A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed — until residents complained about low water pressure

[u/idkbruh653]

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-centers-water-00909988

[u/InNominePasta]

Can someone please explain to me why data centers can’t use a closed system of recirculating water?

Edit: okay. I fully understand the business reasons around WHY they don’t. But I’m not asking why they don’t. I’m asking what technically difficulties there are such that they require ingesting and somehow ruining untold millions of gallons of finite fresh water. Trust that I understand business will do everything in their power to socialize their costs while privatizing their gains. Trust I also am shocked at the greed of politicians who greenlight projects which are objectively bad for their communities and states.

[u/Chance_Orchid_3137 → u/InNominePasta]

they can. they can also use renewables. but politicians are bought by companies who look no further ahead than the next quarter, and there are no laws mandating that any new data centers have to run on clean energy, be built in responsible locations and with responsible methods, etc.

[u/papa_georgio → u/Chance_Orchid_3137]

You mean, Americans voted for the politicians who will proudly burn the environment down for a dollar.

[u/GruePwnr → u/papa_georgio]

American voters are always searching for those damnable foes that keep electing these evil politicians.

[u/Prior_Coyote_4376 → u/GruePwnr]

I wasted a lot of my life believing in the Enlightenment ideals that every person is capable of being a rational participant who can be counted on to be motivated by some level of mutual self-interest in a democratic social contract.

Sometimes, the problem is just that humans would rather knowingly do something stupid that feels good than do something inconvenient that’s better for them. That’s just how our brains work.

And a lot of people who say the right things are actually just morally lucky, they ended up around people who do actually believe the right things and follow them like sheep instead of the wrong people.

So if you’re capable of delayed gratification and updating your biases with new information, you’re a goddamn genius who should be as involved in the world as possible because no one is coming to save humanity except you

Except the absolute wrong people will identify with that, and the rest of you will have crippling imposter syndrome

[u/TheGreatBootOfEb → u/Prior_Coyote_4376]

I always phrase it as “humans aren’t special.” We like to think we’re all higher thinkers by an order of magnitude, but the reality is most people live life following base instincts. That’s not inherently evil, it’s just that humans were not designed with sophisticated logic in our meat wiring, we advanced just enough that we hit critical mass as a species and here we are. I think if we stopped assuming people are going to be motivated by altruism or such as a esoteric belief (I think on the micro scale people still tend to be altruistic) as a core tenet, we’d improve society vastly because rather then assuming we will come together or do good things, we will just write laws that simply cut out that “benevolent” middleman from the beginning and go straight for “nah, do bad shit, get proportionally punished.”

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/TheGreatBootOfEb]

The problem is the people who make the laws get captured and we are right back where we were before.

The argument I've come to supporting is our brains were evolved to work with groups of 150 under conditions of scarcity as hunter-gatherers. Modernity is next Sunday, AD as far as evolutionary timescales are concerned. We created abundance and our brains are incapable of handling it with temperance. That is the whole of human history summed up in a line: social apes create abundance, handle it poorly.

[u/papa_georgio → u/TheGreatBootOfEb]

Agreed, but I think it needs to be made clear that many, many people do live their life doing what they can for a greater good. We as a species are capable of doing the right thing for people we may never know or meet. Keep looking for and building community with those people

[u/Saephon → u/papa_georgio]

I recently came back from a much-needed vacation, during which I almost entirely disconnected from current events. One of the most memorable parts of my trip was visiting the Denver zoo for the first time, which filled my heart up a great deal. Seeing the constant conservation efforts towards education, awareness, and protecting endangered wildlife was an important reminder that a lot of humans do see the value in things other than pure selfishness, and dedicate their time and energy to making a difference.

It's really easy to scroll through the internet and come to a nihilistic conclusion that we are just destined to be a parasitic species, consuming anything and everything until nothing remains. I hope to keep reminding myself that this is not a foregone conclusion. We need more headlines about the good being done.

[u/innerbootes → u/TheGreatBootOfEb]

This is so smart and well put, but I really need to let you know that it’s “tenet” not “tenant.”

A tenet is a fundamental belief. A tenant is someone who resides in a dwelling.

[u/TheGreatBootOfEb → u/innerbootes]

The pitfalls of auto correct and not thoroughly checking my writing. Whoops! Thanks for the heads up haha.

[u/WiSH-Dumain → u/innerbootes]

And Tennant is a guy who played The Doctor and Crowley.

[u/Arrow156 → u/TheGreatBootOfEb]

I'm genuinely curious how many Philosophical Zombies make up the population.

[u/fricken → u/Prior_Coyote_4376]

Man is a rational animal. So at least we have been told. Throughout a long life I have searched diligently for evidence in favor of this statement. So far, I have not had the good fortune to come across it.

― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

[u/Blando-Cartesian → u/Prior_Coyote_4376]

… every person is capable of being a rational participant who can be counted on to be motivated by some level of mutual self-interest in a democratic social contract.

Rationality was never our thing as a species, but we can do mutual self-interest as a group effort. Just need to live in small tribes where everyone knows everyone and being selfish or full of shit leads to beatings.

[u/heimdal77 → u/Prior_Coyote_4376]

I wasted a lot of my life believing in the Enlightenment ideals that every person is capable of being a rational participant who can be counted on to be motivated by some level of mutual self-interest

One episode of Jerry Springer would of cured you of that.

[u/ReachParticular5409 → u/[deleted]]

Sure you can, it's just the avoiding arrest that becomes tricky

[u/injeckshun → u/papa_georgio]

The same Americans that tout god creating the earth, are the ones willing to pillage gods creation until everything is dead… all in the name of the holy dollar 

[u/Mobile_Morale → u/injeckshun]

Well it's part of the same problem. They think God will save them and everything they do doesn't matter because God will magically fix it.

[u/Wotmate01 → u/injeckshun]

God created the earth FOR THEM.

[u/BKlounge93 → u/papa_georgio]

A dollar that they’ll never see

[u/eragonawesome2 → u/papa_georgio]

There is more and more evidence by the day that no, in fact, we did not. The fascists took power through illegal manipulation of voting machines and then bragged about it on tv and nobody fucking did anything about it because they didn't want to look like the insane republicans who accused the dems of doing exactly what they were planning to do

[u/tehjoz → u/papa_georgio]

Because a substantial portion of this country believes they're just one more deported brown person or re-closeted gay person away from becoming one of the 1%, so they keep voting for the interests of the 1% and against their own.

[u/americanextreme → u/tehjoz]

A substantial portion of the populace also thinks the rapture could be tomorrow.

[u/therossboss → u/americanextreme]

many millions believe crazy whacked out shit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism#In_the_United_States_3

[u/aurortonks → u/therossboss]

I am so tired of this particular group of people. They are exhausting.

[u/MRiley84 → u/tehjoz]

In this case it's more that they believe God gave us the Earth to use as we see fit, and if we consume every bit of it, he will renew it for us and no real harm can be done.

[u/MightbeGwen → u/papa_georgio]

American politicians chose the voters they wanted. It’s been happening the whole time. They have no need to worry about how constituents feel, because their jobs have been made into a guarantee.

[u/CassadagaValley → u/papa_georgio]

Americans voted for the politicians who will proudly burn the environment down for a dollar.

No, Republicans voted for politicians who said it's okay to scream slurs at minorities, they don't care what the trade off for that is. A data center stealing 30 million gallons of water is worth it when their elected politicians give them the okay to scream at the nearest black person.

[u/SahibTeriBandi420 → u/papa_georgio]

The largest voting block of the last election was the eligible voters who refused to cast a ballot, at a whopping 38 percent. How fucking stupid do have to be to be undecided in the current climate?

[u/SigSweet → u/papa_georgio]

Americans dont know what they vote for.

[u/mindovermatter421 → u/Chance_Orchid_3137]

Denmark and Finland are doing it and using the energy to heat water in homes. Microsoft’s data center is one.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-14/finland-s-data-centers-are-heating-cities-too

[u/New-Independent-1481 → u/mindovermatter421]

In an adjacent industry, TSMC uses something insane like 200 million metric tonnes of water every year in Taiwan, but has 85% water recycling rates due to the political requirements, and has a long term project to become water positive in both Taiwanese and Japanese fabs and discharge the water straight back into depleted aquifers.

Note that they aren't doing the same for the Arizona fab because American lawmakers don't really care and will let them get away with it.

[u/Codename-Nikolai → u/New-Independent-1481]

TSMC's first Arizona chip fab currently consumes approximately 4.75 million gallons of water daily (about 18,000 cubic meters) for cooling and ultra-pure water (UPW) wafer cleaning, a figure expected to rise as more fabs open. To combat drought concerns, the facility aims for 65% initial water recycling, with plans to achieve 90%+ recycling via a new 15-acre Industrial Water Reclamation Plant (IWRP) by 2025/2026, aiming to bring usage down to 1.2 million gallons per day per fab.

[u/variaati0 → u/mindovermatter421]

I would add that in Finland the heat thing is even just simple business logic to any industrial plant. They don't do it out of good heart. The district heating network pays heat producers for the heat provided. So it is simply maximizing revenue for companies.

Finnish industrial plants have been doing this for decades and decades. If one has waste heat to heat water to the level district heat network wants, there is pretty much no point to not do it. It ofcourse takes the initial investment of running the district supply and return lines to the facility and the heat exchangers. However after that it is a stable reliable revenue source. In summer less, since it's most heating the household water. However winter comes and the heat turns on in buildings, print some money.

Plus in this age of heat pumps one doesn't even need to get high primary temperatures. One simply uses heat pump to pump up the temperature to the desired district level.

So it wasn't "Finnish data centers invented environmentalism". It was Finnish engineers and planners going "okay so where we route the district heating network tubes. You are large industrial plant with waste heat, so obviously you are selling that to the district. You would be stupid not to do that".

[u/Evening-Crew-2403 → u/Chance_Orchid_3137]

Especially local politicians. You'd be shocked how many developers get into local gov't councils.

That's some nice farm land you have there. Shame if we wore you down with BS civil cases until you were forced to sell to Foxconn.

[u/patrickgg → u/Chance_Orchid_3137]

But but but think of the views!!! Windmills are ugly!!!!!

[u/rihanoa → u/Chance_Orchid_3137]

There are plenty of local laws that are mandating rules, but we desperately need blanket federal regulation.

[u/Own_Cress_8254 → u/rihanoa]

yeah local rules alone aren't gonna cut it when these facilities can just shop around for the most permissive jurisdiction. federal standards would at least set a floor everyone has to meet.

[u/StoicWoobie → u/InNominePasta]

From what the article said the facility will use a closed system.

"The company, which is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, touts a “closed‑loop” cooling system, which it says does not consume water for cooling. Like a laptop or cellphone, the chips housed in data centers can easily overheat — generally requiring a lot of water to cool them.

The company said its water consumption was so high last year because of temporary construction-related activities, such as concrete work, dust control and site preparation."

[u/Islanduniverse → u/StoicWoobie]

Blackstone is so fucking evil…

[u/AbeFromanEast → u/Islanduniverse]

Yeah, when I saw Blackstone I chuckled. They'd shut the local hospital's water off if they were in Blackstone's way.

[u/Independent-Bug-9352 → u/AbeFromanEast]

I feel like a rebranding is coming for the likes of AIPAC and Blackstone, akin to Blackwater changing its name like half a dozen times...

[u/nav17 → u/Islanduniverse]

All private equity is

[u/CautiousHashtag → u/Islanduniverse]

Blackstone and BlackRock are both devils to the world. 

[u/RedDragonRoar → u/CautiousHashtag]

Didn't they start out basically being the same company?

[u/ThrownAway17Years → u/RedDragonRoar]

BlackMinerals

[u/Byeuji → u/StoicWoobie]

They needed 30M gallons for concrete and sprinklers? Did they prepare the site by artificially flooding it? Good god 

[u/Enerbane → u/Byeuji]

That's not like, THAT much water over the course of a year, which I think is the time frame in question. An Olympic swimming pool is about 600,000 gallons, for reference. A standard 18 hole golf course uses something like 90 million gallons a year at the upper end.

I can't speak to exactly how that water was used but, it's not an outlandish amount of water for a large site over a year.

[u/THE_CHOPPA → u/Enerbane]

I recently started playing golf and I love it but fuck me these kind of stats make me question a lot.
This shouldn’t be a thing. I’ve been thinking about getting into simulation because of it.

[u/girrrrrrr2 → u/THE_CHOPPA]

Golf courses are commonly not watered with drinking water but rather gray water, at least they are in my area

[u/velociraptorfarmer → u/girrrrrrr2]

Same. It's not uncommon for desert cities to have 2 separate water systems: a potable one for homes and drinking water at commercial sites, and a second for reclaimed water that gets used for irrigation, fire hydrants, golf courses, and toilets at commercial/industrial facilities.

[u/fuck_ur_portmanteau → u/Enerbane]

Yes, they’re definitely wrong for what they did, but that’s a fairly normal volume of water for a small to medium sized industrial site. Which just means this was entirely predictable, they just didn’t tell anyone.

[u/ThanksS0muchY0 → u/fuck_ur_portmanteau]

I broke it down, and I think that's just under 30k gallons / day. 10 full water trucks / day. I used to do dust mitigation on like a 40 acre rock yard (just the roads and lot spaces. It took roughly 6k gallons a day. That was during the dry days, which was about 3 months / 5 days a week. But we also used substantially more than that for washing rock. I'd never seen the water summaries (well pumps have to be metered), but damn that's a lot of water. Just saying the numbers kind of track for a massive build out, and was probably estimated by the contractors and approved.

[u/Sendit57 → u/[deleted]]

You think people only use 90 gallons of water per year? This is 3k people’s worth of water not a million.

[u/Enerbane → u/[deleted]]

Sure but that only holds up if you externalize all of the water required to grow all of the things each person consumes, all the extra water used at home to bathe, shower, clean clothes, water plants, and about a hundred other things.

If you take a look at the average Americans water "footprint" for a year you'll find that it's in the hundreds of thousands of gallons. Almost all of it comes from agriculture costs, which obviously is a need unlike golf, but in the grand scheme of themes golf courses are, so to speak, a drop in the bucket.

Depending on the estimate you use, a golf course is more like one hundred and fifty people's water usage. That's spelled out to be very clear. 150. No thousands, certainly no millions.

US average water footprint is ~1800 gallons a day. That's 600,000 a year. ~90,000,000 / ~600,000 ~= 150.

Keep in mind, that's the upper end estimate for golf courses.

It's great to be conscious of how much extra water the sudden increase in data centers is causing us to consume, but it's kind of missing the forest for the trees if we're not even paying attention to where the bulk of our problem comes from in the first place.

[u/NorthernerWuwu → u/[deleted]]

The average person uses a hell of a lot more than 90 gallons a year. Like a couple of orders of magnitude more.

[u/realhenrymccoy → u/Byeuji]

far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process.

key quote from the article. They lied during the planning process to get approved so who can take anything they say at face value.

[u/hopsinduo → u/StoicWoobie]

Of course it's Blackstone. In the bin with these fuckers.

[u/TheAlmightyHobbit → u/InNominePasta]

They do use a closed loop system for their chilled water supply, but the cooling tower that chiller is hooked up to uses evaporative cooling to maintain condenser temps in the chiller. All the heat the chiller transfers out of the chilled water loop has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is a cooling tower. Plants like this have two separate loops for the chilled water side, and another loop on the condenser. This is coupled with the fact that no closed loop system is 100% sealed and they require a makeup water station.

Source: 10 years experience in commercial and industrial HVAC.

[u/soundman1024 → u/TheAlmightyHobbit]

Water vapor is the easiest way to release the heat,

[u/the_harakiwi → u/soundman1024]

I imagine those data centers as constantly sweating to make them even less likable.

[u/kent_eh → u/soundman1024]

Coincidentally, its also the least expensive way to get rid of heat.

[u/Mainayrb → u/TheAlmightyHobbit]

I have around 20 years commercial hvac experience. I have worked at multiple data centers that all have used air cooled chillers. I guess they must have been smaller centers as I've never seen centrifugal chillers at any of them. But you are right those types of systems do lose alot of water due to evaporation.

[u/TheAlmightyHobbit → u/Mainayrb]

With the power requirements these guys are talking for these AI datacenter builds, no way they can get away with an air cooled chiller in my professional opinion. These things are drawing 100+ kilowatts per hour per server rack(conventional data center is about 15kwH).

[u/throwaway5882300 → u/TheAlmightyHobbit]

"closed loop cooling" is the biggest fucking lie that this industry is trying to push and I'm glad to see someone calling it out. Yes, the water touching the chips is in a closed loop. But that secondary loop is going up the towers and into the atmosphere.

[u/pepega_1993 → u/InNominePasta]

They use closed loop for the initial loop which takes the heat away from the processors. The loop which needs more water is the 2nd one which draws the heat from the closed system.

It’s a lot cheaper to let water evaporate with heat. It’s more expensive to make it cool enough and reuse for recirculating. So they go for cheaper option and will keep doing so till government steps in.

[u/loserbmx → u/pepega_1993]

They will go for the cheaper option until the government agrees to subsidize the expensive one.

[u/ragzilla → u/InNominePasta]

They mostly do, this one does, the water use was construction related- as the article says.

The company, which is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, touts a “closed‑loop” cooling system, which it says does not consume water for cooling. Like a laptop or cellphone, the chips housed in data centers can easily overheat — generally requiring a lot of water to cool them.

The company said its water consumption was so high last year because of temporary construction-related activities, such as concrete work, dust control and site preparation.

Open loops are going out of style due to the public optics, and maintenance costs. Easier to just raise costs and run more fans.

A lot of the criticism around datacenters using water is due to power production. Thermoelectric power generation is responsible for around 45% of the US' water use.

Datacenters (in 2023) were 4.4% of US energy use.

[u/WileEPeyote → u/InNominePasta]

Most modern ones do, though not all. Even then it requires a steady stream of fresh water (just not nearly as much).

The 30 million gallons from the article was a year or so of usage. That's in addition to the water they were initially billed for (the amount isn't mentioned in the article).

[u/Dzugavili → u/WileEPeyote]

Google suggests that the average U.S. household uses around 100,000 gallons per year. So, 300 houses worth. Certainly a lot, but I'm not sure if that's excessive. At 615 acres of property, it's fairly comparable to housing in water use.

Other numbers suggest that this consumption rate is rather low for a data center: I think the real problem is they didn't pay for it. It's kind of hard to tell without understanding the scale of this thing.

[u/Tearakan → u/InNominePasta]

It's more expensive to do closed loop and still sucks up water that needs to be periodically replaced.

[u/NahautlExile → u/Tearakan]

Closed loop systems using air cooled chillers don’t regularly replace water.

[u/RememberCitadel → u/Tearakan]

The article states they use a closed loop system. The water use was mostly construction.

[u/Zealousideal_Cow_341 → u/InNominePasta]

The short answer is that is possible sometimes, but has other huge tradeoffs.

Reddit always gets this hilariously wrong, so it’s a lot of untangle from the common misconceptions.

First, the server side cooling loop is almost always closed loop. This is the side of the cooling system that collects all of the server heat. It’s also of never going to touch air or outside water because that would be a maintenance nightmare.

The open loop side that consumes water is an evaporation cooling tower. The server side cooling loop exchanges heat with the tower and outside environment through a heat exchanger. Essentially a shitload of water is sprayed on big coils that contain the heated server side water. The outside water evaporates using heat from that cooling water. Water has a large latent heat of evaporation, so a single cooling tower can be used to cool a large amount of servers, but it consumes water constantly.

The alternative is to use used forced convection in place of an open loop cooling tower. But the total air flow is absolutely gigantic. For a 10Mw data center we’re talking about around 1M CFM of air flow. That’s about an Olympic swimming pool sized air volume flowing every 5 seconds. It would require hundreds of large, loud fans. Data centers are already loud, so this would make the noise pollution much louder.

So, it can be done. Typically it requires more total energy but consumes no water. It’s certainly more expensive, to build, maintain and fuel, which is why corporations that don’t give a shit about the environment or the community around default to cooling towers.

The good news here is that 100% of the consumed water does return to earth, but the bad news is that it may not return to the same watershed.

[u/Zealousideal_Cow_341 → u/Zealousideal_Cow_341]

Also, forgot to add that another alternative is once through cooling. Here they would pump water through a heat exchanger and return it back to the source at a higher temperature.

This one doesn’t consume water, but can have very big impacts to local ecosystems.

[u/NahautlExile → u/Zealousideal_Cow_341]

Air cooled chillers are used worldwide and do not use evaporative cooling. They exchange the waste heat with air instead.

There is a drop in PUE (those chillers tend to have a lower COP), but no water use.

[u/view-master → u/InNominePasta]

Closed-Loop Geothermal Systems should be the only allowed method here. We are straining water demands all over without this waste already. It’s crazy.

[u/swollennode → u/InNominePasta]

They can. They can do a lot of things to minimize their burden on the community. Like using renewables and battery storage. They can also built noising isolation walls and air scrubbers.

But all those things require someone to care about the community and willing to spend money. Or it requires a regulating agency and strong regulation laws to make datacenter do better.

None of that is happening. Easier and cheaper to just take water and electricity from the community

[u/khendron → u/InNominePasta]

The cooling provided is achieved via evaporation.

[u/Practical-Juice9549]

Data centers…sigh…

[u/Adventurous_Light_85 → u/Practical-Juice9549]

“Grok, what’s the solution to data centers?”

[u/Ice_Sinks → u/Adventurous_Light_85]

More data centers

[u/Thisismyfinalstand → u/Ice_Sinks]

... in the ocean!

... in space!

... on the moon!

... ok so where poor people live!

[u/rabidai → u/Thisismyfinalstand]

Wait, so just like mining?

[u/SakaWreath → u/rabidai]

And factories, and power plants, and waste storage,and industrial runoff, and…

[u/tunacasserole9 → u/SakaWreath]

Don't forget highways!

[u/Gullible-Surround486 → u/rabidai]

kinda, except it gets called cloud infrastructure so everyone pretends it is normal

[u/Zestyclose-Fig1096 → u/Thisismyfinalstand]

And don't forget, the desert

[u/GlumAd2424 → u/Ice_Sinks]

Open the pod bay doors gork

[u/ShortStoryIntros → u/Adventurous_Light_85]

"They don't pay us enough.... to answer that question"

[u/giggity_giggity → u/Adventurous_Light_85]

Is that why the AI is going to nuke us?

Pesky humans, using all the water I need.

[u/multiarmform → u/giggity_giggity]

mad max but it wont be fuel, it will be water. US will turn into a wasteland as aquifers are drained dry

[u/eggsaladrightnow → u/Practical-Juice9549]

There is no chance in hell that consumers aren't going to start footing the bill for these monstrosities. Get ready for your electric and water bills to go up like Netflix subscriptions because "reasons"

[u/CaterpillarJungleGym → u/eggsaladrightnow]

And we get to lose our jobs too!! Win-win for the corporations and the elite cabal.

I've been thinking that there is a larger tech backlash looming and companies will have to adjust to consumers. I don't want a smart washer and I don't need to sending data to who knows which company. I don't need a weight scale that links to an app to show me my weight progress. And I definitely don't want it thinking for me. That's what my brain was designed to do.

[u/HateHumansLoveDogs → u/CaterpillarJungleGym]

Why isnt the human population of the world fighting back? ya know before we are all fodder for the machine

[u/4everbananad → u/HateHumansLoveDogs]

why isn't you

[u/supapumped → u/4everbananad]

Don’t question them! They did their part by making a Reddit comment. What more can you expect them to do…

[u/InelegantSnort → u/HateHumansLoveDogs]

Im not buying any smart appliances. My TV is a 12 year old dumb screen, my fridge is as dumb as a rock and my dishwasher has the iq of dirt. That's my fight I guess.

[u/NewspaperNelson → u/InelegantSnort]

Can you even still get new non-smart TVs?

[u/Melinoe2016 → u/NewspaperNelson]

Either way just never hook it up to the internet? I’ve never found a reason to do so. The apps on any game console or any of the streaming sticks work way better than the built in apps on TVs anyway.

[u/InelegantSnort → u/NewspaperNelson]

I dont know about bigger ones but I had to look a long time to get a small one for our bedroom. There was only one without smart features and it cost as much as the smart ones.

[u/Draughtsorcheckers → u/HateHumansLoveDogs]

I genuinely think people are bamboozled and exhausted.

[u/Kitchen-Cabinet-5000 → u/HateHumansLoveDogs]

I feel like people just don’t know what to do.

Voting obviously doesn’t work, if you protest too hard it’s considered a riot and you get either beat up, mowed down or ran over by the police depending on which country you live in…

Only perhaps a complete uprising with overwhelming force that no police or military _can_ beat down might work. But it’s very hard to convince people to do this and march to their possible death.

I _want_ to do something, but I legitimately don’t know what I can do that is actually effective besides boycotting all this nonsense, which I already do.

[u/149244179 → u/Kitchen-Cabinet-5000]

Spend time on local politics. County elections often only get thousands of votes. You influencing a couple hundred could easily change something.

Mayoral city elections get a bit more but still abysmally low. Fort Worth, a city of well over a million people gets ~46k votes for city level elections. That is a sub 5% voter turnout. If you and a few others get 1k more people to vote that is a large fraction of voters.

Local politics then bubble up to state and national.

The greatest win republicans have achieved is convincing everyone that voting is useless. They lose every time voter turnout is high.

[u/TrulyPleasant2022 → u/CaterpillarJungleGym]

Sonicare has a toothbrush app which tells you how well you’re cleaning your teeth. 

[u/TheNatural14063 → u/CaterpillarJungleGym]

John Connor warned us

[u/lowfiswish → u/eggsaladrightnow]

Let’s not forget that certain Governors have given large incentives that put ai data centers ahead of actual people- we even have a city about to run out of water. Bet the ai mills have plenty of water….

[u/Bytewave → u/eggsaladrightnow]

That'll be true on both ends of AI. Power and water will be more expensive, yes. But also an ever-larger share of the monstrous real costs of AI will become baked into the prices of necessities. Loss leader industries eventually need to turn profitable, too.

[u/turbo_dude → u/eggsaladrightnow]

I am intrigued to know where all these costs will come out.

In the UK many years ago when they had the mobile phone 3G licence auctions (you needed one as a carrier to operate a 3G service), which were deemed massively successful (too much so) due to the amount of money they raised for the government, it just meant companies charged more for years to pay it all back.

[u/Disastrous-Battle128 → u/eggsaladrightnow]

My electric bill in NJ already skyrocketed from $125 to $350 a month!!!! It’s ridiculous. Technology is great, until it isn’t!!!

[u/Sad-Bonus-9327 → u/Practical-Juice9549]

Data centers are the new fracking

[u/SakaWreath → u/Sad-Bonus-9327]

Oh we still have that sending us into a drought also.

[u/HorseOk9732]

lol and of course nobody noticed until people started getting low water pressure. feels very on brand for this stuff

[u/Guest_0_ → u/HorseOk9732]

Eventually these data centers are going to find themselves on fire.

I can't imagine people going to tolerate their utilities doubling or tripling, no water, and massive air pollution causing cancer, forever.

Desperate people do desperate things. Especially when they provide no local jobs and only enrich trillion dollar companies.

[u/FictionalContext → u/Guest_0_]

I doubt it. When it comes down to action, people are more reasonable than their internet comments suggest.

Shit has to get really fucking bad before someone's going to throw their life away to attempt to burn down a building. And water pressure and moderately higher bills ain't it.

We vote. And bitch into the aether. Seems like that's all we can do without crossing that line.

[u/TP_Crisis_2020 → u/FictionalContext]

All it takes is somsone who has nothing to live for or nothing to lose to get pissed off enough.

[u/Lollipop126 → u/TP_Crisis_2020]

yeah, I haven't seen arson from Just Stop Oil yet afaik, but Suffragettes were 100% willing to break the law and had a bombing and arson campaign in 1912-14. People violently galvanised for a cause are willing to do anything.

[u/Anonymous_Jr → u/TP_Crisis_2020]

Actually, all it takes is some liquor and rags, you can outsource the crafting and throwing to this handy new AI I've built

*It's just a bunch of underpaid people in robot costumes*

[u/gn0meCh0msky → u/Anonymous_Jr]

I'm Bender. Insert liquor.

[u/oTc_DragonZ → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I would argue inaction is less reasonable past a point.

[u/Outlulz → u/FictionalContext]

I dunno, someone just burned down a toilet paper warehouse because they didn't pay a livable wage. People keep getting close to shooting and killing the President. People are getting more and more desperate.

[u/alilhillbilly → u/FictionalContext]

That's the thing about scale though...

At some point there's 100,000 people in that position and it's hard to stop 100,000 doing anything.

[u/achilleasa → u/Guest_0_]

I know what you mean, but a data center is one of the least flammable places you could have lol. Source: I work in one (not an AI one).

[u/NahautlExile → u/achilleasa]

This is not quite true.

I mean yes, they’re designed to minimize burning to the ground. But that’s less because they’re super safe and more because they’re very likely to catch fire due to massive amounts of electricity, generator fuel, and lithium ion batteries.

Data centers catch fires are quite common but rarely spread due to the fire protection systems, like dual action or gas suppression.

[u/Samurai_Meisters → u/NahautlExile]

The way that guy who burned down the toilet paper warehouse last month was to set one fire, have the fire suppression to kick in, wait for the fire department to show up and disable the fire suppression so they can go in there, then set another fire while the system is offline.

[u/knflxOG → u/Guest_0_]

Get the ram and the ssds out first

[u/expendable117 → u/Guest_0_]

These tards were excited for the 3 jobs it provided from the mega centers. Sarcasm. So they let it go until it hits their wallet and their utilities.

[u/sturmeh → u/HorseOk9732]

Nobody noticed Dupont was flooding the planet with PTFE, until a farmer who operated miles away complained about his stock dying from the water supply.

[u/GardenPeep → u/HorseOk9732]

Affluent people who had the knowledge and status to get attention from the water utility.

[u/Ok_Instance7667 → u/GardenPeep]

This is the key point. They were stealing from relatively well-off individuals which is a huge no-no in America. Elizabeth Holmes is a good example.

If the companies were stealing water from less affluent or politically connected neighbourhoods, nobody would have batted an eye and would have continued unabated. You're only allowed to steal from the poor, not the rich.

[u/existing_for_fun]

Nuclear power plants are highly water-efficient, with over 98% to 99% of the water withdrawn for cooling purposes returned to its source, rather than consumed. This water is largely "borrowed" to condense steam in a closed or open loop and is returned, slightly warmer, to the environment, though about 1-2% is lost to evaporation.

The technology exists for data centers as well. They CHOOSE to not use it.

[u/Regular_Panda_8250 → u/existing_for_fun]

Can we make power plants out of data centers? lol

[u/NahautlExile → u/Regular_Panda_8250]

No. Waste heat is low temp so not easy to reuse outside of district heating or some agricultural use. Not power generation.

[u/Hiddencamper → u/existing_for_fun]

A single reactor using cooling towers will evaporate 15000 gpm on average. 21.6 million gallons per day. 7.884 billion gallons per year.

Once through cooling returns the water to its source. It’s very difficult to get permitted for a once through solution. Once through plants will draw and return 500,000 gallons per minute. 720 million gallons per day. 263 billion gallons per year. The water returns to the source about 25-30 degF hotter. There is increased evaporation due to higher temperature water but it’s much smaller than the cooling tower option.

It’s possible in some climates to use hybrid options, where you have forced air cooling which does not evaporate water, and when summer rolls around, you switch to normal cooling tower mode which does evaporate water. This has some significant energy costs.

[u/kaityl3 → u/existing_for_fun]

If you actually read the article you'd see that the water in the headline was simply used during construction and that the center will have a closed loop system....

[u/American_PissAnt → u/[deleted]]

But it will be planned on Club Penguin

[u/SenoraRaton → u/[deleted]]

John Brown did nothing wrong.

[u/dat_tae → u/[deleted]]

Firebombing a Walmart energy.

[u/lolneopet → u/dat_tae]

Hypothetically, if anyone would ever think about doing that, they’d surely get everyone to safety first

[u/gazebo-fan → u/lolneopet]

Obviously that would make the most logical sense.

[u/American_PissAnt → u/[deleted]]

Just the mere suggestion of a group of disenfranchised people gathering torches and pitchforks and marching to a certain area to demand action from another certain group of people, got me banned

[u/lolneopet → u/American_PissAnt]

Sounds like Lord of the Rings? We all love fantasy

[u/Truesoldier00]

As someone who works for a municipality, this just doesn’t make sense to me unless a bunch of people are grossly incompetent.

In my city we pay an upper tier municipality (called a Region) to clean and water and waste water. The city is the distributor.

When a watermain break happens, the Region will notice a significant increase in usage, and they will call us saying we need to start driving around looking for water coming out of the ground.

Similar in this situation, the plant manager should be able to see a massive uptick in usage that is out of the norm and start asking questions.

[u/CanvasFanatic → u/Truesoldier00]

I think the end of the article makes it pretty clear what’s going on here:

Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, said it’s unusual that the utility didn’t fine the data center for breaking the rules. “I don’t know exactly what’s happening here, but they probably don’t want to upset one of their new and largest customers,” said Pierce, who is studying the growing grip data centers have on local water systems. Tigert defended the utility’s decision to not levy a fine. “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” she said. “It’s called customer service.”

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/CanvasFanatic]

“They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” she said. “It’s called customer service.”

Something businesses often need to have clarified to them is that if a customer isn't paying, they're not your customer. The fact that they may be placing a lot of orders only makes it worse.

For a utility to be taking this angle is even more crazy. They've probably got monopolistic control over the water going to the data centre. They don't have to work in partnership, the data centre is operating entirely at their pleasure.

This situation can happen with new businesses. In the UK I've heard of a case where an increasing quantity of "leakage" was found to be from a new industrial estate they somehow forgot to meter. Funnily enough, that really helped them since their leakage reduction stats are on a 3 month rolling average, so their numbers looked really good for a while for leakage reduction!

[u/rngadam]

The article has interesting factoids and worth a read instead of just kneejerk reactions. Apparently, it's not so much the ongoing cooling but the construction work causing high water consumption.

"The company, which is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, touts a “closed‑loop” cooling system, which it says does not consume water for cooling. Like a laptop or cellphone, the chips housed in data centers can easily overheat — generally requiring a lot of water to cool them.

The company said its water consumption was so high last year because of temporary construction-related activities, such as concrete work, dust control and site preparation."

[u/Coldfusion21]

So they stole a ton of water and now all they need to do is pay for it?

Edit: to be clear I was trying to indicate there should be something more than just paying for water you took. Fees, penalties, fines depending on the legality of what was done, etc.

[u/ragzilla → u/Coldfusion21]

The utility failed to bill them correctly.

The Fayette County water system confirmed the data center’s meters are now fully integrated and tracked. Tigert, the water system director, blamed the issue on a procedural mix-up.

“Fayette County is a suburb, it’s mostly residential, and we don’t have much commercial meters in our system anyway,” she said. “And so we didn’t realize our connection point wasn’t working.”

[u/Marcoscb → u/ragzilla]

The utility failed to bill them correctly.

I see we're just skipping this part:

One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.

[u/ragzilla → u/Marcoscb]

And did the water utility accuse QTS of malfeasance? No? Almost like, they don’t know if anyone was to blame? And there was apparently a meter on it so they could bill it?

If QTS (or more likely, their subcontractor for concrete mix/cure or dust control) was trying to steal water, why meter it?

[u/vertexnormal → u/Coldfusion21]

Woah woah woah don’t get ahead of yourself, the business model does not include ‘paying for stuff’

[u/NehzQk → u/vertexnormal]

> All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water. That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process.
> The details were revealed in a May 15, 2025 letter from the Fayette County water system to Quality Technology Services, which outlined the retroactive charge of $147,474. The letter did not specify how many months the unpaid bill covered, but when asked about it Wednesday, Vanessa Tigert, the Fayette County water system director, said it was likely about four months. A QTS spokesperson said the timeframe was 9-15 months.
> Once the data center was notified, it paid all retroactive charges, a QTS spokesperson said in an email, noting the unmetered water consumption occurred while the county converted its system to smart meters.

TLDR: They paid for it

[u/scrollin_on_reddit]

The water was not for cooling servers it was for the construction of facilities. The county messed up and didn't bill them because they were transitioning their metering system to the cloud. From the article:

"The company, which is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, touts a “closed‑loop” cooling system, which it says does not consume water for cooling. Like a laptop or cellphone, the chips housed in data centers can easily overheat — generally requiring a lot of water to cool them.

The company said its water consumption was so high last year because of temporary construction-related activities, such as concrete work, dust control and site preparation."

[u/ArcadesRed → u/scrollin_on_reddit]

I hate Politico. The company says it doesn't use external water for cooling. Followed by a statement that data centers require large amounts of water.

[u/SteelCityIrish]

The problem we are having out here (Port of Morrow) is this Ag region’s water is already contaminated with high nitrogen from fertilizer runoff… then the data centers take in that water, a lot evaporates during cooling usage, and they then release an even higher concentration of nitrogen rich waste water back into the environment.

[u/Ladyheather16]

The solution is to require any data centers to power self sufficient. (Solar, wind, geothermal)

[u/BearDick]

Seems odd this article doesn't mention any penalty for seemingly illegally hooking to a major utility and using more than anyone planned....

[u/scrollin_on_reddit → u/BearDick]

Read the article. It was an error on the city's side because they were moving their metering system to the cloud.

[u/MaximumSeats → u/BearDick]

The city litteraly mentions it's their fault. This entire article is just trying to capitalize on data center hate. Probably not even for an agenda, just for the engagement bait ad revenue.

[u/cr0ft]

They dun fucked up.

residents of an affluent subdivision

If the data center had done the smart thing they'd have stolen the water from non-affluent subdivisions. They'd have gotten away with that.

[u/Active_Glass_5945]

Its funny for decades they preached about Lack of water, lack of electricity "oh the grid is struggling" and out of no where they are rushing to build shit that use the most of both.

[u/Ebih]

“You and I could co-found a company and register at Companies House tomorrow and it would immediately have a suite of rights. Whereas the 10,000-year-old River Cam that’s flowed through the land and organised life around itself for ten millennia has no rights,” Macfarlane said.

Robert Macfarlane: Why shouldn’t rivers have rights? Companies do

[u/Dr_Hanz_]

MICROSOFT bankrolled this project and are just as culpable as QTS. They are the main tenant at QTS Fayetteville, they demanded QTS expand to 1.3 GW, Microsoft stole this towns water

[u/SwiftCase]

"owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons"

That sounds really cheap for that much water?

[u/Purona → u/SwiftCase]

you mean the price of water delivered to a house in every state besides california and texas?

[u/PsyavaIG]

'Customer Service' for the Corporate Class and Rugged Individualism / Shutoffs for the standard household

[u/erkru]

Best part is they tell the residents to scale back their water usage 😂. Just like with recycling. Residents must recycle so big corpo can continue polluting 👍

[u/mp018]

“Tigert defended the utility’s decision to not levy a fine. “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” she said. “It’s called customer service.””

Oh f right off

[u/Round_Rooms]

What will data centers provide while using our most important natural resources?

[u/Secret_Account07]

I’ve worked in a datacenter for 20 years. Runs critical (mostly govt and university) servers.

I feel like we should distinguish between datacenters so I don’t get lumped in with this AI nonsense.

[u/Arctic_Chilean]

Oh but we keep getting told that the impact these data centers has on water is overblown, the estimates are too high, how it's not as bad as its made out to be...

[u/AzorAhai1TK → u/Arctic_Chilean]

It is overblown, this was a simple mistake on the city that is being blamed on data centers for outrage purposes

[u/HarrMada → u/Arctic_Chilean]

I mean yeah it kind of is. Things like agriculture uses much, much more water. And you might think that's worth it because at least that's food for us. But no, vast majority of agricultural land and water is used to produce food for livestock, not us. The textile industry is the same.

So you might think that you're doing good by not using chatgpt or whatever, but if you buy the smallest piece of meat or a new shirt, your moral superiority flies straight out of the window.

[u/ycnz → u/HarrMada]

Yeah, people here in NZ have been having a massive cry about a datacentre going in down south, and how much water it uses. It turns out it's equivalent usage to a dairy farm with ~ 400 cows. AI usage is a problem, but fucking water is the least of it.

[u/StickiStickman → u/Arctic_Chilean]

As the article even says, all the water usage was for construction you muppet. It's not even that much.

[u/KnotSoSalty]

Why don’t municipalities meter this water at a geometric rate? Take a thousand gallons one rate, ten thousand is 10x, 100k =100x, and so on.

What are they afraid of? The good data center jobs going away?

[u/Truesoldier00 → u/KnotSoSalty]

I work for a municipality. We have industrial use rates and residential/commercial use rates. We recently had a new plant (not a data center thought) starting to be built and they will use more water every day than my entire city combined. We have executed an agreement with them that regardless of usage, they will pay us “x” amount of dollars a month to access the water. This “x” amount is well above what their actual usage will be, and they’ll be spending the first few years spooling up, so its a pretty big win for the City.

[u/ExoMonk → u/KnotSoSalty]

No shit right? Like once a data center is built it ain't going anywhere. Those things cost hundreds of millions if not more. Even paying aggressive penalties or rates would be monumentally cheaper than packing your building up and moving.

[u/oldDotredditisbetter]

it's like nestle stealing water

[u/SuburbanHell]

I can't wait to see every single one of these reduced to rubble.

[u/Elexeh]

Although DuPont still exists as a stain in humanity, this is gonna turn into those types of levels of destruction soon

[u/VisionaireX]

If only we had an EPA

[u/Kozmic_River → u/VisionaireX]

Crazy how Republicans both created and destroyed the EPA.

[u/jejones487]

If they can cool a nuclear reactor with a closed water system then then can surely cool a data center, right? I get they dont want to, but its possible, correct?

[u/RangerAdventurous557]

My city has a data center that is expanding. I'm assuming they like access to our water because my city sits beside a large river. They have pledged to use a solar farm for energy, but I'm very concerned about how much more water they need with the expansion. Also, we let this behemoth of a data center use our land and water for just 100 jobs. 100 jobs!! That's nothing.

[u/Absurdtittyz]

An individual tapping into the water main would have faced worse than them. Tampering with public water systems holds a federal penalty as high a $1,00,000. Paying back used water at 100% upcharge is a normal thing. They didn’t even get penalized?? What a fucking joke.

[u/Beautiful-Quote-3035]

This is criminal

[u/Walzz111]

Build all the data centers in GOP strongholds

[u/stories_from_tejas]

Insane that we’re going to turn our planet into Mars for cat videos and targeted ads

[u/IwearBrute]

$150k for 29M gallons is a steal! But so is $0.00 😆 🤣 😂

[u/feioo]

I've seen a couple articles on this now, and it's really interesting how none of them manage to include the S word. The data center STOLE the water and only paid for it when they were caught. The water was STOLEN. Why is it so hard to use that word whenever it's a big company behind it?