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.
How long until angry farmers attack a data center?
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 ✊🏼🇦🇱
Super El nino will make it worse too.
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.
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.
Ground water takes months to decades to replenish
You’re wayyyy underselling it here. Some aquifers take thousands of years to refill - and some won’t ever refill because they were filled when climate conditions were different.
If an aquifer under a desert was filled when the region had regular rainfall, that water isn’t coming back on any human timescale. If we pump it out and a data center evaporates it away - poof, it’s gone from that area. Pretty much forever.
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.
Yes. It ends up in the ocean. Where there is infinite water. Do you know why there are places with almost no water, even though there is an “infinite” water source on earth? It’s not because they live far from the ocean. It is because ocean water is salty. Salty water is not apt for human consumption.
When you throw fresh water in the ocean, you are essentially destroying that water. Even if the H2O molecules are still there.
We should start by removing tax incentives to build data centers in water stressed areas. It makes no sense to encourage building centers where the impact on water affects people.
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.
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?
They evaporate it using cooling towers. Because it’s the cheapest way to shed heat.
Many of these facilities are using evaporation coolers. Which means the water just evaporates. And that 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.
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.
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.
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
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…
I was almost offended at the responses to your fact checking comment, then I remembered I’m on Lemmy
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.
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.
I love that you’re saying they’re worthless, and at the same time the ruling class is using them effectively to do something.
It’s a great argument.
Imagine bootlicking parasitic LLM companies
Except it’s using very little water overall
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.
This is exactly my point, people aren’t using their brains with their anti-AI arguments. They’re very emotional responses rather than actual problems.
Because those services are actually useful. LLMs are just plagiarism machines. The only way they are remotely useful is because they “saved” a lot of money by stealing all the data on the internet. And even then, they have to operate at a huge loss. They’re also stealing from everyone by getting government subsidies and by ignoring environmental laws.
Remember, just because data is on the internet, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an owner.
If billionaires played by everyone’s rules and had to operate with profit, LLMs would be so incredibly expensive that no one would use them. They only seem remotely useful because basically all of society is footing part of the bill.
For the other services provided for data centers, whoever uses them does pay them, and it’s not expensive. You don’t need 5GW to serve a 30 minute video.
The Malthusian argument to defend AI…
“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.
Your example is bad.
I never said AI was good, though it is, I’m saying your argument against it is weak because you’re ignoring far worse problems to protest something that’s pretty minor in the scheme of things.
I’m calling you out for being a hypocrite and illogical.
If you were protesting all of the things that use too much water AND datacenters, I’d be okay with your argument. That’s just not what any of these protests are, because otherwise we’d see water use protests at beef farms and almond farms… and I don’t remember that happening anytime recently.
Except AI water use is the number is people who drown in backyard pools. Not great, but not an argument for banning it
Yeah but billionaire bad.
Think about it. You might be on to something
