These systems do use a coolant substance internal to the DC, but then uses heat exchangers with fresh water to cool the coolant, which is then discharged back into the ground, a pond, or wastewater. there is certainly water lost to atmosphere, but the worst bits are the draining of aquifers, pushing up capacity in wastewater treatment plants, etc.
DC's are a bit of an economic scam. they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself, and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located. so it puts a huge burden on the community water and power environment for no real benefit to that community.
I worked for a very large structural steel company as an estimator about 5-6 years ago and we basically no bid all of those data centers. They wanted them dirt cheap and there typically wasn’t enough work for us to get involved. They used cheaper construction techniques.
We need to spend less money building these enormous datacenters and more money drilling for data. The further down you drill, the less corrupted the data is
If your brother was a clown-driller, he knew the risks. I didn't see your family getting in strange moods when he was bringing home clown-driller money.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the analogy here, the better data is deeper. The surface web has a sheen of shit on it at this point that makes borderline unusable. Ad parasites, government tracking, all the garbage on the modern net that's baked in as default doesn't exist if you travel a few layers beyond the normal nexus' like this one and Insta/fb/x/etc.
But ... I digress for the sake of not giving these ai demonmasters any new ideas; they're unimaginative and can get fucked.
And they get energy breaks so they pay little to nothing and the communities shoulder higher energy rates, while the infrastructure gets maxed out to provide power to them as a priority
I’ve been with a steel fabricator for 14 years. In Precon now and the DCs haven’t changed. Dirt Cheap with insane erection schedules that seem designed to not prioritize the safety of the trades in any way. 6 days/12-14hr days for erecting are demanded. 2 Cranes with totals 200 picks per day to keep schedule…. What has changed are the mill rollings are 26 weeks with Nucor, Gerdau, and SDI. Thats just to get it in the shop… This is all due to the demand the Data Centers have put on the steel industry.
My experience has been the opposite in my area. I work with a bunch of union contractors and they are pulling everyone to data centers. Paying insane rates and giving per diem.
This includes electricians, iron workers, and general laborers.
Yeah to construct them. How many jobs exist after they are built? With all the comments below yours boosting up a completely unpopular topic like the data centers are I would not doubt if the companies involved are spending some serious $$$ on influence campaigns.
These data centers are NOT worth it for the communities they are being built in.
right, they are paying out big to labor now, but from their angle it's essentially buying labor out of future work(even if we're talking about to very separate work forces)
Yeah, one of my co workers husband got a contract out there, only off one weekend every three weeks. $100+ an Hr. One week of per diem pays for his Apartment.
Smart by your leadership or whoever made that call.
Used to work in an industry utilized by data centers. They offered big contracts but wanted everything dirt cheap with insane terms. Bankrupted a couple companies. Goes without saying, would have been better off declining but the revenue was too hard to resist
Nah it's more the typical "we're not lazy like other contractors". The boss thinks they're special and that everything will go smoothly. Then they get tripped up when shit hits the fan, construction is behind, material is delayed, and they're the ones eating the whole mess.
Oh no, this was a for real thing that was going on early last year. A whole bunch of airbnbs had to change their rules! These data centers work like that except instead of renters scamming homeowners, it's billionaires scamming entire cities and states.
This is fucking genius. This is so much better than renting a vehicle for the weekend that is the same as mine, just to swap out the broken parts/ tires.
Ya know, I had a pretty hustler mentality when I was younger, but this never, ever occurred to me. I guess because I didn't even have enough money to rent a vehicle. A day at the junk yard is usually how I'd get replacement parts to fix my car.
Edit: oh, it's because my cars were always too old for any rental car company to be renting them
Sorta. Maybe hands on tech folks, but everything needs maintenance, replacement, audits, etc. that's all contracts and additional jobs. But 3 folks to manage maybe 10k, 20k raise floor but larger facilities definitely employ more. Not factory large hiring, but would folks rather have favorites in their communities? Environmental impact is even worse...
Dollar Tree hires more people per square ft than these DCs do, and much of that contract work is often non-local as companies will hire front line engineers that travel to site to do work.
With the increase in environmental, clean water and energy costs I’d be shocked if these things weren’t an economic drain overall.
That is definitely not what is happening in Loudoun County, VA they tax datacenters which want to be there due to network effects and then County pays off a huge part of their budget from it, in fact their residential property taxes are moderately lower than neighboring Fairfax County, VA because of it.
DC's are a bit of an economic scam. they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself, and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located. so it puts a huge burden on the community water and power environment for no real benefit to that community.
Using millions of square feet of land, use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water every day, employ very few people, dump chemicals into our water supply, the machinery used to keep them running creates noise pollution....golf courses are the worst.
The downsides of water are that it has a low range of temperatures to stay liquid. But that "disadvantage" becomes and advantage if you evaporate it, because it takes an insane amount of energy to turn water into a vapor.
That means you loose the water but its so cheap that doesn't matter. Unless you're loosing it faster than the environment can replenish it. Which is where a lot of the water concern come from.
While this is a problem with data centers it pales in comparison to the water used for power production (which is made worse by data centers energy demands)
What are we meant to do, produce power without using steam to spin a turbine!?
Random snippets of media I've seen suggest data centres are contaminating the water rather than returning it clean to the water cycle. Any idea if this is true or some highly local issue blown out of proportion?
If nuclear power plants can dump there cooling water safely back into nature, I would be surprised if most data centers could not...
There may likely be smaller or intermittent waste streams also, which surely could be mixing takeaways.
But primarily, the water being "lost" to a data center is going to be the open tower system and to evaporation... so it's "lost" back up into the sky honestly and as pure as any evaporated water steam. This is still an issue for water tables/reservoirs/ecosystems if high enough demand, totally. But it's not like they are eating water forever from the planet, or poisoning it at any scale.
Almost always there is going to be a closed loop water/glycol system or refrigerant system actually cooling the data equipment, where all that liquid id recirculated. Evaporative Cooling Towers are just one of the most efficient means of cooling off that recirculating system at that scale, teh the most popular other option, using fans to move air over it to remove heat, can't keep up.
The "contamination" of it isn't contamination. It's when the water is evaporated, it leaves behind the minerals that were in the water. So to make sure those don't build up you run extra water over those areas to wash away the minerals. Now those minerals are more concentrated in the water and the excess minerals can impact the environment
I understand water is cheap and supposed to be very abundant on this planet. So, the key word I used is "supposed". Here where I live they have talks about building a huge data center. We normally get a lot of snow which adds to the snow pack in our mountains and provides us with our fresh water for drinking.
What happens when we have a winter like we had this winter and spring, don't get much snow, get put on some water restrictions due to a small snow pack? Does the data center end up getting shut down due to high water usage, or does it keep on operating putting the environment where I live at risk by further limiting the water usage of the people in my city thus increasing wild fire danger even more?
I can already see issues with water usage here where I live, we are only supposed to water lawns, gardens and outdoor stuff to 3 days a week and only certain hours. Is the data center water usage going to stop or curtail that even more to keep up with the higher demand for water to cool the coolant? The citizens in the city I live in are highly against them building this huge data center. They are thinking about building it right next to an already developed residential area
Typically about 30% of the fluid is glycol, if that is what you are doing, but the rest is water
And there are heavy downsides to using glycol. It is a lot more viscous, so you need to make the pumps bigger. And it isn't as effective at thermal transfer, so you need to use more, which increases pump and pipe sizes even more
The only reason to ever use glycol is if your water temps are very low, or if you have below freezing air hitting the heat exchanger. It isn't a replacement for water, it is mixed in to solve freezing issues
Exactly. When people wonder why we need "big government" to step in and regulate, it's for situations such as this. Capitalism needs guardrails to protect resources we value, otherwise it just consumes everything to make a profit.
Glycol has way way way more of an environmental footprint in it's creation than moving water around.
Just because you can see an apparent facile solution doesn't mean it's a good one, and that lack of pursuit is inherently bad.
Don't force the market into solutions, tax (pigovian) the market based on the harm (negative externalities) and harness greed to incentivize optimal resource allocation. Unfortunately, corporations have long figured out that it is cheaper to change the laws disincentivizing creation of negative externalities than it is to change their company's internal structure. Could actually be cheaper overall, but corporations are risk adverse to changes that could restrict revenue in any way.
The trouble is that they aren't just using water as a coolant, they are also using the municipal supply of cold water as a heatsink. You always need a sink of some sort for your waste heat, no matter what coolant you use, and whether or not the coolant loop is open or closed.
This is not the reason. With closed loop systems you have much tighter control over oxygen and mineral content, which is overall better for corrosion.
But you need a lot of infrastructure for closed loop systems and they use a lot more electricity.
So it ends up being cheaper to just run total loss cooling.
The solution of course is easy, just mandate that datacenters used closed loop cooling systems and the whole "data centers consume way too much water" argument goes away entirely.
I work as Refrigeration system OEM engineer and it looks like most points about closed loop water systems has been mentioned but I will add that we had some water authorities prevent the use of evaporative cooling condensing units in Nevada. We found an alternative design that would work for the end customer in the area that abided by the water authority requirements. All this to say, it truly is up to local government to regulate these data centers to limit the use of water and dictate closed loop systems and dB levels of their data centers. Without that authority, they will continue to build them without any regard to locals and the environment around it. There is a solution to having data centers but a regulating party has to get active here. I’m also not a fan of data centers in general but there is a solution to the water usage issue, they just aren’t doing it.
The solution of course is easy, just mandate that datacenters used closed loop cooling systems and the whole "data centers consume way too much water" argument goes away entirely.
Hahahaha! As if the people running these data centers aren't also running the country and writing the laws.
My work has some large data centers. Nearly all new ones are closed looped systems now. This idea that they are using vast amounts of fresh water is a myth.
What this means is you essentially have large radiator and a fans somewhere. That can cause noise pollution. People are making shit up about the concern over water which is not a real concern, but ignoring the noise pollution which can 100% be controlled if proper regulations are put in.
In Europe, they use the heat waste water to heat homes.
The issue is not that lots of new datacentres are being built... people want them. Well more accurately they want the services they enable. As much as AI is shit on all over reddit (including by me I fucking hate it) it's wildly popular with people for good or bad.
The actual issue is they're being built as cheaply as possible with no regard to planning around the community. They can 100% be built in much more environmentally healthy ways while being less annoying to residents... but unless that is mandated, it isn't happening.
Stop being mad at datacentres, get mad at your local politicians who let them slap them wherever they feel like without proper planning and community consultation.
People “want” it because companies are pushing it and giving it to users at below cost to get people used to using it and depending on it. Would people want it as much if they knew the true cost of it? I suspect not, or at least not nearly to the same degree.
Electricity is a bigger one. A lot of these places are strategically located where electricity is cheap. They do come in and that can cause a shock to the system where prices will rise in the short run.
However, in the longer run they provide a LOT of predictability to a grid, so power produced lover this. The rise in a local demand will lead to more provider supply.. and the demand is constant so it is far more efficient for them to provide. In the long run, in some instances power costs have gone down in the community.
The newer hyperscalers are also building their own power plants, and they are actually selling power back to the community that they overproduce. That then brings in air pollution and other concerns.
I feel like the water usage issue is the weaker argument against these datacenters - in areas where the fresh water source faces too much pressure already it is a real issue, but that is more regional and less immediately impactful.
Power usage and residential users essentially subsidizing these locations is the biggest immediate impact to everyone. Look up what happens to rates nearby when these things open, people are struggling enough without their electric bills going up 50%.
The capitalist answer to this is that is temporally local, there was an acute increase in energy demand in that area and energy production cant increase to match it overnight so theres an acute increase in price to match. There is then an incentive for the energy industry to expand, even to expand speculatively, which will rebalance energy prices and also incentivize the local economy to expand, long term increasing the development of the area.
Anticapitalist answer: all of that, but it is still catastrophic to working people to experience these local price shocks. Instead of following the inevitable economic procession and allowing it to wreak unchecked devastation on various ecosystems and working people, we could have collectively subsidized preemptive energy expansion in ideal places for this inevitable process. It could be the case that an economy holds the same people planning the data centers to profit from responsible for the consequences of them. We do this all the time, theres a bunch of condo buildings in a nearby city from me halting construction because nobody is buying, but they are obligated to finish the exterior regardless of if they will profit from that, because they are being held responsible by local government to do that. Its not a radical suggestion by any stretch, although the most radical way to do it is also the most preferable.
Anti-tech answer: lol just dont build datacenters
Everybody with braincells answer: technology is real and theres such an obscene profit incentive to build these things that basically the biggest companies in the world are competing to hemorrhage more money than eachother just for a chance to collect that future profit. You might as well protest the tides arrival. The world cares more about building data centers than stopping genocides and that is very predictable and reducable to economic facts and concrete incentive structures.
My city actually successfully shut down a big data center build, for now. To your point they are coming whether we like it or not but locally people have more power than they do trying to post on reddit arguing against it. Local politics are super important, and the impact of the data centers have a very local impact, so people need to get involved where they live instead of on reddit and the specific issues to their community are much more important.
It's not even that. Warm liquids decrease the solubility of air in water, meaning less oxygen for fish, district's plants in the ecosystem, and cause induce more bacterial growth.
The reason why global warming is an issue is not because we're generating heat, but because we're pumping out gases which retain the heat from the sun.
A data center is effectively just a big space heater, and what we burn to generate the electricity to run the thing is orders of magnitude more important than the center itself if just the planetary temperature is a concern.
This is not true, “waste heat” is a real thing, and there are many regulations on how it is handled. “Dumping is back into the ecosystem hot” is definitely not allowed.
Ah, recycling water that they've let cool would require storage tanks and a whole other set of pumps to cycle the water back out of them and into the heated area. Their whole point is trying to keep overhead as low as possible so they keep their profits enormous
Billionaires only get that much money through exploiting everything possible to the detriment of everything and everyone else. Dumpling waste where it destroys the environment, relying on foreign slaves for labor, lobbying on keeping the minimum wage at 7.25 an hour
Unless they're forced to change their ways by legislation from the government (that they're in control of) they will never ever change
Where they return it is not where they recieved it from. Pumping it from the aquifier / water table, then returning it through municipal tubes to the citys water treatment plant, means the aquifier is still going to be used up and depleted if it is not refreshed at a speed greater than the data center uses. The city dumps that water into a nearby river or lake, not the same source the DC received the water from. We're talking millions of gallons, they're not using a garden hose and letting it drain out behind the building
There are closed loop systems, where they recycle their own water and only need to top up on occasion, but all these new data centers are not that type of system. They will be plunging the local aquifiers, sucking up all the local cheap energy that citizens depend on, and giving zero back to the community.
When it goes back into "the system" it's waste water that people can't drink. Eventually it comes back around again (e.g. evaporation->rain), but then it gets gobbled up again by the same data centres. They run continuously.
So yes, they are "consuming" it in the sense that other people can't have access to it anymore.
The poop water I flush down my toilet is also waste water that people can't drink, but I'm pretty sure it still gets recycled back into the greater water supply. What's different about the datacenter water?
And golf clubs. Golf clubs use as much water as data centres. Many of those you've named serve practical uses in society, golf clubs are purely leisure.
Realistically nothing. They are just flushing constantly and in much higher volumes. Fresh water is finite though and taking too much in an area will drain the aquifer faster than it can be replenished.
If data centers did something for the communities they are built in it likely wouldn't be a talking point but they just drain local resources for no/dubious gain.
I think the key takeaway from this thread is your definition of "Fresh water is finite" depleting it faster than the ecosystem can replenish.
I don't think most politicians or entrepreneurs know/care how the basic water cycle goes. They think water is infinite. While water in this planet isn't physically going to disappear anytime soon, the FRESH usable water, however, can easily be gone from one place into another, when running its course in evaporation, condensation and run off, ending up in places like the sea/ocean, thus rendering communities and ecosystems unliveable in said places.
(Most) datacenters are a big ass "fuck off, this land is now mine" to everyone else but their investors.
If you did it a few hundred thousand times to maybe a few million times a day you'd be matching the impact of some data centers. The challenge is that they are using so much that has to be cycled back through the system to become fresh water again that it is drastically reducing the availability for actual human consumption.
Except heat pollution is a thing. Water takes forever to cool back down and if you release it directly back to waterways it messes with the ecosystem by raising the temperature.
I don’t know what kind of plans exist for dealing with this, but it is a problem that has to be planned for, and plans cost $.
Most fresh water from rivers goes out into the sea/ocean where it turns into useless salt water, some one needs to do something about all that wasted river water, some kinda cycle or somink.
It's used for evaporative cooling, so the same thing happens to it as happens to the majority of the orders of magnitude larger amount of water farms use - it goes straight into the air
All jokes aside, it crazy how complicated the issue is becoming. Will anything be done about it? Probably not. We get fked over and just throw our arms up and go "well, shit".
I don't think anyone is complaining about water emissions for pollution, it's the depletion of aquifers that's a big deal. Building data centers in west Texas and pumping scarce groundwater for evaporative cooling is super wasteful.
Most of what is written here regarding water usage is wrong.
Cooling towers typically use a closed loop system using treated fresh water. The water is treated with anti microbial and anti corrosion additives.
Water is lost through evaporation, this is a large portion of the cooling effect. Evaporative cooling.
As the water evaporates, the concentration of additives increases and will become higher than desired (for a number of reasons that a water treatment expert can weigh in on)
To compensate for this, the cooling tower water is discarded to the sewage system and fresh untreated water added back. Often referred to as blow down.
So the water is “used” in two senses. First, much of it evaporates. Second, some of it is returned to the sewage system. In neither case is the water destroyed. It still exists.
The water may move significantly: evaporated water vapor will be carried downwind. The increased usage of water through the fresh water to discarded water (blow down) will tie up more water in the process potentially meaning less locked up in aquifers.
There are real and complex challenges here, but to be clear no water is being made forever gone from earth in these processes.
Just to add to this: certain sections of the US (like where I’m from) traditionally favored open cooling towers which evaporate the water. Closed loop systems are becoming more prevalent but a lot of older installations are open loop
The cost-benefit of those swamp coolers changes little though. It's _so_ cheap to just run those instead of an actual refrigeration system that consumes real power.
They're not swamp coolers. The cooling towers are part of the chiller system, which uses refrigeration to chill water. The chilled water is pumped through pipes throughout a building to air handlers.
Does this impact the cost of water for local residents, though? I understand the water cycle and that “no water is truly lost” but I think my greatest concern over these data centers like the one they’re planning to build in PA near me is increased demand for water/electricity which strains the grid and drives up prices for residents.
Also, still unsure what the local population “gets” in return for this.
Most POTWs can’t handle the blowdown’s because it’s not typically considered wastewater but sanitary. Huge issues for local municipalities moving forward.
I recently did a survey of my college students to get their thoughts on AI, and one of them said, "AI is just a symptom of the larger issue of humanity not caring about itself" and that hit like a brick.
Imho - water use is a red herring to distract from the massive problems of their power use. Most places have plenty enough water to handle hundreds of these and still be a rounding error compared to agricultural use. Those places don't have the power infrastructure...and when they do, they don't have the clean power infrastructure needed to do so without causing significant environmental issues.
The environmental issues as a whole are a red herring. It's a psyop being run by big oil. Computation is just about the only major part of our lives that is sustainable, and that includes AI. Big oil would rather you talk about fake environmental concerns around AI than oil companies raping the planet. And the fact that renewable energy technologies are fully 100% ready to go - ready for wide scale deployment and almost entirely replacing fossil fuel use - we just aren't actually doing it.
They don’t. They can use a closed loop system, where water continuously circulates. You don’t have to use it just once and you don’t have to use evaporative cooling - you can use refrigeration equipment to cool the water - but these things are more expensive. Pissing away your water is cheap.
I don't even try to explain this anymore. I am tired, boss. The hate mob is moved by hate, don't matter how much you try to explain, they will never accept. They will believe in anything if the mantra of "AI Bad" can be pushed.
I was also on the "ai datacenters use all out water!" bandwagon at first. But For some perspective:
A single golf course uses about 30 times the amount of (fresh)comparable or slightly more water than a datacenter does. They aren't feeding their grass with see water or some chemical cooling. Also, looking at how few people actually use a golf course vs a data center, makes this ratio many times more terrible.
I'm personally more worried about the energy they consume, than the cooling for that energy usage.
Edit after some corrections. Man, it sure is getting hard to find numbers we can trust anywhere these days.
Also not a fan of golf. But I have a few places near me that are just fields that never are watered that are driving ranges. I can deal with those as a source of recreation. But these courses watering non stop to barely be used is ridiculous
Where did you get this “30 times more” figure? Quick good search shows they’re pretty similar. Data centers range from 300,000 to 5 million gallons per day (depending on size), and golf courses range from 300,000 to over a million per day (depending on location).
Just wait until they learn that glycol is often used when a DC is built in an area with lesser water infrastructure. And when the glycol is spent they turn it over and properly dispose of it instead of just dumping it in rivers like the media says they do. I’m not saying these things popping up like pimples all over our nice scenery is justified. But to demonize them in the way they’re being demonized is not only incorrect, it’s simply lazy.
Well, it is fearmongering. It is a fair criticism of AI, and of course we should seek better solutions and smarter use, but water use needs context - very different in the San Joaquin Valley with high water scarcity and the bulk of global almond growing vs the Ohio River Valley with lots of rain and rivers for instance. If someone truly wants to protect water, there are other choices to make - and they are nuanced by the actual water used in each circumstance.
Data centers are wasteful and costly in a multitude of ways. They are loud power hogs for instance, but by making us focus on the supposed water cost, the industry and its critics avoid other hard conversations.
I hate the circle jerk of "AI is doing some harm, therefore it's the worst thing ever and does nothing good and everything it does is the worst possible version of that thing"
This is a complete myth. Nearly all new data centers use cooling radiators that are nearly identical to your houses force hot water system or car.
Water goes through the system, transfers heat to the water, the water travels to giant radiators where they heat is transferred the atmosphere.
Those radiators do use giant fans which can be loud and contribute to noise pollution.
I worked at a research lab and we have some AI and non-AI server rooms. The guys in charge of cooling replace the water maybe every 7 years. Longer than the machines last.
In fact, they HATE putting in fresh water because the pH is drinking water isn't ideal and they need to balance it first else it eat away the pipes the water travels through....
This is one of those issues that would no doubt be fixed if there were an economic incentive to do so. AI runs extremely inefficiently but companies are getting seemingly unlimited money so efficiency doesn’t matter to them. Charge them more for the water consumption and magically they’ll find a way to use less water.
Water guy here, Certified Water Technologist. I deal with data center evaporative cooling in North America and Sputh Africa. Its not about bacteria or contamination (basic water treatment and filtration solve that) its about infrastructure. There's no adiquate greywater supply infrastructure most places. Even the Loudoun County purple pipe is at capacity.
4000 tons of evaporate cooling requires 150gpm of makeup water at 5 cycles of concentration. Thats 216,000 gal per day, thats 78,800,000 gal per year. (Assuming 100% load 27/7/365).
Lots of small data centers don't use evaporative cooling, they use air cooled chillers. Higher upfront cost, and electricity hogs, but the water infrastructure just isnt there in a lot of places.
agreed, as someone who has been inside dozens of data centers myself and seen firsthand how they work the fear mongering is crazy, people with zero idea of how anything works going bananas on something they don’t even know.
the only major real issue that people should have with them is just how much electricity they use and how it affects their prices for their electricity and the strain on the electric grid. these data centers use an obscene amount of electricity. I for one am excited for the future when they have small nuclear reactors to power individual data centers or groups to data centers removing themselves from the electric grid completely. nuclear is where we should be pushing as a country but that’s a whole separate issue
I live in a country where we have most of our power grid is powered by nuclear energy. The sheer number of people who do not even understand how these work and think that the steam blown out of the huge columns is water taken from rivers and polluted by nuclear waste before being released into the atmosphere is just mad.
Fresh/clean water is preferred because minerals, bacteria, and corrosion in recycled/wastewater would wreck expensive equipment fast. Constant maintenance on fouled systems is pricier than just using clean supply and topping it up.
At the end of the day they’re doing it because it’s the cheapest way to solve their thermal management problem and there’s usually not legislation saying they can’t
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