Here a neat fact: Palo Verde, a nuclear power station in Arizona that generates so much power that it is the 2nd largest power plant in the United States is cooled entitrely by the treated waste water from Phoenix.
This is to illustrate that Data centers can be designed to be environmentally friendly, its just the greedy corpo pigshit that demands they suck drinking water out of water tables to power AI that nobody wants.
The AI apologists in this thread are wild to me. It’s too bad they don’t have access to some kinda tool that could give them information on how water tables work.
Albania showed us the way. Doing nothing is a choice. Vive la revolución ✊🏼🇦🇱
How long until angry farmers attack a data center?
Consumed? Where did the water go? I’m guessing it’s still water.
They (usually) pump water out of the ground because they don’t need it to be filtered or treated. The hot towers turn liquid water into vapor, which they (usually) pump outside. The vapor floats into the air and then gets carried away and dumped somewhere else, like the ocean.
Exactly. The water isn’t destroyed, just put through it’s normal cycle.
Oh well that makes it completely okay!
Say, you wouldn’t have a problem if I dumped my household sewage in your municipal water supply, would you? After all, I’m technically not consuming any water - no molecules are being created or destroyed - just borrowing it for a few hours.
Yeah, man. Consumed in the same way that we mean water is consumed in every other context. Doesn’t change the fact that the ground water is now sky water. Ground water takes months to decades to replenish, using it isn’t harmless to the ecosystems you take it from.
There’s no reason AI datacenters couldn’t be closed loop systems and just reuse the water. There are a multitude of ways water could be used more efficiently, it just has to be regulated.
And there’s no reason I couldn’t be a bicycle if you attached wheels to me. We’re talking about what is, not what could be.
So reach out to your representative to encourage them to implement regulations.
Not entirely. If it’s pumped from the water table, it can take many years for it to filter its way back in through the bedrock.
My dad had a house on a mountain and when his well went dry, I celebrated when it started raining. But then he said it wouldn’t matter, as that rain wouldn’t hit the water table for years, and it would just run off and away mostly.
We could start by using non pottable water in the first place. In Canada, no data centres use groundwater extraction because of stricter regulations. You can shake your fist at the clouds, but far better to lobby your government to pass regulations to protect groundwater.
it’s basically evaporative cooling. so they could condense it but that takes energy. energy takes money. money takes from profit. and the water is a public resource and capitalists hate the public anyway.
Yeah that’s what I don’t get about all of this. Why can’t they recycle this water if it’s just being used for cooling. Why must it always be fresh water?
Many of these facilities are using evaporation coolers. Which means the water just evaporates. And the ends up raining into the ocean later.
They’re going to cheap out in whatever way they can. Using a different cooling system, or using non-potable water isn’t going to be done voluntarily.
They evaporate it using cooling towers. Because it’s the cheapest way to shed heat.
It does have a touch of fear mongering. The water wouldn’t even be contaminated.
They evaporate it using cooling towers. Because it’s the cheapest way to shed heat.
Global beef production used approximately 264 trillion gallons. Quite literally 1000x more water.
For a single type of food.
Water for irrigation of peoples lawns is just under 3 trillion liters a year in the US, about 10x as much.
Where are the protests against that?
Nowhere, because people are sheep and can’t use their critical thinking skills.
This is like watching people yell at their kids to turn off the light in their room(which is an led) while leaving the AC running at home while they run out to the grocery store 10 miles away in a 7 seat SUV.
Missing the forest for the trees. The lot of you.
“The Holocaust only killed like six million people, while Communism in China and the USSR killed tens of millions each, therefore the Nazis weren’t ackshually that bad!”
That’s what you sound like, ya fucking clown.
AI apologists in the wild are so weird.
LLMs in current form are protested because they’re a worthless “technology” that also wastes a fuck ton of resources so the ruling class can do IP theft at scale.
Why does everyone jump to AI? A gigantic portion of data centers power streaming services, cloud hosting, and content delivery networks / caching services.
I understand the sentiment against the proliferation of data centers and the impact they have on the local environment but services people consume on the regular have driven this for years now.
Except it’s using very little water overall
The Malthusian argument to defend AI…
Yeah but billionaire bad.
Think about it. You might be on to something
We use twice as much to maintain golf courses and 4x as much to water our lawns every year. I’m not saying it’s a drop in the bucket, so to speak, but it’s not the worst offender. We have bigger fish to fry.
We’re also not at the early stages of a boom appearing poised to grow by an order of magnitude or more in the next few years in golf courses and lawns…
Keep in mind data center water use is set to grow geometrically over the next few years. It will soon be one of the worst offenders. The time to get it under control is now.
We’re not about to run out of water. You should be asking for better permitting for renewable energy because we can run out of that
Texas actually outgrew California in renewable energy because of less regulation
I was almost offended at the responses to your fact checking comment, then I remembered I’m on Lemmy
