of any size, large or small, have signage.
Companies put signs on buildings so you can find them. Signs are important for retailers or offices where people need to find it. This isn't really the case for a data center. Data centers typically have a sign with simply the address of the building on it, so delivery drivers can find it. Any sort of a sign with branding is a waste of money at best, and a security liability at worst.
Even if you aren't worried about intentional security threats to your data center, you don't want the name of your company on it, because people will start showing up at the gate there instead of your primary business location.
Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews. People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.
I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.
>People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.
Others don't like technological progress to be reduced to the speed of bureaucracies who have no compelling incentive to be particularly efficient. Especially when the technology at hand might end up making quite a few of these bureaucracies much less staffed.
The thinking on display in this thread is something like,
"I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."
This was the attitude these leaders took, though. It shouldn’t be downvoted simply for being wrong—it’s wrong in an interesting way.
Lots of folks in Silicon Valley thought they’d be cheered for bypassing bureaucracy. They were wrong and will pay dearly for it, possibly with their wealth and freedom. But it was a commonly-accepted attitude, in part driven by the Bay Area’s obscenely inept bureaucracies around power and building.
> Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews.
Hasn't it been common knowledge for a while -- as in since well before the ai boom -- that those reviews are in practice mostly tools for obstructionism (I don't want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we'll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?
Is that's even half true, I don't think the "unforced" there really applies.
We could also just stop giving bad corporations money. I can assure you it's the thing that they absolutely hate the most and 10x as effective as trying to write legislation.
this works less and less as corporations buy from each other and everybody has things like pensions/401k and investments. there are also many who will buy shit regardless. it's just ignoring the reality of the situation, really.
Companies aren't earning the majority of profit from your average joe buying products anymore. The consumers are investors: Rich assholes with too much money, gamblers, and true believers. It's a lot like how McDonalds true income comes not from consumers but from holding and renting out valuable plots of land.
That's entirely fair and reasonable if you level your complaints about power and water use at everything that uses a lot rather than just data centres.
If you're only saying we need fewer data centres then your argument is against AI, and not in favor of sensible approach to the climate.
In a society of laws you can’t just ignore the ones you don’t like, otherwise it undermines the entire system and suddenly the ones we all generally like/support aren’t being followed either.
Elon musk used his hundreds of billions of dollars to buy a social media platform to push a certain politician, bribed voters, and bought his way in to the government to fire everyone who would investigate his AI business.
You can't just "change laws" when the people building these data centers control the laws.
So the answer is to shrug at environmental regulations and laws protecting the community? I don’t understand how letting Musk and co violate the laws and creating bad outcomes is somehow the superior solution. You seem to be arguing they’ll get what they want no matter what so we should just, what? Do nothing?
If the laws aren’t working we should change them. That’s how this all works. Yes we can debate the efficacy but that’s the system we have and just ignoring laws isn’t viable.
I live in northern va and I can tell you that histeria is about ballooning electric and other bills. vast majority of population is unfortunately “not there” in regards to any unrest about AI
Not saying that increases in power bills aren't caused by ai datacenters at all, but I would like to remind people that there is currently a conflict going on that is impairing 5-50% of the worlds energy supply, which even if we used none of it, still would impact us (LNG exports) and getting people angry at tech is a good distraction for this time of year.
I think there's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
there is definitely more to the story when you are not personally affected by it deeply, then you have the luxury of looking at “deeper meanings” and shit. when you are, shit is quite simple and to the point. I attend every public hearing, community open house and submit shit online (https://www.loudoun.gov/datacenterstandards if you live in the area) and it has absolutely nothing (and never will) to do with some conflict in some shithole place. it is 100% a local issue and it is not only if you have the luxury to not be personally affected by and which gives you additional luxury to dream up “global reasons…”
Is there a well known reason that the US has ruled out building more power plants to meet the increasing demand? This seems like a weird complaint; if it is a problem that this industrial activity uses power, why not ban all industrial activity? Traditionally the response to more demand has been to build more supply.
1. Power plants take a long time to build and large capital investments, typically both public and private dollars. The power demand for the current hyperscaler datacenter trend is happening faster than supply can keep up, guaranteeing the current spike in prices.
2. Most heavy industrial users of power are running stable businesses that are often expected to offset some of the infrastructure costs themselves, making payments over time. Not only have many hyperscalers bent the rules to avoid doing this, even if they did do things the right way, much of the rapid investment is highly leveraged and if a bubble pops, taxpayers would be stuck with the infrastructure bill anyway.
Exactly. It's just like when we used to pay workers a living wage. Well where did all of those jobs go amiright?! Stupid peasants can be so annoying... we're just trying to bring everyone into the grand age of abundance!
Totally not a new robber baron era at all. That's just fake news guys.
Kansas is a rural state that survives because of government agricultural subsidies as well as costly boondoggles such as ethanol that everyone else has to pay for. Complaining about government subsidies also going to other people is a bit rich.
Is it? Can you give me a link to a video that shows the issue in a straightforward manner?
Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.
I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).
I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
Sound meter shows "only" ~60 db, but that constant audible hum is, IMO, the data center actually assaulting those residents and apparently doing so 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
If someone who lived near that place set fire to the data center and I ended up on the jury and heard these recordings I would do everything in my power to nullify because that seems like a completely justified response to me in the face of the company running the data center not shutting down until the problem is fully fixed.
This is so much worse than I was expecting. You'd pretty much have to move out, and your property would be worthless for anything but industrial use at that point.
Is this something that happens by accident in the sense that the decision makers didn't know how it would sound or is there actually someone in a room at some point going "fuck it".
I mean, the latest ones are massive. Climate concerns aside, data centers don’t make great neighbors. They are never a net positive for the local community.
>They are never a net positive for the local community
Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.
The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.
The datacenter companies are forcing local governments to sign NDAs so they can't discuss the details with other areas, leading to them being pressured in to taking horrible deals that are a net negative for the area without.
They force these NDAs so people can't collaborate and see what a horrible deal they are getting.
Two things can be true at the same time. Data centers are fundamentally extractive. They take resources in terms of space, electricity and water and make someone far away richer. They have almost no positive impact on their local communities beyond the initial build out jobs, and then after that they are huge windowless boxes that provide almost no jobs (and in the future, as they are more and more automated, they really will provide no jobs). And their negative impacts are already here, e.g. Maryland utility customers saw a huge increase in their electric bills due to data center build out.
At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology that its most significant leaders say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.
So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
There is no hysteria. We don't want to subsidise your lifestyle and to have pollution you produce dumped in our rural parts. We don't want it and it does not benefit us. Have all datacenters you want in your backyard.
More generally, societal fatigue with tech culture overtaking everything, subsuming power from every other corner. Surveillance, the Zuck and Elon, COVID-19, immorality, Luigi Mangione and Elizabeth Holmes, a glut of cat videos and jackal-eared Wikipe-tans, delinquency of minors, 5G and everything else that technology can share some blame for, now focused on their visible manifestations.
The trouble is, once a danger becomes visible and ubiquitous, you’ve already lost. Fighting “A.I. Data Centres” is literally quixotic. If you look up “quixotic” in the Spanish Wikipedia, there is a photo of a chivalrous knight jousting with Nvidia’s CEO.
My biggest problem with the data centers getting built around me are that they are building new natural gas power plants to power them, that will be greenhouse gases and decrease local air quality. I would be a lot more ok with it if they were using wind or solar. And maybe built it somewhere that didn't have a water shortage.
One being built near me is being built on public lands that are being sold off for datacenters. That's an additional pretty big negative (especially since the specific land was set apart as a wildlife habitat.)
I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
If we compare 2025 to 0025, a truly remarkable number of problems have been solved by, effectively, intelligent people doing research. While it is impossible that AI will fix everything it is plausible it will fix most things since it looks like it'll be able to do research faster, better and with a higher quality than humans as well as more effectively communicate the results to the masses.
Yet Altman and Amadeo are talking how AI can kill us. So either it solves some problems it creates or kills off humanity... This is a gambling addict level rationalisation of betting your house to win it all at once.
The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
The second problem is that the CO2 is diluted in the atmosphere. Consider the amount of energy needed to remove salt from ocean water, it's not simple.
It just takes a lot of energy to that what was done by burning fossils in the first place.
> The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
This is only a problem if AI won't develop cheap carbon neutral energy sources, like fusion or advanced fission, or more efficient solar with cheap grid-scale batteries.
There are many practical substances that can absorb CO2, and "regenerating" them may not be necessary (the resulting carbonate compounds can be useful without releasing the carbon) or as energy-intensive as the original reaction. This has been an active field of research for over a quarter of a century.
there needs to be some form of energy input to analyse the co2 to another molecule. the logical input would be the sun. but why not use the sun directly via solar instead of going the long way over fossils?!
There are non-fossil sources of energy, though. Even without a major discovery like fusion power, we could in theory stop the progress of global warming at any time by building a lot of fission powerplants powering direct carbon capture.
We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.
> We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.
Well, it was true in the 90s, and it's still true today. Once climate change becomes important enough (that is, causing actual significant damage to important, wealthy countries), it takes just one such country to start a stratospheric aerosol injection project, or, if space launch costs become low enough, put a sunshade between Earth and the Sun. Such solutions have their own risks, of course. But if climate change really becomes bad, they will be tried. And from what I have read, they have a good change of succeeding.
It will still be true another 30 years from now perhaps, but nobody who has the actual funds to spend seems to care. If the world was actually taking it seriously, it would be dealt with like the ozone hole was. Instead, we're still debating whether it's real, and if it's real whether it's important, and if it's important whether it is more important than - I don't know - pretty much anything else.
What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
> What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
They are still not melting enough. Most of the negative consequences of current summer heatwaves can be pretty much solved by installing US-style ubiquitous air conditioning.
Yup, as I said. Same as rich people do everywhere, they don't have to worry, they won't run out of water or power, if things get too hot where they are they'll just move somewhere nicer. They have the money and zero incentive to solve the actual problem.
An extremely wealthy acquaintance in my local circle is happy to endlessly debate whether climate change is ACTUALLY real or just scientists carving out job security, while flying out for monthly ski holidays wherever there's nice snow in the world when it gets a bit muggy at home.
It is already causing actual significant damage to important wealthy countries. Just not in a way that directly impacts the people with the means to make a significant impact.
Climate change is a lot less important when you are rich enough that it doesn't impact you personally, and when you don't care about what the world looks like after you die.
Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that's going to impact the company's profitability, but by then your stock options will have already vested - so that's a problem for someone else!
Google, at least, purchases 100% of its electricity from renewable sources. This doesn't mean that they have renewables feeding directly into all their datacenters at all times -- but for every kWh they consume, they purchase a kWh of renewable energy somewhere and add it to the grid.
Do they shutdown when there is no renewable power available? I doubt they have enough battery capacity... The whole per unit buying is misleading. In the moment is what really matters. Not to forget them paying for renewable power can move others to non-renewable sources...
What it means is that they only pay for generation that's renewable and the energy company assures them by contract that they'll only be paying for renewables.
The rest of us, who might be on green tariffs usually get a commitment that on average almost all our energy comes from renewables. When supply is short then I'm the one who's paying for gas generation rather than the company who has committed to greenwashing. But that also drives investment in renewable generation, in the UK renewables have gone from 2% of power generation in 1991 to around 50% now.
No, but they cover their fossil fuel energy usage by entering into PPAs [1] for new clean energy projects that get added to the grid. This allows renewable projects that would otherwise not have been economical to finance to get built. This is additional renewable capacity that that goes into the energy mix. It moves others onto renewable sources, often without them even knowing it.
From a climate change perspective, what happens at one particular moment doesn't matter -- it's CO2 emissions globally over time that do.
And you think they wouldn't directly benefit from solar power?
What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.
Directly? No. Indirectly? Of course they do. Everyone does.
Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.
NIMBYism isn't rational, it's a manifestation of fear of change, even if they past state of affairs was worse than the future one. I live in a city where the anti-datacentre campaign isn't about some pleasant locale, but a disused toxic industrial land in a steel-mill complex over half a km away from any actual homes.
They can make all objections or decisions they want on their own private property. It seems people have too much levers to pull to control what others can do with their property.
A lot of people have dumb opinions grounded in ill-thought-out ideas like "natural cornfields are morally superior to human-built infrastructure buildings" or "solar power is a Democratic party conspiracy". In general it should be easier for property owners with skin in the game to make good land use decisions to make them without having to need small-d-democratic opposition from locals with bad incentices and values.
Anyone with kids probably should be aware of Mercury - it's an important guideline during pregnancy, all the mercury in fish. I don't have kids, so I am not sure if the doctors explain how all the mercury got into the fish...
Well, in the post above, isn’t it? Mind you, I was simply reacting to your general reasoning with some of my own, so bit of a misdirected question if not rhetorical...
Now where's the data for the popular claim (which as you conceded is not what you just posted, where it's specifically the overall burden that is too big)? I'm amenable even for a complex mix of cases, where some of the local impact is too much. Would be good to know what share of it is true, even if only a sliver. Although this wouldn't change the bullshit conclusion.
There's also a lot of folks out there with no sense of scale getting "dihydrogen-monoxieded" by scaremongering tactics like measuring power consumption in number of atomic bombs.
It's different issues in different places, and when built/operated by different companies. Global companies that put their name on the facility will be more careful of optics than a PE firm that hides behind shell companies.
The disparity is that older data centers were for storing and serving data. They have a lot of bandwidth and storage, but aren't consuming much energy. Plus, they are there to provide quicker access to data, to provide a service to actual people.
New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.
These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.
With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
I gave this half an hour video the first 10 minutes. He
- explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)
- played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient
- showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas
- did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record
- did not disclose the actual dB SPL figures measured
- kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.
If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research, at least in this context.
I would have hoped people would have been inoculated against the 'infrasound is harmful' nonsense when it was used as a complaint against wind turbines.
This is not really the same thing. When people are discussing the dB output of things like data centers, it's a constant volume. While your kids may be loud, they are not outputting this volume 24/7 without rest. (If they are, consider enrolling them in Opera singing lessons.)
And furthermore, the actual acoustical impact is very different from what is measurable or what might cause physical harm.
I've spent enough time on city council noise ordnance boards and understand enough about acoustics to say that the professional sound system I own would certainly be audible and annoying to my neighbors half a kilometer away even if it were not appreciably above the noise floor of the surrounding environment.
Folks are great a signal detection and it's very annoying to them to be able to detect an unwanted bass drum or similar, which they can do at pretty long distances. Even distributed noise is still often noticeable to people.
For instance, I live in the literal middle of nowhere and I still encounter real noise pollution from gas well heads and gas processing plants that are several kilometers from my home.
Yea, and if you go beyond people, animals are much more receptive. It's one thing to have a big building nearby that's sort of annoying, it's another thing when that building means all your local wildlife leaves. No birds singing, deer, raccoons, opossums gone, etc.
Look at your local megascale datacenter on Google Maps satellite view. How many parking spots does it have? How many of those parking spots are occupied? Are you seeing hundreds of cars, or is it just the mandatory pair of security guards and maybe a remote hands technician or three?
The tax breaks are well-established in the media, see for example [0].
The taxable income is generated remotely from the location of the physical data centre.
That’s the root of the problem.
Even if the data centre raises billions in revenue and pays billions in taxes, that isn’t paid to any government entity close to where the building is.
The locals get replaced by machines, the revenue is pocketed far away.
It’s the equivalent of big mining companies “investing” into mine automation in some developing country. The locals do not benefit!
Yeah I am going to be honest if Google was a Dutch company they would bulldoze houses for them. They do it for ASML. But it is an American company and nobody likes them. The Netherlands, for all it's faults, is still too dignified to become a US colony.
It comes in about 0.2-0.3 people per MW, but as the size rises the number of people per MW reduces.
So, a 100MW DC will have about 20-30 people and a 1GW campus will be 200-300 people.
Those numbers can be boosted if the site has a significant non-operational support staff such as security and cleaning. But a significant part of security us heavily automated, to the point where when Meta had a major network failure they couldn't get on-call support staff into the facilities to fix the issue because the security doors were linked to the main network.
You can’t collect tax revenue by giving away tax breaks worth almost the entirety of the taxes that would otherwise be collected. This is particularly common in the the gulf south - see Louisiana with Hyperion, which also has been an absolute disaster of a construction project (deaths, school can’t operate, all kinds of violations and damage) and is estimated to produce double digit jobs.
>For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW.
This is always kind of funny to me. How's an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?
How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed "data" center?
Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they'd like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.
Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can't decide if it's zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I'd be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can't be purely about power consumption.
>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?
What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because you aren't receiving the benefits is naive. No one's doing all this for free.
>If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We've been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?
You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?
And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.
Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you're not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.
>How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.
Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.
This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.
I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].
Thank you. This seems a good start to a desperately needed credible "externalities report" to ground political and economic discussion.
The flood of anecdotal thumping seems to distract and undermine deliberation. The sad lack of peer reviewed data and impact analysis hinders thoughtful policymaking.
> At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
This is absolutely false. Those are the noise levels _inside_ the facilities. Noise attenuates by inverse-square law by distance. 90dB at 100 meters means 116dB at 5 meters distance... That's industrial alarms level of noise and would never fly in a residential area.
Having worked in data center HVAC for a while I can confidently say you would only expect this noise from a pump room. Not even the air handlers or evaporators on the roof will be this loud
Extra zero. Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB. Even traditional server facilities can hit 80-90dB inside. I've read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn't fly.
> I've read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn't fly.
So, first of all, I agree, that's still top much. But I think it's important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).
I absolutely believe that there's leftover noise around the facilities, too, specially low-frequency humming for electrical equipment, but I have yet to see _actual_ reporting demonstrating newer AI-centered datacenters produce even near the amount of noise OP was claiming.
> Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB.
That would mean 130dB of noise inside the facility, which sounds (pun intended) impossible to me, no matter how bad the acoustic planning is.
edit: just understood what "Extra zero" meant. The original comment before being edited said 100m and that's what I was quoting.
as someone who has driven by Google data centers in Iowa and Facebook in Oregon, I can report you that I can’t hear anything from them from the roadside.
That makes sense, indeed. I've yet to see one of these new datacenters, but I've recently visited a hyperscaler's datacenter and most of the noise did seem to come from the outside ventilation.
I still heard almost nothing ~20m from it, but neither I (nor the company who built it) knew what kinds of workloads ran there and I suspect it was mostly traditional workloads.
> So, first of all, I agree, that's still top much. But I think it's important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).
For someone who knows enough to point out that dB is logarithmic, you seemed to have neglected the fact that sound is inverse-square for distance? Unless these neighbors are _literally_ located 100m outside the data center?
No. They point out that 60dB is 1000 less than 90dB, which is true. In order to make that point they gloss over the fact that one measurement was taken at 100m (90dB) and another (much lower) at whatever distance the neighbors are at. Both measurements can be true (while the comment suggests that the 90dB is false).
dB should generally be expressed at what distance it was measured, and you'll see this done all over the place.
In this case, you'd reach 70dB at about 1km from the 90dB at 100m source, assuming a spherical cow, but they could also be completely different datacenters.
I haven't really glossed over that fact, although nothing you've said here is factually wrong.
OP was talking about datacenters in residential areas and quoted the 90db @ 100m value, which indeed is 70dB @ 1km distance, which is absolutely absurd and would make it impossible to live nearby. That's the original comment I've answered.
Then, OP edited the post and said it was 90dB @ 10m, which means 50dB @ 1000m, an okayish value (depending on the type and duration of the noise), but that's not a distance we were talking about before.
I know datacenters in my city that are less than 500m from residential zoning (I should note I'm not in the US and this is not a new datacenter), so I didn't think that the original (distance) measurement sounded absurd, that's why I pointed out how much the (noise) measurement seemed to be out-of-scale.
Anyways, I think OP's measures where just completely made up or misremembered, because I'm any way I've framed the data (and the edited data), it doesn't match my personal observations around the few datacenters I've been to nor the data that's been released.
I did agree about the possibility of low-frequency noises being a huge nuisance, though, as those types of noises feel much worse than random noises at random intervals at higher dB.
Inverse square law is proportional, so the distance isn't fixed. It depends on the base sphere of the original measurement, which can be quite large. If the size of the data center property is 100m and the flux at the property line is 70dB, it's only 1/4'd at a doubling of the radius, 50m away. So that only attenuates to ~65dB.
It's also not a uniform medium. Sound gets reflected by houses, the ground, resonance, so it can constructively interfere and have a extra few times the expected amplitude. This can make the sound quaver and become really annoying, too.
Bright lighting is typically an artifact of the commercial property insurance policy in effect (namely, "Protective Safeguards"). It's asking you to demonstrate that you've done enough to create a barrier towards theft/loss.
It doesn't have to be really bright lighting but that's the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter's request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.
Doesn't matter to Bob, who lives across the road from the datacenter and has an artificial sun outside his bedroom 24/7 and wants to burn the thing to the ground.
I live very near to two industrial facilities, but they deal with agricultural products instead of high-value GPU farms. They've got some lights outside and they're not bothersome.
It's been my experience that living urban means black out curtains and ear plugs are a must. Sub damaging levels, a continual hum is better than spiky sounds like sirens, loud exhausts, and people thinking fireworks are cool beyond July 4th.
Datacenters don't (usually) smell of liquid cowshit, which is NOT AT ALL what you think it would smell like if you've only ever had the pleasure of cowpies.
100% and if you've never had the experience you really can't properly conceive of how bad the smell is. It's not just stinky as in someone blowing up the bathroom, it's a smell so thick in the air that it can make you want to vomit and will likely give you headaches from the methane or other gasses involved. Depending on how it's being handled e.g. if they spray it on a field they use to grow feed for the cattle you can wind up dealing with levels that feel unsafe for weeks out of the year.
The noise issue kinda needs to be treated separately to the other issues imo. As I understand it the loud part is the gas turbine generators that some datacenters run, so while it’s associated, it’s not strictly a datacenter thing.
"Rechnen" is short for the now obsolete "rechenen", which seems to be where the words "Rechenzentrum" and "Rechenaufgabe" came from. It's a word that predates what we call computers today, too.
A "Rechenzentrum" was a place where lots and lots of people were sitting down crunching numbers with pen on paper. This job also existed in the USA, where originally "computer" was the job title of someone working in such a computer center.
But then electronic computers became better at crunching numbers than human computers, so the job became obsolete. The word stayed around, but the meaning changed. Same way we dial phone numbers despite phones no longer having dials. We also still hang up the phone, despite there being nothing to hang the phone on anymore.
I sometimes forget the meaning of data in English. In my language, a computer is a «data machine», so a «data center» is obviously just a center of computing, which would have fit.
> At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
> Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
I'd also question whether that is inside or outside. We already have regulations that govern the acceptable noise levels around commercial and industrial properties so I highly doubt that a datacenter is going to have an exception.
The only case that would match for 90dB anywhere outside a datacenter are abominations like the xAI one with ton of barely-legal to straight out illegal (before recent rule change) gas turbines providing power, which is an issue downstream from US grid being utter shit
I can’t actually understand the incapacity of the richest country on the world to build infrastructure. Why would people be fighting over resources like that when you can just build a hell lot of wind, solar and gas plants along with batteries and whatnot.
From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.
Because the US president considers solar and wind to be a woke scam, and no company wants to build legacy coal plants because it's a terrible investment at this point. So the datacenters are just building their own gas plants next to the buildings causing all of the noise and air pollution people are mad about.
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.
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.
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.
I guess it has to be said: it is not guaranteed that the water rains in the "right" spots for it to be useful freshwater again anymore. Dumb example: maybe the wind currents mean that the water simply comes back down downstream.
One shouldn't assume that evaporated water comes back into the system in the place you want it to. Water management orgs try to reduce loss from evaporation for a reason!
OK sure but this is like defense in depth. It's a negligible amount of water, most of it doesn't evaporate, and most of what does rains somewhere it's useful anyway. The actual damage here is microscopic.
You're literally on a thread just a comment or two from the water cost of producing ethanol. Why are you still talking about data center water evaporation? This is morally equivalent to worrying about the water consumption of Slip-N-Slides. Everything is a rounding error compared to agricultural misuse of water.
i'm guessing it means that when datacenter gets too hot (maybe load, maybe climate, or maybe a combination), they may use more evaporative or other methods to help cool. e.g. a turbo mode for cooling that uses more water, but isn't required at all times.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
Tech companies are bundling AI into their base subscriptions and force feeding it to consumers, so I doubt the metrics they are reporting to their shareholders represent real demand or value.
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.
Within the amount of water lost by a near-median-population nation, perhaps. Not within the amount of water used productively by a near-median-population.
if you look at household water consumption, most places in north america treat their water and return it to a freshwater source. you can scale cities very wide and water use might go up, but the consumption rate is actually low. more depending on how much people water their lawns.
farms on the other hand 'spray water on the ground' but it actually removes the water from the freshwater source and needs to be replenished.
leaks is water loss/consumption. human activity is no guarantee. leak in this case is still bad.
The freshwater source might be an aquifer so staying in the ground isn't a loss to the local water supply, though it may be a loss in regards to effort to move and treat it.
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.
$87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill.
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
Do you think people look at big facilities and calculate that they're spending whatever times the medium wage on a crucial service and get mad about it?
Converting things into median wages is a way to put them into scale. They spent this many wages for construction, they spend this many on supplies, they sell this many in product, they hire this many people to work there. If anyone thinks its bad for anything a company buys to exceed a median wage, that's a very silly expectation and I wonder where they got it.
Condensing the steam back into water would undo the cooling power, so yes. Massively less efficient. Negative efficiency, as required by thermodynamics.
Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
Evaporating a gram of water is 2260 joules. Evaporating 20 gallons per minute, 1/3 of a gallon per second, gets rid of around 3 megawatts of heat.
If you had to use heat pumps to move all that out of the water, you'd have to spend about a million dollars on their electricity. If you're somewhere that you can use unassisted radiators all year, great. If you need to force the heat out part of the year, that easily gets worse than boiling off water.
Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
No, it's just that people notice when they're being asked to concern themselves with numbers this far to the right of the decimal point. It's not just that almonds are bad. It's that they're vastly, heroically worse than data centers, so much so that optimizing water usage at data centers is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic.
If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
> But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
you've hit the silent nail on the head.
The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).
If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?
It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.
None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the talk about the water consumption is a red herring intentionally spread by the PR machines of these companies because it's it reframes the debate around an aspect of the issue that is ultimately irrelevant and distracts from ones that are more important like carbon emissions, pollution, electrical/gas price spikes due to induced scarcity and ultimately how these mega projects have little benefit for the people who will experience all the negative consequences of them.
Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.
That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure, our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things, and people collectively lacks the ability to think and talk about these things.
So the best we can do is inconsequential conversation about water usage.
Sorry if you think 280 household of water is not a lot and if the facts don't help your cause.
For a small locality it is a real amount of water. And if there's a draining reservoir, then that's _even more_ water being pulled out of a reservoir.
The almond discussion is tiring as well. We're not growing almonds in most of the world. The water in Montana isn't the water in Cali as well.
If the facts aren't on your side on a specific issue, at least have the courage to accept it.
> I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
People protest golf course water usage. Water usage problems in Cali are not as big of a concern to people in Montana than water usage in Montana.
And of course there are people who think that the added buildout of data centers _for AI usage_ (people acting like "oh these data centers are just from everything", let's not kid ourselves what the source of the demand is) is a net negative. People don't think that about food.
Personally I think we shouldn't be setting up massive farms in a desert (and perhaps just figure out how to make society work in a way where during winter we accept having less fresh veggies available) either.
Data center defenders need to get better talking points, cuz they sound very silly (perhaps as silly as the arguments heard on the other side!)
Should I start running through the list of industries that use more water than datacenters?
Montana exports tons of petroleum products and beef. Should I illustrate how those industries also uses orders of magnitude more water than datacenters?
In fact, I would be impressed if you could come up with a single locale where a datacenter would be the primary water consumer. Even top 3 would be kind of impressive.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say other than "datacenters use water and I don't like it, and yeah those other industires in the area use 10-100x more, but like, I don't like datascneters so we need to focus on that"
I think the real snag is that average people have absolutely -zero- concept of how much water industry uses. Your local recycling plant washes all that dirty plastic you throw in the recycling to the tune of thousands of gallons an hour. And you're learning this right now for the first time in your life. But sure, datacenters running water through metal pipes, five alarm crisis here
What the water figures show is that water usage is not the problem of these data centers. It's a drop in the bucket, literally. Yet another way to see it is that given the average weather in Lincoln, NE (29 inches of rain annually) it rains 480 million gallons annually on the 600 acres campus that Google's data center is located on. So it would be possible to collect only 3% of this rainwater, and it would be enough to cover all their water needs. Water, at the local scale of this campus or city, is an infinitely renewable resource.
Other issues than water are far worse, like pollution associated with the manufacturing and running of all the data center gear. Water is not the issue.
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")?
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".
Because hedge funds are going to use those numbers to get better estimates of their business and revenues and use that in their forecasting which means Google loses in the stock market.
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.
> 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.
I think that's true, but also is the corruption of allowing works going without enough preparation.
If I remember correctly there are a considerable number of cases where habitants said they would have increased price in their bills or some even saying that their supply will be cut short or completely.
And this is not even considering other problems such as noise, pollution, etc
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.
No, it’s that if there’s nothing to hide, then they shouldn’t jump through so many hoops to avoid basic industrial reporting requirements.
It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.
If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.
I'm commenting here about the water figure. Are you talking about something else? Because the impact of that amount of water usage is knowable regardless of the corporate structure of the data center.
Literally every movie ever made was made by an LLC created specifically to make that movie. This is not some nefarious thing. It’s common business practice in any number of industries
> Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
none of these are reason for the country not to demand transparent data for monitoring.
Being able to monitor things properly has high societal value - it prevents fraud (more data being visible makes it harder to fake). It prevents skirting regulations, and makes it easier for competitors to sniff out high margin opportunities (which serves to break monopolies in some sense).
Not to mention that statistics collected could have value in aggregate in research sometime in the future.
Like auditing and accounting, the country should mandate transparent data reporting of utilities usage for all industries.
I don't understand your question. I'm commenting on the figures we know from this report. I don't have to work out the motives behind them to evaluate whether they're material (they are not).
Lincoln data center "comes online" in 2026 (info from Google). These are early, non-mature operating numbers. I'm disappointed this wasn't made more clear in the story and, of course, most of the comments here don't understand the context.
You're assuming they're hiding the numbers because they think they seem bad in the discussions about data centers using too much water. The cover up is likely motivated much differently, and I would bet that doesn't really care about people complaining about waiter usage.
Perhaps not a meaningful amount at a national/worldwide scale. However, an individual datacentre consuming that amount at a local/regional scale could be more impactful.
So you’re limiting the scope of your analysis to this report only? Where does it mention water usage by housing built in Austin over the past two years?
You’re comfortable making those comparisons and concluding how significant the water usage is but you’re unwilling to check the context of the data in the report? Not sure I follow.
Did you stop reading the article at the first data center?
"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." (emphasis mine)
Do you recall reading many articles about the water usage calamity 70,000 new houses constitute?
The comparand here isn't "all the houses in Austin". It's "the number of houses Austin has added in the last 2 years alone". And it's vastly larger than the data center usage number we're discussing.
Yeah, though it says right below that 6 data centers report using 750MG, which is weird cause each of them would average 125MG, so 10 times more than the 13MG reported above.
At what point does it become significant? I’d think 200 olympic swimming pool worth of water taken out of the local ecology would have some impact. I guess it depends on the region.
The article doesnt say though if all the water ends up evaporated.
Read TFA, that is just the usage of the smallest data enter in NE, across NE their water usage is ~50x that, and that’s just Nebraska, not exactly a hub for data centers
This article seems to focus on one of the less interesting in terms of water usage data centers (for most of us non-locals) because the paper is from Lincoln and that data center is in Lincoln.
The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon.
Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one.
Update: in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient. That would be a nice thing for some journalist to research...
Update 2: it seems that Google uses water-evaporation cooling in regions that they don't consider water-stressed. Here's a not-so-great reference (scroll down if the text-fragment link doesn't work): https://www.axios.com/2026/06/03/google-pushes-water-standar...
I lived in a town that had two lakes. No water problems for decades. Two year drought brought the lakes down about 30 feet each, so it looked a little bit like Lake Mead. Water rationing in the second year, maybe the tail end of the first, I no longer recall. Brown lawns everywhere
The city finally got permission from the state and the Army Corps to divert water from a nearby river, but only when the river was at a relatively high rate of flow. So functionally what happened was that once the drought broke they were able to refill the lakes faster, and top them up during storms in wet/dry cycles.
Every place is going to have higher and higher odds of becoming water-stressed over the next three decades. Some places more than others. Will the data centers shut down in those situations?
You might think that using 5% of the municipal water supply isn't much but it's a significant fraction of what austerity measures would be able to conserve to retain water through a prolonged drought. In that situation holding water a few extra months until the rains return is the goal.
Let’s. You should know better than that by now. Rural states spend more tax dollars than they bring in. A lot of that is down to highways being really fucking expensive and making them go near the back of beyond more so.
Cities are more efficient and large enough to sustain culture.
People shouldn't be latching onto side effect costs of AI data centers like water or energy use, it seems like an abstraction layer above the core complaint. If we don't want AI, or LLMs, or data centers that should be the complaint. Once it is abstracted to water use or similar it opens the door for data to show the actual water use is comparatively small.
Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
I agree with your first point but not the analogy. Climate change is causally related to carbon emissions; if we had 100% carbon-free energy, there would be no concern with waste beyond inefficiency. Data centers can increase electricity/water prices, but it's not a linear relationship like climate change. Prices can stay constant or even go down if we increase supply by building more infrastructure, or decrease demand by limiting how much non-residential buildings can pull from the network. But yes, the conversation about utilities is ultimately more of a proxy for political frustration. If data centers became 10x more efficient, the same people would find something new to complain about because they're fundamentally against the technology itself.
I'm not actually sure where you land on climate change being causally linked.
Don't get me wrong, I think carbon emissions matter but primarily because we should simply do better if we can. But I've never found a study that proves causation, at best its correlation shown primarily through modeling.
That doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it does mean that reducing carbon specifically isn't guaranteed to reduce or reverse climate change.
Surely you must agree thst such a complex system as the global climate can't be driven by a single factor, or a single element on the periodic table.
You can always have a conversation with AI about it. Relevant topics: physics of the enhanced greenhouse effect, IPCC methodology on attributing global warming to human activities, transient climate response to cumulative CO2 emissions.
Yes, those are all well researched and well understood concepts based on a large body of modelling studies. Both can be true at the same time, and just because the data can only support correlation doesn't mean its irrelevant or not useful, it simply means we can't extrapolate to an argument of causation.
I'm not sure what you mean by "correlation" in this context. The things I mentioned are strong evidence of causation. CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming by well-understood physical proceses, and human activities account for almost all of the warming above pre-industrial levels. In fact, the net amount of warming undercounts how much we have caused because we have also released aerosols into the atmosphere which cause cooling.
As I said, have a conversation with a top AI model and try to convince it that there is no evidence of causation between CO2 and climate change. AI is better than me or any other human at pushing back and presenting the right arguments and evidence for a specific line of questioning.
When laws are unjust, resistance is duty. And you usually have to come at them sideways, to delay while the wheels of justice slowly grind toward repeal.
Legislation gets easier once public opinion has turned against an idea or a company. But it takes a while to build that up.
I think I may agree with you here, but in this context can't you add more details? Your comment here is pretty high level and not specific to this topic or how we might go about trying to handle it.
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.
You are overlooking scale and pace. No one is trying to build more steel mills in the next 3 or 4 years than have been built over the entire history of the steel mill industry so far, with each new steel mill using around an order of magnitude more energy in the same space than steel mills built a few years ago.
I'm not against local governments setting zoning laws and regulations if they're concerned about the pace of growth. Personally, I'm not concerned because I think we can and should invest in infrastructure to keep up with demand. This will benefit all industries, not just AI. My point is that I suspect (I'll admit that I haven't done any research on this) that people wouldn't be against facilities with the exact same footprint if they didn't carry the label "data center" and this is primarily driven by a backlash against AI rather than the resource use itself. In that sense, they're trying to rebrand a political/culture war issue as a zoning or utility issue.
After Prohibition was repealed, we didn't outlaw public drinking, but we did outlaw public drunkenness. There's only about a factor of 2-3 between the legal and the illegal activity. A fairly narrow margin between acceptable and excess, if you ask me. But it's not unique in that regard. We have the same kind of rules for interest rates, for instance. We accept this much, but not a larger amount.
Tonto, dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.
I am not really aware of the laws around walking down a public sidewalk with a beer in hand. It is certainly gauche but a done-thing to sit at a bus stop and have a Fireball or two.
However, any drinking establishment that serves alcohol will stop you at the door and won't permit anyone to carry drinks outside of their premises. That's a strict thing. My apartment community bans drinking in walkways and stairwells, which was probably done more by non-residents than my neighbors. So there are a lot of bans on public drinking, even if it is not blanket-outlawed.
A couple of major developments at the shopping mall, though: traditionally all American movie theaters were dry, but that rule has been relaxed, and even the major chains are serving alcohol now. At the mall there has been instituted a "sip & stroll" policy, where designated bars can serve you a plastic cup, and you can roam around the mall with drink-in-hand, as long as you observe the borders of it, where you can't walk into the parking lot or off-premises with your booze.
In general, I have seen many liquor-related laws be relaxed and lightened across my county and state. It seems that there's a general lack of will to crack down on the demand-side, when there is lots and lots of profit to be had on the healthcare-side, where you will get a diagnosis and medication and treatment, whether that is IOP or in-patient, so why not encourage more drinkers to overindulge? Broken window fallacy FTW!
tl;dr details vary by state and municipality, but with very few exceptions you can't walk around a random town drinking fireball. Or, well, you can as long as you don't get caught.
I've seen what you're talking about though. It seems like the big trend for millenials has been "<blank> but with booze." Barcades. Sip & stroll at malls. Booze in movie theaters. Paint & Sip. The microbrewery craze that's partly just "bars but make them fancy"
If you really want to get thrown for a loop, go read up about the Tavern League. One of the most powerful lobbies in Wisconsin state government is a massive cartel of... bars.
These new proposals, which have been suspiciously hidden under NDA’s, misdirection, etc. are ENORMOUS. And the local permitting in my area has data centers categorized as “light industrial”, and thus passed a 1-year moratorium to revisit the code. I am fully aware of smaller data centers along the highway I drive every day with no issue, and as such I do not consider myself crazy.
But are the NDAs new, or were you manipulated into caring about them this time and not the 1000's of other times it's happened (across various industries)
It's helpful when journos put things in terms the layman can relate to.
I had no idea what 13 million gallons of water was until they pointed out it was like when I filled up my olympic swimming pool 20 times. That was a slow summer.
Given the pressure construed on resources, why not use personal or household usage averages?
Maybe ~450 people-years doesn't have the same impact as Olympic pools.
As soon as I saw the headline I knew they’d use Olympic swimming pools as the comparison point, as this is seemingly the international unit of volume for journalism
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.
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.
He's done just terrible things, the accusations are true. No one wants to associate with him because of all the bad things he's done. Everyone knows he's a liar, and anyone asking for evidence of it is a perfidious pro-AI ideologue.
> 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.
Yea, that stuck out to me more than the resource usage.
Id find it difficult to believe that these companies are giving that much money in free loans to the government the way a retail worker estimating their taxes and getting a refund of a few hundred to thousand a year does.
Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Nebraska had a unexpected 86 million dollar gap in tax revenues collected last year[1] and these tax 3 tax breaks on their own account for 130% of that
> Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Given the numbers I've seen for tax breaks for other big construction projects (malls, factories, etc), I wouldn't be surprised if the state ends up in the red on datacentres. It's not all that uncommon for the state to offset project cost 100% on the promise of job creation.
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.
you can say something like data centers are using as much electricity as if 33% new people started living in Nebraska. they are like our new neighbors. A new county of benevolent super-smart scientists in a data center.
I understood your point when I read it, and it didn't bother me. But the term inadvertently triggers a different hot-button issue in people's minds, so I think a clearer term might have been "marginal population increase".
The reason I dislike this is data centers aren’t houses, they are industry. Industry and farms takes up more power and water than some peoples houses, because your house doesn’t need to create the power and food and stuff you need to survive.
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.
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.
Depends on where it's coming from and who else needs water. If the water supply being drawn from was collected from rainwater initially and there's still enough for local residents to also have water, then sure, it's probably sustainable. But if the water is coming from an underground aquifer and there's otherwise not enough rain in the region to go around then it's a finite resource.
> It's gonna come back down as rain and refill wherever datacenter took it from
It's going to come back down as rain, yes, but there is no guarantee it will come down in the place you need it. Fairly minor variations in surface temperatures and evaporation can have a large effect on local rainfall.
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.
The greenest solution is to not consume something at all. Growth can't last forever on this planet. Do we want to spend our limited resources like this?
I've never understood the focal point of water "usage" . Short of splitting it for hydrogen, all the water that is "used" is re-deposited through evaporation, down a drain, or worst case as sewage that must be processed. For cases like watering your lawn, data centers, humidifiers etc the water is essentially just borrowed.
Why do we act like water "used" is like oil "used"? Can't we effectively have nearly unlimited water usage, given enough pipes and energy? To make it extreme but also obvious, a nuclear plant beside the ocean and a pipe could make the driest desert green.
How much polluted is the water after cooling? Can they not be reused?
As long as they don’t pollute, I don’t see much a problem with this amount of water usage. And the water doesn’t need to be disinfected either, only cleaned and filtered. So any natural renewable source would do.
It's evaporated so it's not polluted but of course it does strain the local area water supply that has to collect, treat and distribute the water first. Likely resulting in higher water prices for the area.
Most of the water evaporates in the end. Once it rains down again, it can go through water treatment plants again and be reused. The other water contains everything that was in the original incoming water and concentrated forms of minor pollution for descaling. The contamination problem isn't that big compared to a farm or chemical plant.
Once the outside air crosses a certain temperature, air-to-air AC becomes less efficient and evaporative cooling can be used to get rid of heat instead.
Of course, this has the side effect of using more water during warm periods, when people and agriculture also need more water. That can be rather problematic in drought situations, especially in the decades to come.
It should be noted that evaporated water usually doesn't rain back down in the same place it evaporated from, so increasing the evaporation in one area does not guarantee a matching increase of rainfall there.
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.
If it was irrigation water, instead of drinking water, that would be about 26 acres worth of irrigated crops - in drought conditions.
If they were bypassing the municipal water supply or using post-wastewater treated water for their water usage, I'd be more blase about the situation. But farms are much thirstier than people.
Redaction should be a tested security operation, not a visual formatting step. If copy-and-paste, a PDF parser, or OCR can recover the content, the document was never redacted.
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
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.
I understand electricity usage... But water "usage"? The water is not used, heat is transferred to the water, and then it is available again, right? Am I missing something? Is the heat the big problem? Why do we call it "usage"? Is it actual tap-water that could have been put to other use?
Water that had some heat transferred to it sounds like perfectly well usable water, right...?
I'd assume that most datacenters use evaporative cooling, since it does consume water directly and is pretty cheap. Some web searches on the topic were swamped with companies trying to pitch their solutions (as if I'm in that market??) but this[1] link looks... slightly less suspicious.
Dealing with waste hot-water sounds like a PITA. Piping it straight back to the reservoir would need a dedicated pipeline, probably with insulation so you don't bake everything around it. Harnessing the excess heat on-site would be awesome, although I'm sure datacenters would already doing this as best they can to recoup electricity costs.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This data center is in Nebraska, not California, and motionlessveloc's comment that I replied to wasn't even limited to the US as there are local protests against data center water use in other countries.
Yes, water rights law is complicated. California's access to water from the Colorado River is due to the Colorado River Compact, which exists because state disagreed on the details of how water "goes back out into the environment".
That said, I was under the impression that many data centers use municipal water, which is more subject to market price, and not water allocated by property rights. While certainly some do, it isn't always so.
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).
20-25% of the water consumed for evaporative cooling becomes contaminated waste water. It is used to clean out the residue left behind by the 75-80% of the consumed water that is evaporated.
The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
Well as long as there are statutes preventing disclosure of the real numbers, we can't treat this as a non-problem. For all we know somebody intentionally failed to redact the lowest water usage data-center in the state.
Different data centers have order of magnitude differences in water usage depending on how whether they use the water for cooling or not.
Let's have a law that makes public companies that offer cloud services run benchmarks and have to publish their Power Utilization Effectiveness, annual waste, water usage, etc.
I mean, come on, let's drive some competition on something other than profit. If someone wants to buy the greenest compute they can, and they can afford a slightly higher price, let's empower them to do that!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s gonna be location dependent, and all golf courses are definitely not that well sited or ecologically engineered. I’d say most probably are not.
There are DCs that use grey water, are built by bodies of water to use them as direct heat sinks, etc. which is better.
The reason they use water at all is ironically to save energy. Evaporative cooling uses a lot less power. It’s a slider: all evaporative is little power and a lot of water, all closed cycles is lots of power and no water, and you can adjust between the extremes when designing the cooling system.
Using DC heat for urban heat in winter is the best idea. Put them in city centers. I think this is done in Europe to some extent.
I find it quite funny that they are working so hard to redact/hide this information from the public in the first place, when they could just be publishing it and pointing at the (likely equally despised by the general public) "big ag" firm next door
> 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.
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...)
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.
Sure, I think the rebuttal is that while your numbers are correct (and possibly even more in your favor than you may have guessed) they aren't particularly relevant.
First, the numbers. My searching says that for some particular lake in Nebraska, "Average annual gross lake evaporation ranges from
about 48 inches to 54 inches". Let's call it 4 feet per year, which means 4 acre-feet of water evaporates per acre per year. Trusting some numbers someone gave in a comment earlier, the data center in question used about 40 acre-feet per year. So 10 acres of lake would evaporate about the same rate as the data center. At a very rough guess, there are something like 200,000 acres of non-seasonal lakes in Nebraska, so this is indeed a tiny percentage.
Next, the relevance. The lakes are more or less in a steady state. But if you were actually to double the evaporation rate for a 10 acre lake, you might quickly end up with a muddy pit instead of a lake. The fish would be gone, and the users of that lake would have good reason to complain. If lake was 10 times larger, so that you were only increasing the evaporation by 10%, over time you'd still probably have a major effect on the shoreline and any infrastructure there. What used to be a useable pier might look over a mud flat rather than the water, and launching a boat would be impossible until you built a new one.
But the real issue is that water use isn't actually fungible. Water continuing to evaporate from a lake at the rate it always has definitionally doesn't make people's life worse than it was. But suddenly pumping of the same amount of groundwater might be really bad for the neighbors who previously were using the same water to irrigate their fields. And trying to double the output of a small municipal water system might (at least in the short term) make things much harder for all the existing users on the system. This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done, but it's a harm that should be considered.
That's my good faith attempt to answer you. In return, I have a quick research question that I think is essential to understanding whether or not data center water usage is a big deal or not, and that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments: Where is this water for these new data centers coming from? Is it from new wells they drill? Existing irrigation wells they buy and repurpose? From the local municipal water supply? Rainwater collection? Diverting a nearby river?
I feel like there's no way to answer the question of whether data center water usage matters without considering the actual local impact, and no way of determining the impact without considering the specifics of the source. But somehow I haven't seen any mention of this on either side of the debate.
And yet, the scale of the tragedy being blown out of proportion online regarding the high water and energy consumption of data centers seems somewhat exaggerated to me. But, of course, it would be better to build them in places where there are no issues with clean water.
Data centers could avoid the whole water usage debate if they just collected rainwater on the roof or something. Most places that are getting datacenters are heavy rainers.
Data centers are ugly and dystopian. We can likely survive as a species without building a single other one. Society and general well-being does worse because of them and what they bring.
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.
Water in the atmosphere doesn't help much when the aquifer that is supplying your water effectively runs out. Even if all that evaporated water comes down as rain in the same region, it still takes years to centuries to get to the aquifer.
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.
The redaction failure itself is almost the bigger story than the numbers - highlight, copy, paste revealing 52.65 MW peak and 13.3 megagallons is such a classic PDF redaction fail. Someone just drew black boxes over text instead of actually removing it.
On the substance: 13M gallons sounds huge until you see the context in the article - less than half of what the City of Lincoln uses in a single day, and about 20 Olympic pools for a year of operation. The Papillion site at 548 megagallons is the much larger water user. And the tax refund numbers ($55.8M for Agate alone) explain why Nebraska's reporting law and the governor's executive order exist - locals want to know what they're getting vs giving.
Claiming electricity/water usage as trade secret under 81-1527 feels like a stretch when the state explicitly requires annual self-reporting to DWEE. If everything material is redacted as trade secret, the reporting requirement is meaningless. Would be interesting to see if DWEE fixes their submission portal to reject non-flattened redactions.
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.
As other commenters have pointed out, 13.3 million gallons = ~40.8 acre-feet and this being Nebraska, the obvious comparison is agriculture (Corn and Soybeans being the main crop).
The average Nebraska farm is 989 acers[1] as of 2022 and uses roughly ~1,200 acre-feet of water (or roughly 390 million gallons) per year[2]. So a single average Nebraska farm uses roughly 30 times the water the Lincoln data center uses per year. There are 44,479 farms/ranches covering 44 million acres, which accounts for over 90% of the state's total land area.
Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming (even in a state like Nebraska that gets a large amount of rainfall compared to Central or Southern California). I hope that the current data center environmental focus continues to shed light on our industrial water and electrical usage.
[1]http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-... [2]https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-man...
The most fair comparison of water use would include evaporated vs soaked into the ground vs run off into rivers vs contained in the final product. As far as I'm aware, data centers are 100% evaporated while farms are going to be some percentage lower than that(though still high). Evaporating extra water can be detrimental to an area if the rainfall isn't high enough, while soaking into the ground is fairly good.
Plants evaporate a ton of water. So much so that corn fields create their own weather. A corn stalk is a high surface area, water infused, porous object. It's sending tons of water into the air.
Indeed: "corn sweat" https://extension.osu.edu/about/resources/corn-sweat-and-hum...
why would including evaporation make any difference to the water usage counts?
The water used, whether evaporated or returned into soil (which includes rivers) is unusable any more. Unless the runoff is collected and reused again, which is a form of recycling, and should also not count towards usage of water.
Aquifers maybe? Well water. The issues related to things like the California's central valley subsidence. Not sure data centers are at that scale though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence
Indeed. If you evaporate all the water before it soaks into the ground, you end up with a desert
As far as I'm aware, data centers are 100% evaporated while farms are going to be some percentage lower than that(though still high).
Newer data centres use closed loop electric (refrigeration) cooling instead of induced draft open loop evaporative cooling.
Do they? That's been a sticking point for many regarding this big push to build more. Evaporative is cheaper and these companies aren't going to spend more if they don't have to.
But they have to, if not spending threatens the continuity of their operations, e.g. by allowing public perception to get so bad that laws get changed due to misinformation about the ecological footprint. Data centers are investments, they take time to build and get operational.
Or they move around to someplace they get less pushback.
What misinformation?
Evaporative is cheaper and these companies aren't going to spend more if they don't have to.
There's a cost either way (electricity or water), but electricity is much easier to get to your data centre so the capex cost at the start is lower, and municipalities have this annoying tendency to ban cooling towers because they're not pretty enough.
Which uses more electricity, at peak cooling times, when wet-bulb would advantage an open evaporative system.
I would imagine plenty of data centers use both? Last time I worked at one they had both industrial heat pumps and evaporative cooling towers outside. While the heat pumps are effective, the cooling towers are way cheaper on cool dry days, so it mostly ended up being which one cost less that day vs strictly one or the other.
A lot of estimates used online for datacenter usage at large scale actually calculate water dependency including power generation - to the point that they might include water used by hydropower plants. It does not mean the reports are wrong, the data is simply for specific use that is then misrepresented by people who didn't read deep enough (or who have an agenda)
Others have posted that this datacenter has not yet "come online" and that the water usage is low because it is not yet running at its full potential.
Isn't most of the water use by a data center consumed during construction for concrete?
It's very important to think about embodied energy and water in the construction project. Operating the datacenter will definitely use more water if the datacenter uses open loop evaporative cooling.
I’d wager that dividing evaporative water by construction water reaches 5 orders of magnitude over its lifetime.
And so this "leak" could be a way of diverting attention from the issue now. And later when the datacenter comes online no one cares because it's already been "revealed".
> Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming
It's really just a matter of appreciating how much land is involved. Converting to metric, that's 370mm of water per year across the entire land surface. For comparison (per Wikipedia) that's about double the annual rainfall in Phoenix AZ, but considerably less than in San Fransisco (and way less than East Coast cities). Of course, that's in addition to the natural Nebraska rainfall, but you get the idea. It's not an absurd amount.
The only relevant difference between datacenters and agriculture is that we need one to survive as a species, the other is actively being used for malicious crimes against humanity.
For the most part our agriculture usage in the US is very wasteful. We grow corn to run cars and alfalfa to sell to China. All with heavily subsided water. We do not need this to survive as a species.
We could get what we need to survive on a fourth of the farmland if we kicked the addiction to meat, arguably a more malicious crime against animals and the planet
> We could get what we need to survive on a fourth of the farmland if we kicked the addiction to meat
100%
> arguably a more malicious crime against animals and the planet
Personally disagree, it entirely depends on your moral and ethical alignment though, of course. Generative AI will be used to divide and conquer us at a pace never seen before, it will destroy the internet/digital realm by burying it in generated content.
Who decides what is or isn't a crime? Are you a Fruitarianist for making such claims?
Huh? Not eating meat is not the same thing as Fruitarianism.
Plenty of delicious (if prepared properly) and healthier plant-protein alternatives to meat. See: Tofu, Seitan, Lentils, Chickpeas, Tempeh, Edamame, TVP, Lupins, Hemp seeds, Pumpkin seeds, Peanuts, Nutritional yeast, Oats, Quinoa
We don't need to be fatalists to agree that most people, when confronted with the realities of factory farming and the ecological consequences of our diet, would describe them as abject moral failures
Many people have a severe misunderstanding as to the purpose of morality, after all. They also cannot answer who decides what is right and what is wrong.
The future will judge us harshly for what we've done to the animals and the environment.
> agriculture is that we need one to survive as a species
true for some agriculture, but growing the corn for ethanol is stupid
Why is it stupid? Do you understand why the government subsidies farming?
Do you want to explain it? I come from a country that has no farming subsidies and it is a competitive free market (as taught by the US economists like Milton Friedman).
> Do you understand why the government subsidies farming?
To buy votes
>other is actively being used for malicious crimes against humanity.
Yawn... every time people make claims like this the less and less I care to hear their concerns.
Modern agriculture uses quite a bit of data.
I did a deep dive on the numbers:
If the data center building were a pool with a surface area of 6.62 acres, its annual water use of 13.299 million gallons would fill it to a depth of 1.9 meters.
To hold the 391 million gallons in the farm estimate cited above, the same pool would have to be 55 meters deep.
How does that comparison hold water?
The mass of plants growth is roughly the mass of water absorbed plus carbon from the atmosphere, minus water evaporated from leafs. The nutrients from the soil don't adhere to much.
That's to say, farms basically convert water to food and CO2 to O2. I'd say this is the water well spent.
Certainly the vast majority of water is not absorbed by plants, but evaporates from the ground or drains off without being used. You can't just ignore that.
What do you think happens to data center water? (It either evaporates or is recycled)
Water pumped into a field only to drain back into the soil cannot be equated with "recycled". If the crop wasn't there, would it have been sensible to pump the water there for "recycling" purposes? Are we regularly pumping water into the middle of dry areas for no reason? Of course not. Almost all of that water is being effectively discarded and it's a huge waste, which, no, you do not see at data centres.
Yeah you’re right, feeding people is just a huge waste.
Something like 1% of corn grown in the U.S. is used to feed people directly. The majority of it is used to inefficiently make gasoline (via ethanol) or plastic, because farm subsidies make it profitable.
And growing at that scale makes that 1% super affordable as a food source. all these 'we need AI data centers at crazy huge scales' people suddenly don't understand scale when it comes to feeding the brokies.
Subsidizing ethanol doesn’t seem like an efficient way to subsidize food for poor people- that’s why programs like SNAP exist
I never said that. The comment I replied to seemed to imply that water used to grow crops is used very efficiently, or at least as efficiently as water used for data centers. That is clearly not true so I objected. That is all.
Because aquifers and water tables don't exist
Growing food on a scale that makes it affordable to and reduces hunger for the plebes? That's a waste according to AI bros. Good luck with your crime bots, no jobs, no real music, hunger for the masses propganda. Should be a real winner.
> without being used.
If it cools the plants and the ground through evaporation, it's used as effectively as a datacenter.
Most farmers are absolute brain dead and will water with aerial systems during heat waves at noon, 90% of the water doesn't even reach the root system
if you think farmers are "absolute brain dead" you haven't spent any time with them.
Yes, they are intelligent in some ways and must be to survive, but just looking at the steady long-term depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer [0] and the actual squandering of water as mentioned by GP, where spraying it in midday results in massive evaporation, they are clearly being stupid about usage [1], time-of-day optimization, etc. and dooming the area to soon become a barren wasteland.
The lack of drip irrigation used in more arid areas, jsut because they have water today, is kind of shocking, and stupid.
[0] https://www.mygeoquest.com/ogallala-aquifer-depletion-map-an...
[1] Unless cooling is somehow critical, or there is a fungus growth problem from watering at less-hot times of day.
This isn't the 50s anymore, it's not mom and pops anymore.
I stand by what I say, 90% are brain dead, have 0 understanding of sustainable practices, only care about their bottom line, use absolutely outdated ways of managing and growing crops. They're basically brute forcing life with technology, destroying their own source of income year after year.
I worked for years in small scale bio farms, I can certify most farmers are clinically retarded
It's certainly well spent if we eat the crops.
If it's fed to farm animals for meat, that reduces its efficiency by an order of magnitude. There's still plenty of discussion to be had if that is water well spent. It probably depends on a lot of factors.
Now can you scale out your argument for how many data centers for total water usage.
And then find out how much Oracle uses per site as I figure their provably running much less efficient operations.
Im with you being some numbers to the battle. Its either going to be obviously bad or non-issue. Next question is, what is the quality of the recycled water.
Final comment - you used Nebraska as a location - what about all the drought states?
It's always strange to me how many people have an opinion on the produce of farmers. If other products were looked a through the same lens, 90% of all products on Amazon should be removed, Social Media shouldn't exist and Javascript was never used for development.
These are all popular opinions yes
Yet how often is the efficiency of Javascript a talking point in main stream media? Or the quality of the ceiling fans on Amazon?
The difference is that animal agriculture involves millions (or even billions) of unnecessary victims: the animals.
Yes, we should all have opinions on products that consume resources on a societal scale.
Opinions don't necessarily equate with a desire to remove them, there could also be (dis)-incentives like taxes, removal of subsidies etc.
> minus water evaporated from leafs
They varies wildly between different crops. Ideally, farmers in drought prone regions should be choosing crops that don't just dump all the water into the atmosphere (but current economic incentives/excessively cheap industrial water mean this is not happening).
Also, a lot of water evaporates from the soil before it ever gets sucked up by the plants.
Plus we get food.
Because it's well known that the data centers are essential for the survival of the species.
Now that we know that farms use a lot of water, we are clean to waste any lower amount of water.
Thank you!
Are corn ethanol and feedstock alfalfa (the two largest agricultural consumers of water) essential for the survival of the species?
It's essential for the united states to be able to feed it's population. Keeping land fertile for farming and all the necessary supply chain intact is a national security issue.
Corn ethanol is a weird carbon subsidy that shouldn't exist.
It's a weird carbon offset for the fuel industry that isn't effective and it diverts huge amounts of farm land away from food crop usage. It ties farms to industry rather than supplying food, binding their profitability to the price of oil far more and that only exists because the US Gov mandates the ethanol blend.
It's supposed to be because it's renewable/sustainable using a biological product, but the industry is heavily dependent on synthetic fertilisers which come from refineries.
There are a great many reasons to get rid of the ethanol mix. Lower food costs being the biggest. Now that EVs are practical the need for trying to whitewash combustion fuel is overbaked.
It's pork barrel spending for farming heavy states.
So are data centers, in the modern economy. You think all those trucks manage their own logistics in their carburetors?
Nope. So much of that goes to corn because of silly subsidies or to feed cattle. Not really a matter of national security.
27% of crops grown in the US are used to feed humans.
Careful about that, much of agriculture does not produce human staple food. Production of almonds in semi-arid regions of California does scream "luxury" to me.
I don’t understand how his argument. Lots of those crops go to feed cattle or corn going into ethanol. Those are ok choices (people could eat less meat).
> Now that we know that farms use a lot of water, we are clean to waste any lower amount of water.
If the difference is 1000x then definitely yes. Spending any attention talking about the 0.01% is a waste of time or deliberate misdirection.
I'm gonna plug a recommendation here based on your comment: if anyone wants to marvel or horrify at the US' water development history, Cadillac Desert is an excellent read, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert .
Cadillac Desert is on the bookshelf of every educated person in the western United States.
Downvoted for the truth. Everyone recommending this book now is young because literally everyone who likes to read nonfiction was reading it in the 90s
It's just an emotional witch hunt at this point. I get it, societal implications of AI are scary, but protest _that_ instead of cosplaying like an environmentalist.
I feel like it might be that but everyone is obscuring facts and numbers about usage so its kind of making their own problems worse.
I agree, but it's only fair if all industries report their water use.
The only answer that would appease the general public is zero. If they said it used 100,000 gallons per year, people would be outraged because "number big", despite that being less than the typical US household's usage.
The general public really has no barometer for judging industrial scale numbers. Anything "million" to the general public is interpreted as "infinity"
I wouldn’t call it a witch hunt if the resource consumption of AI is given but its social benefits are disputable.
Especially if the resource is drinkable water.
An argument about factors of 10^-6 of a renewable resource, is not a serious argument.
We have real environmental problems, like excess CO2 in the air and forever-chemicals in our biosphere. The narrative must stay with those material issues and not be diverted by trivia.
We have additional environmental problems and water consumption is only renewable in a global scale not if you look at the local water resources.
Evaporated water becomes drinkable water again but not necessarily in the place it was consumed.
And don’t forget that consumption comes on top of the already existing consumption, so at some point you could reach the point of too much consumption. The straw that broke the camels back. There is a reason for that saying.
The saying usually refers to emotional load, and not physical load. Which is very apt here: datacenter water usage is an emotive issue, but one which is completely meaningless in actual environmental terms.
If the water consumption of a datacenter leads to more consumption than is provided back the environmental problem is real and climate change makes it more likely if rain periods and water ground levels change an glacier and snow periods disappear.
Agricultural consumption is already a problem but raising the consumption doesn’t help.
Like with CO2, more is more
lol, Drinking water is totally not a serious environment issue. Let's pump the ogallala aquifer dry.
One year of the data center's water use was equivalent to half a day of the city of Lincoln's water use.
These arguments about data center water use are so dumb they distract from actual water conservation efforts too.
I don't think the "drinking water consumed by AI" is a given. Proponents and detractors of AI are both making mutually exclusive claims with confidence. I suspect few if any of the people making these claims have the background to interpret them.
Then why hide the numbers?
Emotional responses in threads like these?
Water and power use has implications for the amount of compute a given data center has and that may be regarded as a trade secret... or so the various data center owners and utilities claim.
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
> The case represented a major test of Oregon public records law. After The Oregonian/OregonLive requested Google’s records last year, The Dalles sued the news organization to prevent the information’s release. It argued Google’s water use was a “trade secret” exempt from Oregon disclosure requirements.
https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/
> Updates: Following the settlement reached between The Oregonian and the city of The Dalles, a Google spokesperson told the Associated Press that the tech company would no longer seek to protect its site-level water-use numbers as a trade secret at any of its data centers nationwide. And after the city turned over Google’s water-use data, The Oregonian reported that the tech company’s water use “nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city.”
> ...
> The Oregonian first requested records about Google’s water usage in The Dalles last September. But city officials denied the request submitted by business reporter Mike Rogoway, arguing that the records are “trade secrets” exempt from disclosure under the Oregon Public Records Law.
> The newspaper decided to challenge the city’s denial, asking the district attorney for Wasco County to weigh in. After reviewing the city’s rejection, the district attorney sided with The Oregonian, concluding that the city failed to meet its burden to show that Google’s water usage is a trade secret and ordering the city to disclose the requested records.
---
In the Nebraska one... https://www.1011now.com/2026/09/30/more-questions-than-answe...
> The Google Data Center in Lincoln, named Agate LLC, claimed their electricity usage and water usage were trade secret information, citing Neb. Rev. State §§ 81-1527; 84-712.05 and NAC TITLE 115, CH. 2. In fact, Google did this for all three data centers, including their sites in Omaha and Papillion.
This isn't only Google claiming this...
https://midwestadvocates.org/legal-victory-judge-orders-rele...
> In an oral ruling delivered during an August 17 hearing, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Ehlke found that the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) acted unlawfully when it denied a public records request seeking unredacted documents related to electrical load projections at Meta’s Beaver Dam data center. The PSC defended its refusal to release the information, claiming it was a trade secret. Judge Ehlke, however, was not convinced. He ruled that the information did not qualify as a trade secret because it lacked independent economic value, and he ordered its release.
1/4 of the cities water use is pretty impressive though the Dalles isn't that big. It is very dry though so I would be concerned about water use as a resident.
Yes, the vast majority to feed animals. Simply replacing meat consumption with plant-based protein sources by a small amount (say 10%) would offset the water usage of even a heavy AI user.
Datacenters don't sprout out of the land by themselves, as opposed to the plants. There were water resources consumed elsewhere that made building this one possible - manufacturing all the chips, metal, raw materials, whatever went into building one. Like we have concept of TCO, you'd probably need something like total electricity/water usage concept that would take into account all that spread into the expected lifetime of the datacenter, to compare apples to apples.
Make sure to do a fair comparison that includes fertilizer production, pesticides, herbicides, farm equipment and machinery, grain drying and all of the other inputs and processes.
isn't this comparison nonsense? When it rains on a farm, the farmer doesn't irrigate. When it rains on a farm, some of the water goes into aquifer. The remaining is runoff. Depending on farming strategy, this may be high in nitrates.
When a data center uses water, it's almost entirely evaporated away in an aeration pond.
Except you can, you know, sustain human life off of farm land. You can’t do that from a data center.
So the datacenter uses as much water as 33.6 acres of farmland? And, um, how physically big is the data center? If it's more than 40 acres, it's using less water than what it replaced.
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.
it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.
LinkedIn CV says 8 Years working for google as a Data Center Facilities Technician, so. Yeah.
Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.
Also outright dishonest to not add that as a disclaimer!
The use of the word "we" seems pretty clear to me.
>> During my career there
I certainly read that as "there" being the town, not the actual data center!
Same, but revisiting it with context, it does seem mostly obvious enough.
Written communication is hard
" 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.
He specifically said he worked there. Did you think perhaps he possibly worked for the outsourced cleaning crew?
Biased, or well informed?
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.
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…
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.)
Have you ever talked to people with a low paying job?
Yes, I find it a lot more pleasant than most of this industry.
> it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.
It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.
And who exactly would they be astroturfing for?
Big Labor j/k
People looking for something to run against?
China and Russia.
ignorance
Future of Life Institute, Guardrails Alliance, Public First Action, PauseAI, ControlAI.
Both sides of this issue are doing the same thing, you’d be a fool to believe otherwise.
Only one side can afford astroturfers and has a large contingent of employees on HN.
That’s not true. The AI side can afford more surely, but that doesn’t mean the anti-AI side is broke. Lawmakers are being lobbied, YouTubers are already being paid to make vids, seems unlikely it would stop there.
What makes you so confident? Do you have any proof of this? If so I would love to see it because it would explain some stuff I've come across, but could not place.
YouTuber saying she was offered money https://youtu.be/lPdmYMHrWKg?is=JY229A1XgOBi-pdV
Creator outreach guy at ControlAI talking about the same type of thing https://lnkd.in/p/ehkuYFkw
Future of life has a program for digital media outreach https://futureoflife.org/project/digital-media-accelerator/
The PACs are well reported on
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/30/ai-safeguards-public-first-...
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/17/ai-safeguards-millions-repu...
China, of course. They don't like that the US is currently ahead in the AI race.
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.
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).
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.
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?
Great examples. I understand these concepts as a lay person and I think most others can understand them too and therefore think they should be reported.
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.
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
Evaporated water stays in the water cycle though. It comes back down as rain, and returns to the water sources that were depleted (assuming these data centers are generally not using underground aquifers, which I think is true).
You can't control the water cycle over a datacenter and its water source, it is a global system.
The issue for most (well, at least those who are informed and not just bandwagoning) is that it raises the prices of utilities, in which case it doesn't really matter that it stays in the water cycle. If your local municipal water authority has to expand operations to keep up with demand, that is going to incur capital costs which will either raise rates or require tax dollars.
While this water usage might be not a big deal in places with abundant water, it could be problematic in some areas of the US.
> 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
Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas fired steam turbine. And one such installation was proposed for this city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.
Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.
> 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.
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].
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
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.
You have some very motivated people with deep pockets who do not like negative press. Say anything negative and the downvotes will roll in.
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.
Facts and experience mean nothing when everyone knows you are a liar.
Anti-vaxxers favorite line...
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.
People do just that.
I've never seen a well intentioned person use this "everything should be allowed or nothing should be allowed" mentality. It's always somebody who knows they're doing something wrong. You know that the value of a golf course or paper mill is not the same to a community as a data center. You know there are so many levels of falseness to this dilemma that most people will not know where to start and will instead shut down.
Industrial use should never get to hide. It’s such impactful use so every aspect should be scrutinized.
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
I've been spending some time in Tasmania, Aus for the last few weeks and have been following the local debate regarding 3 data centres Firmus is planning on building here.
While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.
Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.
The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].
When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.
However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.
Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.
[1] https://www.tasmaniancountry.com/newspaper/tasmanian-country...
> 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.
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.
Google has some custom hardware, so directly reporting it could be an issue.
Now that it has been, though…
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-a...
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.
> 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.
How do you see all utilities as public? What if a commercial building has rooftop solar?
How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Sorry but large companies forcing NDAs with public servants does not fly.
Absolutely. That shouldn't even be legally possible outside of very narrowly scoped defense contracts.
Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it's low) and people don't believe him.
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.
That’s because he’s a known liar. Like he’s famous for his sociopathic lying even amongst sociopathic lying billionaires. Impressive almost.
That may be true, but I have a feeling that even a third party audit wouldn't appease you. If they confirm Sam's numbers, you'll claim that they were bribed. So how can we solve this problem? Can we trust government officials? Are there any non-biased organizations that could do the audit?
Honestly, the water usage isn't the real issue - the electricity use during a climate crisis is. It's also a huge climate opportunity, because datacenter growth is basically gluing a giant pipe of financer money straight into datacenter and support buildout, and if we passed laws requiring the new electrical capacity be 100% renewable... They'd still spend the money, they're convinced this is the future so no cost is too high (an assertion I feel confident making because we're literally experimenting with putting datacenters in space right now).
Water use has locally been an issue in places where municipalities were taken advantage of and their local water supply management laws weren't set up to account for a giant consumer to just roll up and start pulling past replenishment rate. But there's nothing about datacenters that demand that be the case; those places were cheap to build in (and why they were cheap to build in should probably be its own graduate political theory thesis / series of fraud and mismanagement investigations and prosecutions).
They do! In great detail:
https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
The data tables start on p. 90.
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.
> Did your datacenter consume 9GW?
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...
> 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.
1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
> 1GW of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi/Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.
I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.
This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).
It’s not ‘spare goes to training’. These data centres are training first. Inference is really rather efficient, so not why datacenters are so big.
If we printed electricity like China, this would not be an issue, we can have more electricity at lower prices when we're ready
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity...
> But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use
Not even close to a true statement.
EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].
According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.
For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. Robert Moses dam in Niagara Falls does about 2,700MW.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
Fine, an exaggeration but not off by much.
If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh).
It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.
Okay. And? Data centers are aggregating the demand of nationwide consumption. They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.
Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.
It seems like the size criticism is one of proportionality-of-effect (in various domains such as energy usage, utility costs to citizens, and environmental effects upon water supplies and quality, land usage, noise pollution etc) upon the given locales in which they are proposed to be centralised.
> They’re big because that’s what it takes to be efficient.
Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it's not efficient in terms of time to transport.
> Attacking them for size
I didn't attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don't care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.
> Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached.
https://datacenters.google/efficiency/
> If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind. >
Just some napkin maths. The best combined cycle gas powerplant (Nat gas + steam) have an efficiency around 60 %. So 9 GW of electricity requires enough natural gas for 15 GW (9/0.6 = 15). Natural gas is about 10 kWh/m^3, so in 1 hour, we need 15E9/10E3 = 15E6 m^3 of natural gas. In BTU this is 5.118E10 BTU. A year has 8760 hours, 4.483E14 BTU or 4.483E8 MMBTU in a year.
According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56380&src=%E... the average Nat gas residential consumption in USA is around 80 MMBTU. So these 9 GW of electricity for datacenter s represent the average Nat gas consumption of 5.6 million home in USA.
We know that by and large the biggest new proposed datacentres aren't intended to aggregate existing capacity but to add to it. Adding 26GW spread across three datacentres no doubt is more efficient than spreading 26GW across 26 or 260 new datacentres. But anything like 100GW or 400GW of total extra datacentre capacity, in the US alone https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2026/10/02/insid... , is enough of an increase that the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all, and some (I assume) relatively modest efficiency gains from taking datacentre aggregation to the next level surely won't have a decisive impact on that. We're certainly beyond the point where such questions are largely just a problem for the investors (or even for Americans), especially when it turns out that, whoops, the DCs are going to be powered by finite, highly-dispatchable and CO_2-emitting natural gas after all, not baseload nuclear stations.
Meanwhile from a local perspective the fact that a very large datacentre next door is hypothetically aggregating what would have been several other data centres, mostly built elsewhere, is not so reassuring. (Though the other side of that coin is that from the builders' point of view it may be politically easier to get a given amount of capacity built as a few very large plants in places which are less likely or less able to object: regulatory efficiency, distinct from energy efficiency.)
And also conversely, if the mega-DCs (deca-giga-DCs?) really are markedly more efficient, and if they do aggregate lots of new capacity, most especially if they do also end up aggregating existing capacity, that will worsen problems of competition and market concentration in the cloud computing market, at least once the money spigot is turned off again and it's no longer the case that any idiot can get financing for a new datacentre.
> the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all
If there is demand for it, it's "socially justified". We don't live in a command economy, and thankfully, there's not a panel of woke elders deciding what we get to build. One of the great things about capitalism (indeed, the entire purpose of the thing) is that it does a great job of balancing supply to demand.
The decision of whether or not to build one big datacenter, or a billion teeny datacenters is also well solved by competition, and doesn't need our help.
If built out. A single DC of this scale is driving Oracle, a giant company, so bankrupt their bonds have been downgraded to junk status and they're claiming force majeure to get out of paying their debts.
> [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
For those who haven't clicked through, that article mentions a 9GW datacentre planned for Utah by Kevin O'Leary's company as well as a 10GW datacentre planned for Ohio by Softbank https://apnews.com/article/ai-data-center-ohio-uranium-enric... and Facebook's planned 7GW data centre in Louisiana https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... , all largely to be gas-powered it seems.
> 1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.
1 GW is about a single nuclear rector of the Zaporizhzhia powerplant in Ukraine. Other nuclear powerplants in Europe have about 600 to 900 MW per reactor. The newest generation have reactor of 1.4 GW. Just to give an order of magnitude. Every time a 1GW data center is built, to have a continuous supply and CO2 free, it would require to build one nuclear reactor. I find this insane.
There were certainly 1GW DCs in the US 10+ years ago.
Do you have any in mind? How many?
Given the current power consumption of states, I find it hard to believe.
I remember one in the Midwest was growing past that.
Even for smaller sites, 1-2 MW would have been very small.
1-2MW is like one or two rows of older non-GPU machines, it can't be called a DC.
That's what many data centers look like for a mid/large non-tech company that in-houses their datacenter operations. They're often otherwise a "real" datacenter with UPS, backup generators, multiple tier-1 carriers, chillers, raised floors /w hot/cold aisles, etc.
You see it less now since the shift to the cloud, but in the 00s this stuff was everywhere.
>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.
The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.
I don’t think that 1MW is something older datacenters consumed. Unless you are talking about a single rack in a corporate server room.
It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24/7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.
Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.
You're confusing MW with MWh. Older DCs did indeed consume on the order of 1MW of continuous power, like the one at [0]. The 2012-dated DC at [1] has a redundant 22kW power feed per 42U rack, so that's ~500W per RU - which for most pre-AI servers was plenty.
With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.
[0]: https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delf...
[1]: https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/dat...
You are confusing MW with MWh and apparently kWh.
A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.
1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.
A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.
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?
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
[2]:https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
What about water usage?
For most datacenters the actual largest source of water use is indirectly from power generation (coal, nat gas). Solar reduces that a lot also.
The water isn’t actually used. It is slightly warmed.
In some cases chemicals are added to the water to increase cooling efficiency.
This is a choice, alternative approaches do exist but we should definitely not assume that datacenter water usage is _always_ benign.
In the Nebraska system, the water goes into the municipal waste channels and is treated like any other municipal wastewater, so the chemical additives are handled.
what does handled mean?
Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.
You understand, the water isn't used up? It's not even used up in agriculture. Even when you drink a glass of water, the water doesn't actually disappear, soon someone else will be drinking it. The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today. No need to panic about someone using water.
The only reason to be concerned is if someone is mixing the water with other chemicals at a rate faster than the natural filtration and then not paying for the treatment to purify the water again. But that is not an issue with data centers. Merely using water is a concern only for people who don't understand how matter is preserved, but a school physics book should dispel those concerns.
> It's not even used up in agriculture.
However, the source of the water can be "used up" faster than it can be replenished, such as in the case of some aquifers
That’s not entirely correct. Overall water is preserved but local sources of freshwater can be depleted or contaminated, which raises the cost of water.
Sure the water is still somewhere, but its location is important for future use. US water reservoirs are at problematically low levels already.
> Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.
The linked article talks about >500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It's nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it's such a common thing to do then why isn't it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?
"Recirculating" water isn't thermodynamically the same. Evaporating the water is THE POINT of the system. You can make closed-loop coolers but they use more energy.
Which makes the often repeated excuse "Closed loop datacenters exist" to refute water use concerns a bit nonsensical.
It's all contextual. If the energy inputs are carbon-free and local water is scarce, then for that given situation a closed-loop system might make sense. People are building such a thing in Tucson, Arizona right now.
> The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today.
Nope. Plants turn water into oxygen and (the H part of) hydrocarbons, and animals turn those back into water. And after that, the result is different water than the cycle started with.
Funny how nobody asks the folks who build golf courses "what about water usage?"
hint: An individual 18-hole course uses between 300,000 to 1 million gallons per day
Rather than talking in absolute numbers, ratios help relate human activities better, an example:
If we can close 1 in 3 golf courses and have all the water we need for data centers - and then some - would that be acceptable to our society?
Do we desire so much golf that we'd prefer to stress our water systems instead?
I think people actually do though? They are even sabotaged at times (has happened in Europe at least), to protest against their water usage.
I’ve seen it brought up many times
I’ve brought this up
Hmmm, which political party is famously against solar and renewables in general?
The same one that is paying for their support for data centers and is shifting as a response [1]. Like I said, if political capital is being spent shifting peoples' stances, how much of a waste is it to know we could move them on this and we chose not to. Generational fumble.
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6121776-gop-worried-data...
China are also building tons of coal plants.
> Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries
This is overstating things.
Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.
You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.
A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.
If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.
> 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.
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.
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.
Tbh this sounds perfectly normal to me. Companies often don't think it's worth defending themselves if theres no actual financial damage, and certainly don't want random employees to be doing it. It can be very frustrating, both for employees who want to defend their reputation and for the public who want the truth, but companies can be extremely conservative about chosing their public relations battles.
Yeah no you're right, if they'd like to keep that a competitive secret, it shouldn't really matter how much resources are being consumed where real humans live, those humans won't be there in the future and aren't shareholders in the company anyway so who cares.
I worked at google as well.
They published a lot of less specific info (PUE numbers, water efficiency, etc)
They were very sensitive about any site specific numbers.
You can assume that any company at a large scale will not want to divulge any information unless absolutely necessary. Doesn't matter if you or I think that it might not need to be secret or might not be competitive. Unless there is both an internal push, a need and a sort of proof dat the information can be released, it will never happen. You'll usually find thing that are simplified or aggregated for PR and marketing, or things that are required for legal reasons, but everything else stays internal.
> don't want to tell the people around them
It's probably more that they don't want to tell competitors anything they don't absolutely have to.
Those reasons aren’t obvious to me. Why not just be transparent if that’s the case?
Yep - better off redacting the great efficiencies we’re doing.
Google considers pretty much everything in hwops to be a trade secret. The point is to keep the specifics unknown as much as possible from competitors; the public at large's knowledge is just collateral damage in that fight.
If they are so good at it, they should push to make that the bare minimum and get to hold all future datacenter permits.
What benefit could competitors get from that information?
The ability to improve their data centers, of course. Google is the company that launched data centers with commodity components.
It tells them exactly how much they have to invest in hardware buildout to stay competitive with Google in terms of raw compute.
This is right up there with being able to predict a competitor's total manufacturing capacity for the next year because you have hard numbers on their raw material purchase.
It doesn't even have to be competitors their suppliers would love to know the total amount of widgets that they'll be buying. That way they know if they're the single supplier
A friend accidentally told me not just how many servers Google was deploying for Bard, but what they were putting in them and the volume of the scale up.
A competitor with that information might have made a rush on a supply-constrained component market or negotiated longer term pricing agreements.
The strategic advantage, by definition, is something you, as a company, don't know what it is. If you know, then people leaving your company take the information to competition and the it's not strategic nor advantage anymore.
So, given that you don't know what makes your company better then the competition, it's better to hide everything you can so you don't accidentally disclose useful information. God forbid competition discover your own strategic advantage before you do.
And this one in particular is a high-ticket trade secret; it has been for decades, long before the AI push.
Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything."
... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
This was more than a decade ago. Back then, the data center didn't even have public signage because Google was trying to be so secretive. Things have changed significantly since then and a lot of data is now published publicly.
Very few datacenters run by companies of any size, large or small, have signage.
Companies put signs on buildings so you can find them. Signs are important for retailers or offices where people need to find it. This isn't really the case for a data center. Data centers typically have a sign with simply the address of the building on it, so delivery drivers can find it. Any sort of a sign with branding is a waste of money at best, and a security liability at worst.
Even if you aren't worried about intentional security threats to your data center, you don't want the name of your company on it, because people will start showing up at the gate there instead of your primary business location.
The current hysteria has little to do with datacenters and a lot to do with societal unrest about AI.
Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews. People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.
I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.
>People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.
Others don't like technological progress to be reduced to the speed of bureaucracies who have no compelling incentive to be particularly efficient. Especially when the technology at hand might end up making quite a few of these bureaucracies much less staffed.
The thinking on display in this thread is something like,
"I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."
I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say.
People dislike secretive bureaucrats more than they dislike slow or overstaffed ones.
Good luck with this attitude homie!
> Good luck with this attitude homie!
This was the attitude these leaders took, though. It shouldn’t be downvoted simply for being wrong—it’s wrong in an interesting way.
Lots of folks in Silicon Valley thought they’d be cheered for bypassing bureaucracy. They were wrong and will pay dearly for it, possibly with their wealth and freedom. But it was a commonly-accepted attitude, in part driven by the Bay Area’s obscenely inept bureaucracies around power and building.
> Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews.
Hasn't it been common knowledge for a while -- as in since well before the ai boom -- that those reviews are in practice mostly tools for obstructionism (I don't want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we'll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?
Is that's even half true, I don't think the "unforced" there really applies.
If they're truly there to just be crooked and corrupt then sure let's remove/reduce them openly and together.
Shady backroom deals are bad though, and selectively choosing to apply the rules to some and wave them for others isn't cool, in either direction.
I like clean water to drink and air to breathe and a climate that isn’t on an increasingly hotter trajectory. Government should police corporations.
We could also just stop giving bad corporations money. I can assure you it's the thing that they absolutely hate the most and 10x as effective as trying to write legislation.
this works less and less as corporations buy from each other and everybody has things like pensions/401k and investments. there are also many who will buy shit regardless. it's just ignoring the reality of the situation, really.
Companies aren't earning the majority of profit from your average joe buying products anymore. The consumers are investors: Rich assholes with too much money, gamblers, and true believers. It's a lot like how McDonalds true income comes not from consumers but from holding and renting out valuable plots of land.
That's entirely fair and reasonable if you level your complaints about power and water use at everything that uses a lot rather than just data centres.
If you're only saying we need fewer data centres then your argument is against AI, and not in favor of sensible approach to the climate.
Oh boy, do have news for you: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
Point being that we've been literally eating our environment to death, long before AI was a twinkle in Scam Altmans eye.
Weird how people never cared then. Weird how vegans were constantly shunned as too extreme then.
Then let’s change the laws and regulations.
In a society of laws you can’t just ignore the ones you don’t like, otherwise it undermines the entire system and suddenly the ones we all generally like/support aren’t being followed either.
Elon musk used his hundreds of billions of dollars to buy a social media platform to push a certain politician, bribed voters, and bought his way in to the government to fire everyone who would investigate his AI business.
You can't just "change laws" when the people building these data centers control the laws.
So the answer is to shrug at environmental regulations and laws protecting the community? I don’t understand how letting Musk and co violate the laws and creating bad outcomes is somehow the superior solution. You seem to be arguing they’ll get what they want no matter what so we should just, what? Do nothing?
If the laws aren’t working we should change them. That’s how this all works. Yes we can debate the efficacy but that’s the system we have and just ignoring laws isn’t viable.
I live in northern va and I can tell you that histeria is about ballooning electric and other bills. vast majority of population is unfortunately “not there” in regards to any unrest about AI
Yup. From Fairfax. Very much what you said.
Not saying that increases in power bills aren't caused by ai datacenters at all, but I would like to remind people that there is currently a conflict going on that is impairing 5-50% of the worlds energy supply, which even if we used none of it, still would impact us (LNG exports) and getting people angry at tech is a good distraction for this time of year.
I think there's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
there is definitely more to the story when you are not personally affected by it deeply, then you have the luxury of looking at “deeper meanings” and shit. when you are, shit is quite simple and to the point. I attend every public hearing, community open house and submit shit online (https://www.loudoun.gov/datacenterstandards if you live in the area) and it has absolutely nothing (and never will) to do with some conflict in some shithole place. it is 100% a local issue and it is not only if you have the luxury to not be personally affected by and which gives you additional luxury to dream up “global reasons…”
Is there a well known reason that the US has ruled out building more power plants to meet the increasing demand? This seems like a weird complaint; if it is a problem that this industrial activity uses power, why not ban all industrial activity? Traditionally the response to more demand has been to build more supply.
1. Power plants take a long time to build and large capital investments, typically both public and private dollars. The power demand for the current hyperscaler datacenter trend is happening faster than supply can keep up, guaranteeing the current spike in prices.
2. Most heavy industrial users of power are running stable businesses that are often expected to offset some of the infrastructure costs themselves, making payments over time. Not only have many hyperscalers bent the rules to avoid doing this, even if they did do things the right way, much of the rapid investment is highly leveraged and if a bubble pops, taxpayers would be stuck with the infrastructure bill anyway.
Because the bubble will pop if they have to wait for power plants to be built.
every AI related post on HN has a timer until a “bubble” comment makes its grand appearance :)
That can't be true. People obviously believe DCs have big local impact and it really does affect their power bills at least.
The global impact of AI doesn't change when you force DCs to build in another area.
It does if it slows the rate of data center builds and makes it progressively more difficult to site future data centers.
If you make it hard to build them in the US they will get built in other countries. Do you think Chinese residents get any say over where DCs go?
Exactly. It's just like when we used to pay workers a living wage. Well where did all of those jobs go amiright?! Stupid peasants can be so annoying... we're just trying to bring everyone into the grand age of abundance!
Totally not a new robber baron era at all. That's just fake news guys.
/s
Big tech is worried that if they build a $100 billion datacenter in another country the country could simply take it from them
Kansas is a rural state that survives because of government agricultural subsidies as well as costly boondoggles such as ethanol that everyone else has to pay for. Complaining about government subsidies also going to other people is a bit rich.
The noise issues seem real, but don’t impact whole cities
Is it? Can you give me a link to a video that shows the issue in a straightforward manner?
Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.
I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).
I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
the generators and cooling equipment on some data centers are certainly audible.
https://youtube.com/shorts/AAQsnrAHy5Y?si=vgmEGHS38mzzs2G9
Another video of the same data center:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1uleoa2/sound_...
Sound meter shows "only" ~60 db, but that constant audible hum is, IMO, the data center actually assaulting those residents and apparently doing so 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
If someone who lived near that place set fire to the data center and I ended up on the jury and heard these recordings I would do everything in my power to nullify because that seems like a completely justified response to me in the face of the company running the data center not shutting down until the problem is fully fixed.
Also, that was probably dbA, dbB would be higher
This is so much worse than I was expecting. You'd pretty much have to move out, and your property would be worthless for anything but industrial use at that point.
Is this something that happens by accident in the sense that the decision makers didn't know how it would sound or is there actually someone in a room at some point going "fuck it".
I mean, the latest ones are massive. Climate concerns aside, data centers don’t make great neighbors. They are never a net positive for the local community.
>They are never a net positive for the local community
Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.
The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.
> Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay.
We hear about their tax breaks though. Why don’t they get treated the same as other local businesses, and pay the same rates?
Because the tax revenue of them not coming there is zero, and the tax revenue after the breaks is very significant.
The datacenter companies are forcing local governments to sign NDAs so they can't discuss the details with other areas, leading to them being pressured in to taking horrible deals that are a net negative for the area without.
They force these NDAs so people can't collaborate and see what a horrible deal they are getting.
Two things can be true at the same time. Data centers are fundamentally extractive. They take resources in terms of space, electricity and water and make someone far away richer. They have almost no positive impact on their local communities beyond the initial build out jobs, and then after that they are huge windowless boxes that provide almost no jobs (and in the future, as they are more and more automated, they really will provide no jobs). And their negative impacts are already here, e.g. Maryland utility customers saw a huge increase in their electric bills due to data center build out.
At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology that its most significant leaders say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.
So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
There is no hysteria. We don't want to subsidise your lifestyle and to have pollution you produce dumped in our rural parts. We don't want it and it does not benefit us. Have all datacenters you want in your backyard.
> societal unrest about AI
More generally, societal fatigue with tech culture overtaking everything, subsuming power from every other corner. Surveillance, the Zuck and Elon, COVID-19, immorality, Luigi Mangione and Elizabeth Holmes, a glut of cat videos and jackal-eared Wikipe-tans, delinquency of minors, 5G and everything else that technology can share some blame for, now focused on their visible manifestations.
The trouble is, once a danger becomes visible and ubiquitous, you’ve already lost. Fighting “A.I. Data Centres” is literally quixotic. If you look up “quixotic” in the Spanish Wikipedia, there is a photo of a chivalrous knight jousting with Nvidia’s CEO.
My biggest problem with the data centers getting built around me are that they are building new natural gas power plants to power them, that will be greenhouse gases and decrease local air quality. I would be a lot more ok with it if they were using wind or solar. And maybe built it somewhere that didn't have a water shortage.
One being built near me is being built on public lands that are being sold off for datacenters. That's an additional pretty big negative (especially since the specific land was set apart as a wildlife habitat.)
I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
I guess we can assume that the executives at the big AI companies don't believe in man made climate change.
A(G)I is supposed to fix everything so nothing matters /s
Why is this sarcastic? Isn't this a plausible possibility?
Given that everything important has trade-offs, no, AI, even if it were very very smart wouldn’t be able to “fix everything”
If we compare 2025 to 0025, a truly remarkable number of problems have been solved by, effectively, intelligent people doing research. While it is impossible that AI will fix everything it is plausible it will fix most things since it looks like it'll be able to do research faster, better and with a higher quality than humans as well as more effectively communicate the results to the masses.
Yet Altman and Amadeo are talking how AI can kill us. So either it solves some problems it creates or kills off humanity... This is a gambling addict level rationalisation of betting your house to win it all at once.
The path they are talking about solves also a lot of problems, tho. They don’t care, because they’ll already live on Moon, Mars or will be dead.
There's not.
The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
The second problem is that the CO2 is diluted in the atmosphere. Consider the amount of energy needed to remove salt from ocean water, it's not simple.
It just takes a lot of energy to that what was done by burning fossils in the first place.
Maybe not. You don't need to chemically turn the CO2 back into hydrocarbons and free oxygen. You just need to remove it from the atmosphere.
Sounds significantly more expensive than not producing it in the first place though, doesn’t it?
Except for the politics
> The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
This is only a problem if AI won't develop cheap carbon neutral energy sources, like fusion or advanced fission, or more efficient solar with cheap grid-scale batteries.
There are many practical substances that can absorb CO2, and "regenerating" them may not be necessary (the resulting carbonate compounds can be useful without releasing the carbon) or as energy-intensive as the original reaction. This has been an active field of research for over a quarter of a century.
there needs to be some form of energy input to analyse the co2 to another molecule. the logical input would be the sun. but why not use the sun directly via solar instead of going the long way over fossils?!
There are non-fossil sources of energy, though. Even without a major discovery like fusion power, we could in theory stop the progress of global warming at any time by building a lot of fission powerplants powering direct carbon capture.
The rule of thumb is that technology creates problems that cannot be solved with the same level of technology.
Do you think an LLM can change the laws of physics?
Which societal problems require changing the laws of physics to fix?
Entropy means the costs of cleaning carbon out of the air are only going up.
We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.
> We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.
Well, it was true in the 90s, and it's still true today. Once climate change becomes important enough (that is, causing actual significant damage to important, wealthy countries), it takes just one such country to start a stratospheric aerosol injection project, or, if space launch costs become low enough, put a sunshade between Earth and the Sun. Such solutions have their own risks, of course. But if climate change really becomes bad, they will be tried. And from what I have read, they have a good change of succeeding.
It will still be true another 30 years from now perhaps, but nobody who has the actual funds to spend seems to care. If the world was actually taking it seriously, it would be dealt with like the ozone hole was. Instead, we're still debating whether it's real, and if it's real whether it's important, and if it's important whether it is more important than - I don't know - pretty much anything else.
What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
> What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
They are still not melting enough. Most of the negative consequences of current summer heatwaves can be pretty much solved by installing US-style ubiquitous air conditioning.
Yup, as I said. Same as rich people do everywhere, they don't have to worry, they won't run out of water or power, if things get too hot where they are they'll just move somewhere nicer. They have the money and zero incentive to solve the actual problem.
An extremely wealthy acquaintance in my local circle is happy to endlessly debate whether climate change is ACTUALLY real or just scientists carving out job security, while flying out for monthly ski holidays wherever there's nice snow in the world when it gets a bit muggy at home.
It is already causing actual significant damage to important wealthy countries. Just not in a way that directly impacts the people with the means to make a significant impact.
It worked out well for every problem so far.
Unless they've somehow restored Norway's glaciers with a refrigerator of some sort, I think you might be mistaking a local maximum for a global one.
Unless it’s social media, advertising, sex trafficking, or fraud.
It’s silly to pretend that technology is anything other than a double edged sword.
I did not say it didn't create new problems, or addressed everything already.
I'll grant you social media and advertising, but the other two are not new, and were way worse in the past.
It’s sarcastic in context. My comment doesn’t make sense without GP.
Or to spell it out more clearly, the sarcasm has nothing to do with the truth value of the claim (I’m not making an assertion in either direction).
Climate change is a lot less important when you are rich enough that it doesn't impact you personally, and when you don't care about what the world looks like after you die.
Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that's going to impact the company's profitability, but by then your stock options will have already vested - so that's a problem for someone else!
They could be doing more to combat climate change, but that's also true for everyone in this thread.
Personally I will forgive them the Datacenter carbon if they are willing to stop flying private jets.
Google, at least, purchases 100% of its electricity from renewable sources. This doesn't mean that they have renewables feeding directly into all their datacenters at all times -- but for every kWh they consume, they purchase a kWh of renewable energy somewhere and add it to the grid.
Do they shutdown when there is no renewable power available? I doubt they have enough battery capacity... The whole per unit buying is misleading. In the moment is what really matters. Not to forget them paying for renewable power can move others to non-renewable sources...
What it means is that they only pay for generation that's renewable and the energy company assures them by contract that they'll only be paying for renewables.
The rest of us, who might be on green tariffs usually get a commitment that on average almost all our energy comes from renewables. When supply is short then I'm the one who's paying for gas generation rather than the company who has committed to greenwashing. But that also drives investment in renewable generation, in the UK renewables have gone from 2% of power generation in 1991 to around 50% now.
No, but they cover their fossil fuel energy usage by entering into PPAs [1] for new clean energy projects that get added to the grid. This allows renewable projects that would otherwise not have been economical to finance to get built. This is additional renewable capacity that that goes into the energy mix. It moves others onto renewable sources, often without them even knowing it.
From a climate change perspective, what happens at one particular moment doesn't matter -- it's CO2 emissions globally over time that do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_purchase_agreement
By me they are converting cornfields to data center campuses. People hate it and are against it.
They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.
They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.
I wonder what causes more harm? High fructose corn syrup or data centres?
What's so great about cornfields? I can imagine hating it if they were deforesting the Amazon or something.
The argument they make is, "it is food and we eat it". Nevermind most of the corn grown is not eaten by people.
Yeah, but our food eats it too.
Mostly our cars drink it
45% and rising.
I have bad news about what they are deforesting the Amazon for (hint: cornfields)
Chocolate and coffee I believe
It's almost like people want things built that they directly benefit from.
A warehouse provides hundreds of lower education jobs. Well at least until they go completely robot.
Not everyone is a software developer.
Aren't most people directly benefiting from AI?
No? I can think of so many things in life that were better just a couple years ago.
And you think they wouldn't directly benefit from solar power?
What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.
Directly? No. Indirectly? Of course they do. Everyone does.
Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.
NIMBYism isn't rational, it's a manifestation of fear of change, even if they past state of affairs was worse than the future one. I live in a city where the anti-datacentre campaign isn't about some pleasant locale, but a disused toxic industrial land in a steel-mill complex over half a km away from any actual homes.
The corn field is a known quantity.
They can make all objections or decisions they want on their own private property. It seems people have too much levers to pull to control what others can do with their property.
In the US, there's currently about 300x more land used by cornfields than by data centers.
Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.
A lot of people have dumb opinions grounded in ill-thought-out ideas like "natural cornfields are morally superior to human-built infrastructure buildings" or "solar power is a Democratic party conspiracy". In general it should be easier for property owners with skin in the game to make good land use decisions to make them without having to need small-d-democratic opposition from locals with bad incentices and values.
On Nextdoor, I have met several people who believed solar and wind polluted more than coal plants.
I see that from time to time on HN. It’s hard to believe they’ve never encountered mercury or arsenic in their news.
Anyone with kids probably should be aware of Mercury - it's an important guideline during pregnancy, all the mercury in fish. I don't have kids, so I am not sure if the doctors explain how all the mercury got into the fish...
> The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
At a large enough scale, it doesn't matter how efficient you are - you're still causing a more damage than the region or the world can take.
Except that's not what you see people be up in arms about, or news reporting. Just like with a lot of other topics.
There being a grain of truth or a valid angle doesn't wash bullshit from being bullshit.
Is it actually bullshit? Where's the data?
Well, in the post above, isn’t it? Mind you, I was simply reacting to your general reasoning with some of my own, so bit of a misdirected question if not rhetorical...
Or here, in this comment from below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958135
Now where's the data for the popular claim (which as you conceded is not what you just posted, where it's specifically the overall burden that is too big)? I'm amenable even for a complex mix of cases, where some of the local impact is too much. Would be good to know what share of it is true, even if only a sliver. Although this wouldn't change the bullshit conclusion.
There's also a lot of folks out there with no sense of scale getting "dihydrogen-monoxieded" by scaremongering tactics like measuring power consumption in number of atomic bombs.
It’s not the water. It’s the electric usage, air and noise pollution from sanctioned (and often unsanctioned) diesel generators.
The concern is real and very much deserves the opprobrium voters are showing.
It's different issues in different places, and when built/operated by different companies. Global companies that put their name on the facility will be more careful of optics than a PE firm that hides behind shell companies.
The data centers in the article aren't ever running on generators.
The disparity is that older data centers were for storing and serving data. They have a lot of bandwidth and storage, but aren't consuming much energy. Plus, they are there to provide quicker access to data, to provide a service to actual people.
New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.
These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.
With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
> At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss
Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable
I don’t find this wholly convincing since it’s a smaller scale search but there does seem to be some truth to noise issues: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo also some data here which seems to support OP during generator tests: https://www.lsars.com/data-center-noise
I gave this half an hour video the first 10 minutes. He
- explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)
- played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient
- showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas
- did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record
- did not disclose the actual dB SPL figures measured
- kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.
If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research, at least in this context.
The video is nonsense. There’s an article that takes it down in detail here:
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
I would have hoped people would have been inoculated against the 'infrasound is harmful' nonsense when it was used as a complaint against wind turbines.
IDK, I remember reading something about infrasounds killing chickens in documentation of beep() function in Borland C++, so it must be true.
My kids exceed that at random times during the day.
Yes, data centers are loud. Fortunately, some time ago humans achieved magical technological breakthroughs called "earplugs" and "ear protectors".
This is not really the same thing. When people are discussing the dB output of things like data centers, it's a constant volume. While your kids may be loud, they are not outputting this volume 24/7 without rest. (If they are, consider enrolling them in Opera singing lessons.)
And furthermore, the actual acoustical impact is very different from what is measurable or what might cause physical harm.
I've spent enough time on city council noise ordnance boards and understand enough about acoustics to say that the professional sound system I own would certainly be audible and annoying to my neighbors half a kilometer away even if it were not appreciably above the noise floor of the surrounding environment.
Folks are great a signal detection and it's very annoying to them to be able to detect an unwanted bass drum or similar, which they can do at pretty long distances. Even distributed noise is still often noticeable to people.
For instance, I live in the literal middle of nowhere and I still encounter real noise pollution from gas well heads and gas processing plants that are several kilometers from my home.
Yea, and if you go beyond people, animals are much more receptive. It's one thing to have a big building nearby that's sort of annoying, it's another thing when that building means all your local wildlife leaves. No birds singing, deer, raccoons, opossums gone, etc.
Are you suggesting they just wear earplugs 24/7 if they happen to live near one if these data centers?
do you have data on no new jobs/tax revenue?
I’m under the impression that most data centers have very few staff on site, almost zero.
Sure, some temporary jobs during construction, but I bet it’s nothing like a retail store or factory in operation…
As for taxable revenue, how does that help the community beyond property tax assessments?
Look at your local megascale datacenter on Google Maps satellite view. How many parking spots does it have? How many of those parking spots are occupied? Are you seeing hundreds of cars, or is it just the mandatory pair of security guards and maybe a remote hands technician or three?
The tax breaks are well-established in the media, see for example [0].
The taxable income is generated remotely from the location of the physical data centre.
That’s the root of the problem.
Even if the data centre raises billions in revenue and pays billions in taxes, that isn’t paid to any government entity close to where the building is.
The locals get replaced by machines, the revenue is pocketed far away.
It’s the equivalent of big mining companies “investing” into mine automation in some developing country. The locals do not benefit!
Yeah I am going to be honest if Google was a Dutch company they would bulldoze houses for them. They do it for ASML. But it is an American company and nobody likes them. The Netherlands, for all it's faults, is still too dignified to become a US colony.
>They do it for ASML.
Who then refuse to sell their machines to anyone except some Taiwanese company.
They say no one is buying.
It comes in about 0.2-0.3 people per MW, but as the size rises the number of people per MW reduces.
So, a 100MW DC will have about 20-30 people and a 1GW campus will be 200-300 people.
Those numbers can be boosted if the site has a significant non-operational support staff such as security and cleaning. But a significant part of security us heavily automated, to the point where when Meta had a major network failure they couldn't get on-call support staff into the facilities to fix the issue because the security doors were linked to the main network.
You can’t collect tax revenue by giving away tax breaks worth almost the entirety of the taxes that would otherwise be collected. This is particularly common in the the gulf south - see Louisiana with Hyperion, which also has been an absolute disaster of a construction project (deaths, school can’t operate, all kinds of violations and damage) and is estimated to produce double digit jobs.
>For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW.
This is always kind of funny to me. How's an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?
How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed "data" center?
Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they'd like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.
Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can't decide if it's zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I'd be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can't be purely about power consumption.
>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?
What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because you aren't receiving the benefits is naive. No one's doing all this for free.
>If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We've been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?
You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?
And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.
Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you're not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.
>How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.
Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.
This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.
I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1tes0rr/ai_data_cen...
[1]https://global.honda/en/environment/initiatives/data/
[2]https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv...
[3]https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/health-care.p...
[4]https://electricityplans.com/how-much-electricity-does-an-ap...
[5]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5058574/ for water usage per square meter for hospitals
[6]https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2017/1131/ofr20171131.pdf for water per person per year
Thank you. This seems a good start to a desperately needed credible "externalities report" to ground political and economic discussion.
The flood of anecdotal thumping seems to distract and undermine deliberation. The sad lack of peer reviewed data and impact analysis hinders thoughtful policymaking.
This is absolutely false. Those are the noise levels _inside_ the facilities. Noise attenuates by inverse-square law by distance. 90dB at 100 meters means 116dB at 5 meters distance... That's industrial alarms level of noise and would never fly in a residential area.
Having worked in data center HVAC for a while I can confidently say you would only expect this noise from a pump room. Not even the air handlers or evaporators on the roof will be this loud
The noise from backup generator and step down transform can be quite annoying. Not loud, just annoying.
Extra zero. Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB. Even traditional server facilities can hit 80-90dB inside. I've read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn't fly.
So, first of all, I agree, that's still top much. But I think it's important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).
I absolutely believe that there's leftover noise around the facilities, too, specially low-frequency humming for electrical equipment, but I have yet to see _actual_ reporting demonstrating newer AI-centered datacenters produce even near the amount of noise OP was claiming.
That would mean 130dB of noise inside the facility, which sounds (pun intended) impossible to me, no matter how bad the acoustic planning is.
edit: just understood what "Extra zero" meant. The original comment before being edited said 100m and that's what I was quoting.
as someone who has driven by Google data centers in Iowa and Facebook in Oregon, I can report you that I can’t hear anything from them from the roadside.
Apparently the noise emanates from massive fans for evaporative cooling on the roof. It's not coming from inside, which is why it carries so easily.
That makes sense, indeed. I've yet to see one of these new datacenters, but I've recently visited a hyperscaler's datacenter and most of the noise did seem to come from the outside ventilation.
I still heard almost nothing ~20m from it, but neither I (nor the company who built it) knew what kinds of workloads ran there and I suspect it was mostly traditional workloads.
> So, first of all, I agree, that's still top much. But I think it's important to point out that 60dB is, _literally_, 1.000 less than what OP was claiming (90dB).
For someone who knows enough to point out that dB is logarithmic, you seemed to have neglected the fact that sound is inverse-square for distance? Unless these neighbors are _literally_ located 100m outside the data center?
Isn't this literally saying the same thing?
No. They point out that 60dB is 1000 less than 90dB, which is true. In order to make that point they gloss over the fact that one measurement was taken at 100m (90dB) and another (much lower) at whatever distance the neighbors are at. Both measurements can be true (while the comment suggests that the 90dB is false).
dB should generally be expressed at what distance it was measured, and you'll see this done all over the place.
In this case, you'd reach 70dB at about 1km from the 90dB at 100m source, assuming a spherical cow, but they could also be completely different datacenters.
I haven't really glossed over that fact, although nothing you've said here is factually wrong.
OP was talking about datacenters in residential areas and quoted the 90db @ 100m value, which indeed is 70dB @ 1km distance, which is absolutely absurd and would make it impossible to live nearby. That's the original comment I've answered.
Then, OP edited the post and said it was 90dB @ 10m, which means 50dB @ 1000m, an okayish value (depending on the type and duration of the noise), but that's not a distance we were talking about before.
I know datacenters in my city that are less than 500m from residential zoning (I should note I'm not in the US and this is not a new datacenter), so I didn't think that the original (distance) measurement sounded absurd, that's why I pointed out how much the (noise) measurement seemed to be out-of-scale.
Anyways, I think OP's measures where just completely made up or misremembered, because I'm any way I've framed the data (and the edited data), it doesn't match my personal observations around the few datacenters I've been to nor the data that's been released.
I did agree about the possibility of low-frequency noises being a huge nuisance, though, as those types of noises feel much worse than random noises at random intervals at higher dB.
Inverse square law is proportional, so the distance isn't fixed. It depends on the base sphere of the original measurement, which can be quite large. If the size of the data center property is 100m and the flux at the property line is 70dB, it's only 1/4'd at a doubling of the radius, 50m away. So that only attenuates to ~65dB.
It's also not a uniform medium. Sound gets reflected by houses, the ground, resonance, so it can constructively interfere and have a extra few times the expected amplitude. This can make the sound quaver and become really annoying, too.
1.2kw over what time period?
Presumably on average over a year.
1.2kw is power, not energy (which would be kWh).
`w` is nothing but an ancient Unix command.
The unit you want is spelled “kW”. There really is a difference, especially when you’re inconsistently correcting someone else.
Watts is already a unit of energy over time. (J/s)
Aka it's a unit of power. Hence the OP asked over what time to figure out the amount of energy used..?
Surely that is the average usage over time? 28.8kWh per day?
Edit: The average household in the U.S. uses 10500kWh of power per year. 28.76kWh per day.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
Bright lighting is typically an artifact of the commercial property insurance policy in effect (namely, "Protective Safeguards"). It's asking you to demonstrate that you've done enough to create a barrier towards theft/loss.
It doesn't have to be really bright lighting but that's the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter's request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.
Doesn't matter to Bob, who lives across the road from the datacenter and has an artificial sun outside his bedroom 24/7 and wants to burn the thing to the ground.
Ya but the same would be true no matter what kind of industrial facility was across the street.
I live very near to two industrial facilities, but they deal with agricultural products instead of high-value GPU farms. They've got some lights outside and they're not bothersome.
It's been my experience that living urban means black out curtains and ear plugs are a must. Sub damaging levels, a continual hum is better than spiky sounds like sirens, loud exhausts, and people thinking fireworks are cool beyond July 4th.
> With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers
I would have traded a data center for the dairies I lived near as a kid
Why?
Datacenters don't (usually) smell of liquid cowshit, which is NOT AT ALL what you think it would smell like if you've only ever had the pleasure of cowpies.
Pigs are worse. They are unexpectedly similar to humans in this regard: their shit smells almost as much as our shit
Also if they make cheese there, the fermentation stench is very potent.
100% and if you've never had the experience you really can't properly conceive of how bad the smell is. It's not just stinky as in someone blowing up the bathroom, it's a smell so thick in the air that it can make you want to vomit and will likely give you headaches from the methane or other gasses involved. Depending on how it's being handled e.g. if they spray it on a field they use to grow feed for the cattle you can wind up dealing with levels that feel unsafe for weeks out of the year.
Cows smelly. Lots of cows really smelly.
The noise issue kinda needs to be treated separately to the other issues imo. As I understand it the loud part is the gas turbine generators that some datacenters run, so while it’s associated, it’s not strictly a datacenter thing.
> The disparity is that older data centers were for storing and serving data. … New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead.
Maybe we should be calling them "compute centers" instead of "data centers".
> At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
Good point. That's what a data center is called in German: 'Rechenzentrum', 'rechnen' = to compute, calculate
"Rechnen" is short for the now obsolete "rechenen", which seems to be where the words "Rechenzentrum" and "Rechenaufgabe" came from. It's a word that predates what we call computers today, too.
A "Rechenzentrum" was a place where lots and lots of people were sitting down crunching numbers with pen on paper. This job also existed in the USA, where originally "computer" was the job title of someone working in such a computer center.
But then electronic computers became better at crunching numbers than human computers, so the job became obsolete. The word stayed around, but the meaning changed. Same way we dial phone numbers despite phones no longer having dials. We also still hang up the phone, despite there being nothing to hang the phone on anymore.
I sometimes forget the meaning of data in English. In my language, a computer is a «data machine», so a «data center» is obviously just a center of computing, which would have fit.
> At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
> Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
I'd also question whether that is inside or outside. We already have regulations that govern the acceptable noise levels around commercial and industrial properties so I highly doubt that a datacenter is going to have an exception.
The only case that would match for 90dB anywhere outside a datacenter are abominations like the xAI one with ton of barely-legal to straight out illegal (before recent rule change) gas turbines providing power, which is an issue downstream from US grid being utter shit
I can’t actually understand the incapacity of the richest country on the world to build infrastructure. Why would people be fighting over resources like that when you can just build a hell lot of wind, solar and gas plants along with batteries and whatnot.
From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.
As a non American, I find this incomprehensible.
Because the US president considers solar and wind to be a woke scam, and no company wants to build legacy coal plants because it's a terrible investment at this point. So the datacenters are just building their own gas plants next to the buildings causing all of the noise and air pollution people are mad about.
> But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.
Why can’t it be discussed?
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
you can't eat ethanol either, you burn it to create more global warming
That's why they talked about ethanol.
How does it compare to the water used growing alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia?
"... and keep your hand up if your ethical, water saving stance means you've become vegan."
Also even in the totally fake scenario where that water completely evaporates, it's just gonna rain on Iowa a bit more.
I guess it has to be said: it is not guaranteed that the water rains in the "right" spots for it to be useful freshwater again anymore. Dumb example: maybe the wind currents mean that the water simply comes back down downstream.
One shouldn't assume that evaporated water comes back into the system in the place you want it to. Water management orgs try to reduce loss from evaporation for a reason!
OK sure but this is like defense in depth. It's a negligible amount of water, most of it doesn't evaporate, and most of what does rains somewhere it's useful anyway. The actual damage here is microscopic.
You're literally on a thread just a comment or two from the water cost of producing ethanol. Why are you still talking about data center water evaporation? This is morally equivalent to worrying about the water consumption of Slip-N-Slides. Everything is a rounding error compared to agricultural misuse of water.
i'm guessing it means that when datacenter gets too hot (maybe load, maybe climate, or maybe a combination), they may use more evaporative or other methods to help cool. e.g. a turbo mode for cooling that uses more water, but isn't required at all times.
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.
No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.
>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.
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...
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.
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.
A single average sized fully occupied apartment building uses 8-13 million gallons per year on average.
A typical single family home uses over 100K gallons.
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%.
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.
Tech companies are bundling AI into their base subscriptions and force feeding it to consumers, so I doubt the metrics they are reporting to their shareholders represent real demand or value.
Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
How do you get the California water to this datacenter?
In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.
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.
I live in a country of 5 million people and we lose 40 times that a year to leaks.
So a single datacentre introduces a water consumption cost that is within an order-of-magnitude of a near-median-population nation.
Within the amount of water lost by a near-median-population nation, perhaps. Not within the amount of water used productively by a near-median-population.
still stays in the ground
ground is actually a vector of loss for water.
if you look at household water consumption, most places in north america treat their water and return it to a freshwater source. you can scale cities very wide and water use might go up, but the consumption rate is actually low. more depending on how much people water their lawns.
farms on the other hand 'spray water on the ground' but it actually removes the water from the freshwater source and needs to be replenished.
leaks is water loss/consumption. human activity is no guarantee. leak in this case is still bad.
The freshwater source might be an aquifer so staying in the ground isn't a loss to the local water supply, though it may be a loss in regards to effort to move and treat it.
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.
Remind me median income?
Remind me who leaves 8 bath tub faucets running 24/7/365?
Me?
$87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill.
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
Yeah I’m sure someone on median income feels the same
Probably, yeah.
Do you think people look at big facilities and calculate that they're spending whatever times the medium wage on a crucial service and get mad about it?
Converting things into median wages is a way to put them into scale. They spent this many wages for construction, they spend this many on supplies, they sell this many in product, they hire this many people to work there. If anyone thinks its bad for anything a company buys to exceed a median wage, that's a very silly expectation and I wonder where they got it.
I don't know if you mean to be reinforcing that it's nothing or not
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.
So a system to recirculate the same 24 gallons per minute would be more expensive than $100k per year for water?
Apparently so
Condensing the steam back into water would undo the cooling power, so yes. Massively less efficient. Negative efficiency, as required by thermodynamics.
Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
Evaporating a gram of water is 2260 joules. Evaporating 20 gallons per minute, 1/3 of a gallon per second, gets rid of around 3 megawatts of heat.
If you had to use heat pumps to move all that out of the water, you'd have to spend about a million dollars on their electricity. If you're somewhere that you can use unassisted radiators all year, great. If you need to force the heat out part of the year, that easily gets worse than boiling off water.
Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/water/
Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
That turns the focus to almonds and how insanely bad they are.
I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
No, it's just that people notice when they're being asked to concern themselves with numbers this far to the right of the decimal point. It's not just that almonds are bad. It's that they're vastly, heroically worse than data centers, so much so that optimizing water usage at data centers is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic.
If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
> But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
you've hit the silent nail on the head.
The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).
If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?
It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.
None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the talk about the water consumption is a red herring intentionally spread by the PR machines of these companies because it's it reframes the debate around an aspect of the issue that is ultimately irrelevant and distracts from ones that are more important like carbon emissions, pollution, electrical/gas price spikes due to induced scarcity and ultimately how these mega projects have little benefit for the people who will experience all the negative consequences of them.
Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.
That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure, our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things, and people collectively lacks the ability to think and talk about these things.
So the best we can do is inconsequential conversation about water usage.
Sorry if you think 280 household of water is not a lot and if the facts don't help your cause.
For a small locality it is a real amount of water. And if there's a draining reservoir, then that's _even more_ water being pulled out of a reservoir.
The almond discussion is tiring as well. We're not growing almonds in most of the world. The water in Montana isn't the water in Cali as well.
If the facts aren't on your side on a specific issue, at least have the courage to accept it.
> I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
People protest golf course water usage. Water usage problems in Cali are not as big of a concern to people in Montana than water usage in Montana.
And of course there are people who think that the added buildout of data centers _for AI usage_ (people acting like "oh these data centers are just from everything", let's not kid ourselves what the source of the demand is) is a net negative. People don't think that about food.
Personally I think we shouldn't be setting up massive farms in a desert (and perhaps just figure out how to make society work in a way where during winter we accept having less fresh veggies available) either.
Data center defenders need to get better talking points, cuz they sound very silly (perhaps as silly as the arguments heard on the other side!)
Should I start running through the list of industries that use more water than datacenters?
Montana exports tons of petroleum products and beef. Should I illustrate how those industries also uses orders of magnitude more water than datacenters?
In fact, I would be impressed if you could come up with a single locale where a datacenter would be the primary water consumer. Even top 3 would be kind of impressive.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say other than "datacenters use water and I don't like it, and yeah those other industires in the area use 10-100x more, but like, I don't like datascneters so we need to focus on that"
I think the real snag is that average people have absolutely -zero- concept of how much water industry uses. Your local recycling plant washes all that dirty plastic you throw in the recycling to the tune of thousands of gallons an hour. And you're learning this right now for the first time in your life. But sure, datacenters running water through metal pipes, five alarm crisis here
What happens to the water used by data centers? Is it still clean, just warmed up?
It's turned into steam. It's sent up into the atmosphere.
What the water figures show is that water usage is not the problem of these data centers. It's a drop in the bucket, literally. Yet another way to see it is that given the average weather in Lincoln, NE (29 inches of rain annually) it rains 480 million gallons annually on the 600 acres campus that Google's data center is located on. So it would be possible to collect only 3% of this rainwater, and it would be enough to cover all their water needs. Water, at the local scale of this campus or city, is an infinitely renewable resource.
Other issues than water are far worse, like pollution associated with the manufacturing and running of all the data center gear. Water is not the issue.
>Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France
I wouldn't be surprised if this 4x difference was purely caused by lawns.
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?!
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")?
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".
We have perfectly good reasons to hide behind shell companies and ndas! Anyone who disagrees is a hater!
Because hedge funds are going to use those numbers to get better estimates of their business and revenues and use that in their forecasting which means Google loses in the stock market.
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.
> 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.
I think that's true, but also is the corruption of allowing works going without enough preparation.
If I remember correctly there are a considerable number of cases where habitants said they would have increased price in their bills or some even saying that their supply will be cut short or completely.
And this is not even considering other problems such as noise, pollution, etc
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.
Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.
That’s more of a convenient way to distribute and isolate risks than it is anything nefarious.
Or to shift blame and hide wrongdoing.
You see, that is nefarious. Not taking responsibility is nefarious.
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"?
No, it’s that if there’s nothing to hide, then they shouldn’t jump through so many hoops to avoid basic industrial reporting requirements.
It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.
If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.
I'm commenting here about the water figure. Are you talking about something else? Because the impact of that amount of water usage is knowable regardless of the corporate structure of the data center.
To me, the logic is companies don’t put their brand on activities that contribute to tragedies of the commons.
Alphabet could have named the company “google data center 083941, llc.”
But Alphabet deliberately obfuscated its control of the facility.
Real estate is almost always "hidden" behind an LLC or REIT, as recommended as common practice by CPAs and attorneys.
It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.
Literally every movie ever made was made by an LLC created specifically to make that movie. This is not some nefarious thing. It’s common business practice in any number of industries
Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?
Transparency is not the same thing as honesty.
Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.
Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.
> Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
none of these are reason for the country not to demand transparent data for monitoring.
Being able to monitor things properly has high societal value - it prevents fraud (more data being visible makes it harder to fake). It prevents skirting regulations, and makes it easier for competitors to sniff out high margin opportunities (which serves to break monopolies in some sense).
Not to mention that statistics collected could have value in aggregate in research sometime in the future.
Like auditing and accounting, the country should mandate transparent data reporting of utilities usage for all industries.
The rub is that datacenters rank like 34th for water usage by industry.
So by ignoring the other 33 higher users and just focusing on DCs, what are we actually trying to accomplish?
I agree. And let it be legislated.
I was replying to "Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?".
I don't understand your question. I'm commenting on the figures we know from this report. I don't have to work out the motives behind them to evaluate whether they're material (they are not).
Because the marketing teams don't do numbers and it's a high risk strategy
They are, and people just accuse them of lying!
Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.
Lincoln data center "comes online" in 2026 (info from Google). These are early, non-mature operating numbers. I'm disappointed this wasn't made more clear in the story and, of course, most of the comments here don't understand the context.
You're assuming they're hiding the numbers because they think they seem bad in the discussions about data centers using too much water. The cover up is likely motivated much differently, and I would bet that doesn't really care about people complaining about waiter usage.
Google prints the water usage of each of their sites in their annual report. What other industry is more transparent about water usage?
Perhaps not a meaningful amount at a national/worldwide scale. However, an individual datacentre consuming that amount at a local/regional scale could be more impactful.
The nearby city uses as 30Mgal to 60Mgal per day vs the data center that uses 13Mgal per year. The article gives you the data.
Water in Omaha, Nebraska isn't all that scarce, either.
Not a meaningful amount of water in early reporting from a non-mature operating state. Why are we drawing any conclusions at this point?
The only conclusion I am drawing is about this particular report.
So you’re limiting the scope of your analysis to this report only? Where does it mention water usage by housing built in Austin over the past two years?
You’re comfortable making those comparisons and concluding how significant the water usage is but you’re unwilling to check the context of the data in the report? Not sure I follow.
Did you stop reading the article at the first data center? "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." (emphasis mine)
That's still not a meaningful amount of water! Did you work out what that equates to? We discussed it elsewhere on the thread.
A typical house uses 100,000 gallons a year. So that's 5000 homes.
Austin alone added over 70,000 homes over the last 2 years.
Austin metro area has a larger population than the state of Nebraska.
Do you recall reading many articles about the water usage calamity 70,000 new houses constitute?
The comparand here isn't "all the houses in Austin". It's "the number of houses Austin has added in the last 2 years alone". And it's vastly larger than the data center usage number we're discussing.
Yeah, though it says right below that 6 data centers report using 750MG, which is weird cause each of them would average 125MG, so 10 times more than the 13MG reported above.
At what point does it become significant? I’d think 200 olympic swimming pool worth of water taken out of the local ecology would have some impact. I guess it depends on the region.
The article doesnt say though if all the water ends up evaporated.
Read TFA, that is just the usage of the smallest data enter in NE, across NE their water usage is ~50x that, and that’s just Nebraska, not exactly a hub for data centers
You get that 50x that is a rounding error too, right?
This article seems to focus on one of the less interesting in terms of water usage data centers (for most of us non-locals) because the paper is from Lincoln and that data center is in Lincoln.
The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon.
Seemingly much better article (pictures, better comparisons): https://flatwaterfreepress.org/data-centers-can-guzzle-serio...
Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one.
Update: in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient. That would be a nice thing for some journalist to research...
Update 2: it seems that Google uses water-evaporation cooling in regions that they don't consider water-stressed. Here's a not-so-great reference (scroll down if the text-fragment link doesn't work): https://www.axios.com/2026/06/03/google-pushes-water-standar...
So the big one uses the same amount of water per year that Lincoln city uses in 10 days?
I lived in a town that had two lakes. No water problems for decades. Two year drought brought the lakes down about 30 feet each, so it looked a little bit like Lake Mead. Water rationing in the second year, maybe the tail end of the first, I no longer recall. Brown lawns everywhere
The city finally got permission from the state and the Army Corps to divert water from a nearby river, but only when the river was at a relatively high rate of flow. So functionally what happened was that once the drought broke they were able to refill the lakes faster, and top them up during storms in wet/dry cycles.
Every place is going to have higher and higher odds of becoming water-stressed over the next three decades. Some places more than others. Will the data centers shut down in those situations?
You might think that using 5% of the municipal water supply isn't much but it's a significant fraction of what austerity measures would be able to conserve to retain water through a prolonged drought. In that situation holding water a few extra months until the rains return is the goal.
lets build more sponge cities while we are at it.
Let’s. You should know better than that by now. Rural states spend more tax dollars than they bring in. A lot of that is down to highways being really fucking expensive and making them go near the back of beyond more so.
Cities are more efficient and large enough to sustain culture.
People shouldn't be latching onto side effect costs of AI data centers like water or energy use, it seems like an abstraction layer above the core complaint. If we don't want AI, or LLMs, or data centers that should be the complaint. Once it is abstracted to water use or similar it opens the door for data to show the actual water use is comparatively small.
Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
I agree with your first point but not the analogy. Climate change is causally related to carbon emissions; if we had 100% carbon-free energy, there would be no concern with waste beyond inefficiency. Data centers can increase electricity/water prices, but it's not a linear relationship like climate change. Prices can stay constant or even go down if we increase supply by building more infrastructure, or decrease demand by limiting how much non-residential buildings can pull from the network. But yes, the conversation about utilities is ultimately more of a proxy for political frustration. If data centers became 10x more efficient, the same people would find something new to complain about because they're fundamentally against the technology itself.
I'm not actually sure where you land on climate change being causally linked.
Don't get me wrong, I think carbon emissions matter but primarily because we should simply do better if we can. But I've never found a study that proves causation, at best its correlation shown primarily through modeling.
That doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it does mean that reducing carbon specifically isn't guaranteed to reduce or reverse climate change.
Surely you must agree thst such a complex system as the global climate can't be driven by a single factor, or a single element on the periodic table.
You can always have a conversation with AI about it. Relevant topics: physics of the enhanced greenhouse effect, IPCC methodology on attributing global warming to human activities, transient climate response to cumulative CO2 emissions.
Yes, those are all well researched and well understood concepts based on a large body of modelling studies. Both can be true at the same time, and just because the data can only support correlation doesn't mean its irrelevant or not useful, it simply means we can't extrapolate to an argument of causation.
I'm not sure what you mean by "correlation" in this context. The things I mentioned are strong evidence of causation. CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming by well-understood physical proceses, and human activities account for almost all of the warming above pre-industrial levels. In fact, the net amount of warming undercounts how much we have caused because we have also released aerosols into the atmosphere which cause cooling.
As I said, have a conversation with a top AI model and try to convince it that there is no evidence of causation between CO2 and climate change. AI is better than me or any other human at pushing back and presenting the right arguments and evidence for a specific line of questioning.
When laws are unjust, resistance is duty. And you usually have to come at them sideways, to delay while the wheels of justice slowly grind toward repeal.
Legislation gets easier once public opinion has turned against an idea or a company. But it takes a while to build that up.
Which laws are unjust in this context?
I think I may agree with you here, but in this context can't you add more details? Your comment here is pretty high level and not specific to this topic or how we might go about trying to handle it.
What should people concerned about fresh water supply over the next few decades do?
How do we responsibly plan for clean, drinkable water becoming a resource only people/businesses with a certain income can afford?
At what point do we ask “do we need to use drinking water for cooling servers, or is that just the cheapest design?”
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.
You are overlooking scale and pace. No one is trying to build more steel mills in the next 3 or 4 years than have been built over the entire history of the steel mill industry so far, with each new steel mill using around an order of magnitude more energy in the same space than steel mills built a few years ago.
I'm not against local governments setting zoning laws and regulations if they're concerned about the pace of growth. Personally, I'm not concerned because I think we can and should invest in infrastructure to keep up with demand. This will benefit all industries, not just AI. My point is that I suspect (I'll admit that I haven't done any research on this) that people wouldn't be against facilities with the exact same footprint if they didn't carry the label "data center" and this is primarily driven by a backlash against AI rather than the resource use itself. In that sense, they're trying to rebrand a political/culture war issue as a zoning or utility issue.
After Prohibition was repealed, we didn't outlaw public drinking, but we did outlaw public drunkenness. There's only about a factor of 2-3 between the legal and the illegal activity. A fairly narrow margin between acceptable and excess, if you ask me. But it's not unique in that regard. We have the same kind of rules for interest rates, for instance. We accept this much, but not a larger amount.
> we didn't outlaw public drinking
Tonto, dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.
I am not really aware of the laws around walking down a public sidewalk with a beer in hand. It is certainly gauche but a done-thing to sit at a bus stop and have a Fireball or two.
However, any drinking establishment that serves alcohol will stop you at the door and won't permit anyone to carry drinks outside of their premises. That's a strict thing. My apartment community bans drinking in walkways and stairwells, which was probably done more by non-residents than my neighbors. So there are a lot of bans on public drinking, even if it is not blanket-outlawed.
A couple of major developments at the shopping mall, though: traditionally all American movie theaters were dry, but that rule has been relaxed, and even the major chains are serving alcohol now. At the mall there has been instituted a "sip & stroll" policy, where designated bars can serve you a plastic cup, and you can roam around the mall with drink-in-hand, as long as you observe the borders of it, where you can't walk into the parking lot or off-premises with your booze.
In general, I have seen many liquor-related laws be relaxed and lightened across my county and state. It seems that there's a general lack of will to crack down on the demand-side, when there is lots and lots of profit to be had on the healthcare-side, where you will get a diagnosis and medication and treatment, whether that is IOP or in-patient, so why not encourage more drinkers to overindulge? Broken window fallacy FTW!
> dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.
Relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law
tl;dr details vary by state and municipality, but with very few exceptions you can't walk around a random town drinking fireball. Or, well, you can as long as you don't get caught.
I've seen what you're talking about though. It seems like the big trend for millenials has been "<blank> but with booze." Barcades. Sip & stroll at malls. Booze in movie theaters. Paint & Sip. The microbrewery craze that's partly just "bars but make them fancy"
If you really want to get thrown for a loop, go read up about the Tavern League. One of the most powerful lobbies in Wisconsin state government is a massive cartel of... bars.
So we generally have threads because replies relate to the posts above and I have no idea what any of this has to do with the message I responded to.
These new proposals, which have been suspiciously hidden under NDA’s, misdirection, etc. are ENORMOUS. And the local permitting in my area has data centers categorized as “light industrial”, and thus passed a 1-year moratorium to revisit the code. I am fully aware of smaller data centers along the highway I drive every day with no issue, and as such I do not consider myself crazy.
But are the NDAs new, or were you manipulated into caring about them this time and not the 1000's of other times it's happened (across various industries)
It's helpful when journos put things in terms the layman can relate to.
I had no idea what 13 million gallons of water was until they pointed out it was like when I filled up my olympic swimming pool 20 times. That was a slow summer.
Given the pressure construed on resources, why not use personal or household usage averages?
Maybe ~450 people-years doesn't have the same impact as Olympic pools.
Its about the same consumption as a large chemical plant.
Or a medium/large apartment building
How large? What's the total floor area in cricket pitches?
As soon as I saw the headline I knew they’d use Olympic swimming pools as the comparison point, as this is seemingly the international unit of volume for journalism
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.
[1] https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?ope...
Ok but if you are permitted for some obscene number you could at any point draw that down no?
Why, to flush money down the drain? It would be crazy to go near your limit except in the hottest part of summer.
Why is Masley "problematic" and what's he been wrong about?
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.
What? I follow him on Twitter, and he's pretty open worried about AI existental risk. He just wants accurate reporting about the situation.
> His piece on heat island effects fell over under scrutiny
Do you have a link for this? I'm interested in learning more about why Masley is wrong on heat islands.
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.
He's done just terrible things, the accusations are true. No one wants to associate with him because of all the bad things he's done. Everyone knows he's a liar, and anyone asking for evidence of it is a perfidious pro-AI ideologue.
What terrible things has he done and what accusations? I'm going assume I won't get any reply to my comment
I'm pretty sure that comment was intended as sarcastic.
> 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!
Yea, that stuck out to me more than the resource usage.
Id find it difficult to believe that these companies are giving that much money in free loans to the government the way a retail worker estimating their taxes and getting a refund of a few hundred to thousand a year does.
Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Nebraska had a unexpected 86 million dollar gap in tax revenues collected last year[1] and these tax 3 tax breaks on their own account for 130% of that
[1]https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/15/nebraska-ends-fiscal...
> Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Given the numbers I've seen for tax breaks for other big construction projects (malls, factories, etc), I wouldn't be surprised if the state ends up in the red on datacentres. It's not all that uncommon for the state to offset project cost 100% on the promise of job creation.
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.
Now compare to Nebraska's water usage...
Why do you say “immigrant population”?
you can say something like data centers are using as much electricity as if 33% new people started living in Nebraska. they are like our new neighbors. A new county of benevolent super-smart scientists in a data center.
I understood your point when I read it, and it didn't bother me. But the term inadvertently triggers a different hot-button issue in people's minds, so I think a clearer term might have been "marginal population increase".
The reason I dislike this is data centers aren’t houses, they are industry. Industry and farms takes up more power and water than some peoples houses, because your house doesn’t need to create the power and food and stuff you need to survive.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on where it's coming from and who else needs water. If the water supply being drawn from was collected from rainwater initially and there's still enough for local residents to also have water, then sure, it's probably sustainable. But if the water is coming from an underground aquifer and there's otherwise not enough rain in the region to go around then it's a finite resource.
> It's gonna come back down as rain and refill wherever datacenter took it from
It's going to come back down as rain, yes, but there is no guarantee it will come down in the place you need it. Fairly minor variations in surface temperatures and evaporation can have a large effect on local rainfall.
Yes, I live in an arid western state. It's obvious that you don't from your naive question here.
In many states it doesn't matter, but out in the arid west, water is constantly a crisis item.
How many datacenters are in the "arid west"?
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.
The greenest solution is to not consume something at all. Growth can't last forever on this planet. Do we want to spend our limited resources like this?
I've never understood the focal point of water "usage" . Short of splitting it for hydrogen, all the water that is "used" is re-deposited through evaporation, down a drain, or worst case as sewage that must be processed. For cases like watering your lawn, data centers, humidifiers etc the water is essentially just borrowed.
Why do we act like water "used" is like oil "used"? Can't we effectively have nearly unlimited water usage, given enough pipes and energy? To make it extreme but also obvious, a nuclear plant beside the ocean and a pipe could make the driest desert green.
How much polluted is the water after cooling? Can they not be reused?
As long as they don’t pollute, I don’t see much a problem with this amount of water usage. And the water doesn’t need to be disinfected either, only cleaned and filtered. So any natural renewable source would do.
It's evaporated so it's not polluted but of course it does strain the local area water supply that has to collect, treat and distribute the water first. Likely resulting in higher water prices for the area.
Most of the water evaporates in the end. Once it rains down again, it can go through water treatment plants again and be reused. The other water contains everything that was in the original incoming water and concentrated forms of minor pollution for descaling. The contamination problem isn't that big compared to a farm or chemical plant.
Once the outside air crosses a certain temperature, air-to-air AC becomes less efficient and evaporative cooling can be used to get rid of heat instead.
Of course, this has the side effect of using more water during warm periods, when people and agriculture also need more water. That can be rather problematic in drought situations, especially in the decades to come.
It should be noted that evaporated water usually doesn't rain back down in the same place it evaporated from, so increasing the evaporation in one area does not guarantee a matching increase of rainfall there.
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.
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools
Anything but metric.
13.3 megagallons is 40 acre feet.
If it was irrigation water, instead of drinking water, that would be about 26 acres worth of irrigated crops - in drought conditions.
If they were bypassing the municipal water supply or using post-wastewater treated water for their water usage, I'd be more blase about the situation. But farms are much thirstier than people.
Redaction should be a tested security operation, not a visual formatting step. If copy-and-paste, a PDF parser, or OCR can recover the content, the document was never redacted.
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
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.
So Google is getting back $100 million plus per year in rebates for 3 data centers?!?
How does that benefit Nebraska?
Bribes.
Consumption is only part of the problem other part is ground water pollution[1]
1: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
I understand electricity usage... But water "usage"? The water is not used, heat is transferred to the water, and then it is available again, right? Am I missing something? Is the heat the big problem? Why do we call it "usage"? Is it actual tap-water that could have been put to other use?
Water that had some heat transferred to it sounds like perfectly well usable water, right...?
I'd assume that most datacenters use evaporative cooling, since it does consume water directly and is pretty cheap. Some web searches on the topic were swamped with companies trying to pitch their solutions (as if I'm in that market??) but this[1] link looks... slightly less suspicious.
Dealing with waste hot-water sounds like a PITA. Piping it straight back to the reservoir would need a dedicated pipeline, probably with insulation so you don't bake everything around it. Harnessing the excess heat on-site would be awesome, although I'm sure datacenters would already doing this as best they can to recoup electricity costs.
[1] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/cooling/evaporative-cool...
Most of Nebraska’s water comes from a rapidly depleting source that renews very slowly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
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.
I would love to see a real breakdown of aquifer water usage.
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
IMO the water thing is a distraction. It gets people quibbling over water instead of asking bigger questions about the data center.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In some cases there is no stream involved at all, which is more problematic, but is pumped from groundwater.
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.
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.
This data center is in Nebraska, not California, and motionlessveloc's comment that I replied to wasn't even limited to the US as there are local protests against data center water use in other countries.
Yes, water rights law is complicated. California's access to water from the Colorado River is due to the Colorado River Compact, which exists because state disagreed on the details of how water "goes back out into the environment".
That said, I was under the impression that many data centers use municipal water, which is more subject to market price, and not water allocated by property rights. While certainly some do, it isn't always so.
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).
20-25% of the water consumed for evaporative cooling becomes contaminated waste water. It is used to clean out the residue left behind by the 75-80% of the consumed water that is evaporated.
The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
How much additive gets in there? Is it more or less contaminated than normal sewage? A reasonable amount of treatment is part of the water bill.
The excess minerals don't worry me much.
Well as long as there are statutes preventing disclosure of the real numbers, we can't treat this as a non-problem. For all we know somebody intentionally failed to redact the lowest water usage data-center in the state.
Different data centers have order of magnitude differences in water usage depending on how whether they use the water for cooling or not.
Let's have a law that makes public companies that offer cloud services run benchmarks and have to publish their Power Utilization Effectiveness, annual waste, water usage, etc.
I mean, come on, let's drive some competition on something other than profit. If someone wants to buy the greenest compute they can, and they can afford a slightly higher price, let's empower them to do that!
Obviously, the water usage had to be measured in Olympic-size swimming pools :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which begs the question of who was the source of the water/electricity FUD?
You don’t have to create unrest, sometimes you just have to let it go unchecked in the right spots.
Flood the zone.
> Just few months back
Just a few months more, and the public was still often making Epstein references.
Excess water use is actively harming people right now.
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.
It’s gonna be location dependent, and all golf courses are definitely not that well sited or ecologically engineered. I’d say most probably are not.
There are DCs that use grey water, are built by bodies of water to use them as direct heat sinks, etc. which is better.
The reason they use water at all is ironically to save energy. Evaporative cooling uses a lot less power. It’s a slider: all evaporative is little power and a lot of water, all closed cycles is lots of power and no water, and you can adjust between the extremes when designing the cooling system.
Using DC heat for urban heat in winter is the best idea. Put them in city centers. I think this is done in Europe to some extent.
For those who think "hey it's not that bad": here is some reading for you to get educated on the issue.
https://archive.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home/gt2040-deeper-... | https://water.usgs.gov/vizlab/water-availability/03-vulnerab... | https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts | https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent... | https://natureforward.org/data-centers-and-water-use/ | https://www.newsweek.com/data-centers-environmental-concerns... | https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275... | https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... | https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data... | https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts | https://www.nixonpeabody.com/insights/articles/2025/09/05/wa... | https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-res... | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri... | https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine... | https://www.worldwildlife.org/our-work/freshwater/water-scar... | https://swefc.unm.edu/home/living-without-water-is-draining-... | https://www.cdcfoundation.org/blog/addressing-growing-water-... | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/millions-of-americans-lac... | https://lifestraw.com/blogs/news/america-has-a-drinking-wate... | https://www.digdeep.org/close-the-water-gap
Those tax refunds are a little more eye watering IMO. Why? The net economic benefit of a datacenter is almost zero.
I find it quite funny that they are working so hard to redact/hide this information from the public in the first place, when they could just be publishing it and pointing at the (likely equally despised by the general public) "big ag" firm next door
> 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.
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...)
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.
Water companies in the UK lose about 2,954 million litres of water each year to leaks.
That's 1,200 olympic sized swimming pools of treated drinking water lost in leakages per year.
We're gonna need a comparison chart in number of almond milk lattes and/or golf courses. Otherwise what are we even talking about?
This is also likely insignificant compared to how much water is constantly evaporated by a large lake.
Does anyone want to offer a rebuttal? With actual numbers?
Sure, I think the rebuttal is that while your numbers are correct (and possibly even more in your favor than you may have guessed) they aren't particularly relevant.
First, the numbers. My searching says that for some particular lake in Nebraska, "Average annual gross lake evaporation ranges from about 48 inches to 54 inches". Let's call it 4 feet per year, which means 4 acre-feet of water evaporates per acre per year. Trusting some numbers someone gave in a comment earlier, the data center in question used about 40 acre-feet per year. So 10 acres of lake would evaporate about the same rate as the data center. At a very rough guess, there are something like 200,000 acres of non-seasonal lakes in Nebraska, so this is indeed a tiny percentage.
Next, the relevance. The lakes are more or less in a steady state. But if you were actually to double the evaporation rate for a 10 acre lake, you might quickly end up with a muddy pit instead of a lake. The fish would be gone, and the users of that lake would have good reason to complain. If lake was 10 times larger, so that you were only increasing the evaporation by 10%, over time you'd still probably have a major effect on the shoreline and any infrastructure there. What used to be a useable pier might look over a mud flat rather than the water, and launching a boat would be impossible until you built a new one.
But the real issue is that water use isn't actually fungible. Water continuing to evaporate from a lake at the rate it always has definitionally doesn't make people's life worse than it was. But suddenly pumping of the same amount of groundwater might be really bad for the neighbors who previously were using the same water to irrigate their fields. And trying to double the output of a small municipal water system might (at least in the short term) make things much harder for all the existing users on the system. This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done, but it's a harm that should be considered.
That's my good faith attempt to answer you. In return, I have a quick research question that I think is essential to understanding whether or not data center water usage is a big deal or not, and that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments: Where is this water for these new data centers coming from? Is it from new wells they drill? Existing irrigation wells they buy and repurpose? From the local municipal water supply? Rainwater collection? Diverting a nearby river?
I feel like there's no way to answer the question of whether data center water usage matters without considering the actual local impact, and no way of determining the impact without considering the specifics of the source. But somehow I haven't seen any mention of this on either side of the debate.
And yet, the scale of the tragedy being blown out of proportion online regarding the high water and energy consumption of data centers seems somewhat exaggerated to me. But, of course, it would be better to build them in places where there are no issues with clean water.
Data centers could avoid the whole water usage debate if they just collected rainwater on the roof or something. Most places that are getting datacenters are heavy rainers.
Not sure if those are the same places though -- evaporative cooling works best in dry places.
That'd be illegal in a lot of jurisdictions. Even residential collection of rainwater is often capped
13 "megagallons" per year is almost none especially in the context of the Missouri River.
Accidental improper redaction on purpose!
Data centers are ugly and dystopian. We can likely survive as a species without building a single other one. Society and general well-being does worse because of them and what they bring.
I wish people fought gasoline refineries as much as they fight data centers.
So what? Water used for cooling doesn't disappear.
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.
I thought some cooling setups aren't closed loop?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle
It doesn't mean the water goes back into the same sources it was pulled from, though
Water in the atmosphere doesn't help much when the aquifer that is supplying your water effectively runs out. Even if all that evaporated water comes down as rain in the same region, it still takes years to centuries to get to the aquifer.
no it doesn't but it doesn't go back to where it was taken from either. So it does affect local aquifers.
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.
The redaction failure itself is almost the bigger story than the numbers - highlight, copy, paste revealing 52.65 MW peak and 13.3 megagallons is such a classic PDF redaction fail. Someone just drew black boxes over text instead of actually removing it.
On the substance: 13M gallons sounds huge until you see the context in the article - less than half of what the City of Lincoln uses in a single day, and about 20 Olympic pools for a year of operation. The Papillion site at 548 megagallons is the much larger water user. And the tax refund numbers ($55.8M for Agate alone) explain why Nebraska's reporting law and the governor's executive order exist - locals want to know what they're getting vs giving.
Claiming electricity/water usage as trade secret under 81-1527 feels like a stretch when the state explicitly requires annual self-reporting to DWEE. If everything material is redacted as trade secret, the reporting requirement is meaningless. Would be interesting to see if DWEE fixes their submission portal to reject non-flattened redactions.
Seems like a lot of water to me. And what does society get back from google in return?
Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us?
This document was created after the Epstein redaction debacle and yet they still leaked redacted data. People will never learn. <facepalm>
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.
It could also be that they're leveraged to the tits and plan to use it for citizen surveillance. Just a thought.