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Discussion (38 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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Google consumes around three times as much water indirectly as directly, according to a paper published earlier this year by Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at the Netherlands-based university VU Amsterdam.
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My take: they should report this in acre-feet instead of gallons, and then compare it to a crop, alfalfa for example.
My back of the envelope says even at the larger number Google is using the enough water to grow about 23,000 acres of alfalfa. That would produce about 138,000 tons which would sell for about $34 million.
Water use policy is about agriculture, agriculture, and also agricultural. Everything else is a distraction.
Food is more important than whatever google does. :/
Google's 10.9B gallons in 2025 is equivalent to ~55 18-hole golf courses (200M gallons/year average in the US). Which provided more value to the economy and to you as an individual last year? Google or 55 out of ~15k total golf courses in the US?
And I don't even golf.
If I wanted to dislike them for environmental reasons, then I’d focus entirely on the energy consumption and CO2 emission from the generators directly hooked up to the data centers since the grid can’t provide them with enough juice.
If I wanted to dislike them for economic reasons, I’d focus entirely on the weird circular deals and mountain of debt.
If I wanted to dislike them for social reasons, I’d focus on how AI proponents themselves admit that the whole point is to take all of our jobs.
The water thing feels like a weird hill to die on. It doesn’t feel serious. It’s by far not the biggest problem!
Yeah, you're right. Some parts of the world is running out of fresh/clean water. We can drink coke instead.
It’s not like it’s consumed like fuel. And it is not absorbed like in agriculture. But I understand it is not trivially recyclable either, the heat of the water alone can be harmful if released as-is. Does cooling happen via evaporation and is that how the water is “lost”? And I am not sure if it is contaminated in other ways.
What is the actual impact or opportunity cost of using the water in datacenter (or energy plant) cooling versus other uses?
The result is unusable, somewhat toxic (since you can't remove the chemicals), deoxygenated (hot water can dissolve less oxygen) liquid which can't be used for anything, incl. farming or support any kind of life.
It's water, but it's not. It's not suitable for anything. Practically, waste.
If you use heat exchangers and closed circuits in outer loops, you don't waste the water and pump the heat elsewhere, and make that useful. Heat something in the winter, support greenhouses, provide hot water in the building, etc. etc. When you discard the hot water instead of recycling it in closed loop, you make it unusable for anything. From potting it to flushing your toilet. Every possible use case is gone.
If you need a toxic ballast material, maybe you can use it.
These are not power plants, there are zero data centers using open loop cooling that discharge loop water back into a waterway. It’s unnecessary when you’re cooling a data center.
The system is filled with water and begins operating. As water is lost to evaporation in the cooling towers, more water is added to the cooling loop.
At no point is any of the cooling loop water discharged back into a waterway, it gets recirculated through the system.
All that being said, closed loop cooling is much better in areas with a lack of water.
First, I don't see the banks of dry coolers or chillers required to cool that amount of water in many of the data center photos.
Second, our closed loop data center is not losing that amount of water, so losing 10 billion gallons of water to evaporation across that many data centers seems unrealistic, even with evaporation for humidity balancing and dry-cooler boosting reasons.
Sitting on top of a data center and directly working on it has its perks, apparently.
The true accusation was that crypto used more energy than banks per transaction. Your framing is very dishonest.
BTW, I believe that AI is a good thing in its ideal case, but we need to sort its energy use and data ethics issues.
Wake up, people! Stop the evil producers of almonds!
Just because the U.S. uses it doesn’t mean the rest the world does in every build.
Buildings are built for the climate of where they exist.
If a building can’t cool itself above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, that sounds like it could be common in the U.S. there are other ways to cool the building other water.
It would not be the same in a country like Canada, or other northern climates.
This water narrative is being used to undermine new datacenters in other countries, and it’s kind of strange a publication would so willingly not learn a and clarify the difference about buildings being built differently in different countries with different climates.
With drycoolers or chillers, you can pump out enormous amount of heat energy out of water, even in hot climates.
Is that water cleaned and put back in the environment?
Can the municipalities use the tax cash influx to clean up their power sources?
Not answered or considered which is weird for an org as storied as WSJ.
The bottom line is Heartland re-industrialization will use resources and look different from previous industries.
Can we keep the political focus on the oligcharcal control over our government instead of making something as dry as data centers some kind of new frontline on the Omni-cause
I imagine every side jumping on the water issue is exactly trying to distract from this. You'll notice you hear about water consumption issues much more than oligarchy and wealth inequality on "progressive media".
With the planet heating up at an enormous pace and we have a new hip word called "Water Scarcity" with a cool map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity#/media/File:Wat...),
I don't think this is a distraction.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can call out wealth inequality and oligarchy, and also talk about the very real water issue with regard to data centers (and electricity, and loss of rural land, and other many other aspects).
I'm all for responsible water use in data centers and I don't doubt that the cheapest, most environmentally destructive option is the one being used. That should be talked about, pushed back against, etc.
However, let's not argue in bad faith and say that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and then quietly forget about the walking (oligarchy/wealth inequality/decreasing quality of life/increasing cost of life, etc) while everyone yells and throws water stats around.