[HN Gopher] AI is draining water from areas that need it most
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AI is draining water from areas that need it most
Author : mraniki
Score : 47 points
Date : 2025-05-10 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://archive.ph/tf090
| josu wrote:
| We already went through this with crypto mining; the oceans
| didn't boil, the world didn't end.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah because the crypto world underwent a bunch of disastrous
| rug-pulls and large scale scandals that scared people off. And
| frankly I'm happy about this, the moment I started (and I'm not
| joking here) taxi drivers and hairdressers talking about NFTs I
| was pretty certain (and hopeful) that the bubble was about to
| burst.
| bb88 wrote:
| Etherium also went to proof of stake. Apparently it's going
| swimmingly.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Tell me more about your impression of the timescale that
| climate change would progress at.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Eh, I'd focus on agriculture first. AI is a drop in the bucket
| compared to what it takes to grow a cow or an almond.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Yep. Agriculture uses roughly 2-4K times more water than the
| infrastructure that powers data centers.
| https://www.unesco.org/reports/wwdr/en/2024/s
| Boltgolt wrote:
| I'd rate basic necessities like food 4000x more important
| than data centers too
| mmoskal wrote:
| I don't know. I suspect most people rate data centers
| higher than almond milk...
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Of course! But what about all of the agriculture that gets
| exported? In CA, it is over half of almonds and ~15% of
| alfalfa (cattle feed).
| osigurdson wrote:
| If we could just get rid of these darn living creatures we
| would use much less water.
| bb88 wrote:
| Step 1 is simpler. Get rid of farming in the desert first.
|
| This a fight going on in Idaho right now:
|
| https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/ar...
|
| https://archive.ph/X9nTS
|
| If you look at a google map of Ada County Idaho, the only
| viable agriculture land requires watering from the Snake and
| Boise Rivers.
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/TFPgA6nG6hMBfPcx5
| OptionOfT wrote:
| I often wonder about this. Is it actually cheaper to farm
| near water, or farm in a hot climate and import water (e.g.
| CA & AZ).
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| You can't eat a hyper realistic picture of a dog in a suit.
| smilliken wrote:
| Would you concede the point if I produce a photo as proof?
| anthk wrote:
| That's what I'd love Markov bullshit generators make these
| crawlers implode with metacircular nonsense. That and Gzip bombs.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Well I guess they should not be building these data centers in
| areas with no water and high ave Temps. Where they are building
| having these issues are a surprise to no one.
|
| There are areas with lots of land, water and much lower ave air
| temps in the US and some have empty buildings that can be
| retrofitted for use as data centers. But no, lets build in places
| that allow the company treat their employees as slaves.
| Osyris wrote:
| I was under the impression data centers use closed loop cooling.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| It's much cheaper just keep pulling in cool water than it is to
| cool it yourself
| bilsbie wrote:
| Welcome to Gelman amnesia.
| archon1410 wrote:
| I had the same impression, but apparently not.
|
| > Many data centers rely on evaporative cooling, or "swamp
| cooling," where warm air is drawn through wet pads. Data
| centers typically evaporate about 80% of the water they draw,
| discharging 20% back to a wastewater treatment facility,
| according to Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical
| and computer engineering at the University of California,
| Riverside.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| The refrigerant is closed loop, but the condensers are sprayed
| with water which are much more efficient at removing heat than
| a fan + air.
|
| I did some research on additional cost of water + increased
| efficiency of the condenser, but it's not just that. The water
| needs to be treated, otherwise it leaves way too much sediment.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'm hugely pro conservation, clean air and water, etc.
|
| But modern environmentalism is a religion and this is how it
| works. Any human advancement needs a narrative on how it hurts
| the planet.
| healsdata wrote:
| Have you considered you have cause-and-effect backwards? Any
| human advancement hurts the planet and then the burden is on
| environmentalists to bring awareness?
|
| Why would a for-profit not hurt the environment for more profit
| if it isn't illegal and won't get them sued (for more than they
| profited)? There's a rich history of them doing exactly that.
| Similarly, governments have done horrific environmental damage
| and it was up to environmentalists to create the awareness to
| make it stop.
|
| I honestly don't know how you can look at a world with record
| numbers of wildfires, communities fighting over water supplies,
| and for-profit companies say that water beyond subsistence
| levels isn't a human right and think "oh yeah,
| environmentalists are looking for a reason why this water-
| consuming thing is bad".
|
| Especially when the same technology could be powered in a way
| that doesn't pollute as much and cooled in a way that doesn't
| consume as much water -- if only the environment was more
| important than shareholders.
| roschdal wrote:
| Artificial Intelligence is for people without enough natural
| intelligence.
| monster_truck wrote:
| I'm just not sure I understand what point they're trying to make.
|
| Honestly, 6500 households of water a day is nothing. Individual
| cities often write more than this off in a day when rain
| overwhelms their watershed systems.
|
| Even with perfect watershed recovery our ability to treat,
| utilize, and transport it back without losses is a far bigger
| concern. The average age of pipes in the US is approaching 50
| years old. I've seen reports project the US will need to invest
| nearly 1T in the next 15 years to sustain the current system and
| rate of growth.
|
| Hell, there was a 54 inch water main break in Detroit this winter
| that flooded ~120 homes. A conservative estimate for a pipe of
| that size leaking all of its water for 5-6 hours is 20-25,000,000
| gallons of water. We're going to be seeing a lot more of that.
|
| Another thing I see overlooked constantly is that many of these
| DCs are augmented with their own filtration systems which allow
| them to primarily consume greywater for a net gain.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Municipal water drawn from the Great Lakes is mostly borrowed
| for a short time. There's energy costs to treating it for
| potability and then treating the wastewater, but not really a
| change to how much water is available.
| monster_truck wrote:
| That completely misses the point, it's a harbinger. This area
| is seeing it first because it is largely floodplains on top
| of clay coupled with a decent amount of rain and a consistent
| freeze-thaw cycle.
|
| Merely building a functioning bypass for a pipe of this size
| at this depth takes the better part of a year. Replacing it?
| Out in the suburbs some of the projects to repair pipes from
| the 40s that leaked and caused sinkholes are still ongoing,
| they started over 20 years ago.
| Havoc wrote:
| Surprised there isn't more of a push to align compute with
| suitable geography frankly.
|
| A lot of stuff doesn't need 10ms latency. Why not move it
| somewhere that has geothermal, or abundant water, or say an ocean
| to dump heat into.
|
| Seems like the approach is always to bring the resource to the
| datacenter instead
| rpmisms wrote:
| So put datacenters in Tennessee. We have tons of water and
| hydroelectric power.
| john-h-k wrote:
| Obligatory link about AI water/energy use
| https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/individual-ai-use...
| nativeit wrote:
| I'm not inclined to endorse continued data center construction
| for much of anything, AI especially, but I was a little curious
| about how they determined what areas qualify as "high-stress"
| water conditions? Because they show red squares where I live
| (near Charlotte, NC) and we are pretty firmly within the normal
| range of precipitation and water levels. If anything, it's been
| wetter in the last 10-years than at any point in my lifetime.
| grej wrote:
| The conflation of AI and use of natural resources / energy use is
| mostly a political choice and a straw man.
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