According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025.
I'm sorry, the market research firm is named what now?
Tech Bros love naming their stuff after evil Tolkien shit. And they seem to do it totally unironically - as if they read the books but were confused about which side the good guys were.
Did you see the post yesterday about Thiel unironically arguing that Mordor was the optimal society in the story and Gandalf was just a confused old guy.
Be aware there is no good original source for this. Just articles referencing each other.
It's a tough one because he is already known to be that twisted of a person, so it's almost not even interesting to know if he actually said it.
His actions provide evidence that this is consistent with his morally bankrupt value system
Be aware there is no good original source for this.
Well, there is a source. Good? I don’t think so, but I’m sure there are those who will argue.
Thats a source for the idea but not for the question of whether Thiel agreed with that idea or not.
Here a neat fact: Palo Verde, a nuclear power station in Arizona that generates so much power that it is the 2nd largest power plant in the United States is cooled entitrely by the treated waste water from Phoenix.
This is to illustrate that Data centers can be designed to be environmentally friendly, its just the greedy corpo pigshit that demands they suck drinking water out of water tables to power AI that nobody wants.
they are also doing it the cheapest way possible, the power doesnt come for free , apparently datacenters arnt paying for it at all.
How long until angry farmers attack a data center?
For the record, we use several orders of magnitude more gallons of water keeping grass and golf courses alive. This is why I hate reports with large, absolute numbers. It sounds like a lot. It's really nothing.
Yeah and that's also bullshit
The AI apologists in this thread are wild to me. It's too bad they don't have access to some kinda tool that could give them information on how water tables work.
They’re in fuck around mode, they’ll eventually find out how it works.
Their plan is: they fuck around, and let the rest of us find out.
Our lack of drinking water is a sacrifice they are willing to make.
I’m talking about when aquifers don’t refill, their data centers can’t operate, the cattle have long since died of dehydration, and Midwest is a dust bowl again. The US hasn’t had anything close to an African level drought/famine, starving and thirsty masses get real nasty.
True but I think we will suffer more
People blow their minds, They choose to resign, This deformed society is part of a design, It'll never go away, It's in the cards that way, The masses of humanity have always, Always had to suffer
Bad Religion, Suffer, title track 1988
😒 yeah. We are, we will. I’ve known that since before I found a song that summed my feelings up a half generation before I could.
But also, knowing it’s coming, knowing what it will entail, knowing it’s probably going to suck… what are we up to to limit that?
we are just missing the plague of locusts that africa and ME has. ours went extinct apparently, because we destroyed thier habitat.
Agreed. Different environments, different “plagues”. I’ve never seen grasshoppers hit that threshold where they go locust mode, but I’ve seen Anabrus simplex (Mormon crickets) so thick they turn modern highways into slip’n’slides.
I think a lot of them know, they are just hoping to cash out before the find out phase.
I'm personally hoping for the day when AI and LLMs become more expensive for business than real people.
Already happened, doesn't seem to matter.
it is already, they are just using VC money.
Consumed? Where did the water go? I'm guessing it's still water.
They (usually) pump water out of the ground because they don't need it to be filtered or treated. The hot towers turn liquid water into vapor, which they (usually) pump outside. The vapor floats into the air and then gets carried away and dumped somewhere else, like the ocean.
Yeah that's what I don't get about all of this. Why can't they recycle this water if it's just being used for cooling. Why must it always be fresh water?
They evaporate it using cooling towers. Because it's the cheapest way to shed heat.
Because recycling the water would require condensing it, and the laws of thermodynamics necessitates that the energy that was taken away into the water by the phase change from water to vapor must be taken back out of the vapor in order to change it back into water.
That's to say, in order to get the water back that was evaporated to cool something, you must cool the water the same amount that it cooled your other thing. This makes recovering the water completely pointless as you have to do the exact same amount of cooling again to recover it.
Data centers use evaporative cooling because it's cheap. Not recovering the water is what makes it cheap. They can use cooling methods that don't rely on disposing of water to the atmosphere (like heat pumps), but it's not cheap.
Data centers use evaporative cooling because it's cheap. Not recovering the water is what makes it cheap.
This is where regulations need to step in. The extra cost of non-evaporarive cooling is not going to make or break the datacenter, but it might cut into the CEO's bonus. Make them pay for it! They've got the money.
Many of these facilities are using evaporation coolers. Which means the water just evaporates. And that ends up raining into the ocean later.
They’re going to cheap out in whatever way they can. Using a different cooling system, or using non-potable water isn’t going to be done voluntarily.
It does have a touch of fear mongering. The water wouldn't even be contaminated.
They evaporate it using cooling towers. Because it's the cheapest way to shed heat.
it’s basically evaporative cooling. so they could condense it but that takes energy. energy takes money. money takes from profit. and the water is a public resource and capitalists hate the public anyway.
The issue is heat. If your data center consumes 100 megawatts, that's 100 megawatts of electricity that turns into 100 megawatts of heat. Part of the challenge of a data center is getting rid of that heat and keeping the servers cool.
There's a fun little principle called latent heat in phase change. To take 1 g of water and heat it from just above freezing to just below boiling consumes about 100 calories of energy. To then boil it, to raise it just a fraction of a degree and turn it into steam, takes another 433 calories of energy. So if your data center has 100 megawatts of heat to get rid of, turning water into vapor is a great way to get rid of it.
You don't actually even need to boil the water, if you take warm water and spray it into the air, some of it will evaporate and the water that comes back on the ground is significantly colder than what you sprayed in the air. This is harnessed with a machine called a cooling tower, it's a big boxy thing that has a ton of little waterfalls and wet plates inside it while a giant fan blows tons of air through it. You pour warm water in, some of it evaporates, the water that comes out is much colder. Many buildings use this as part of their air conditioning system. But when that water evaporates, you need more water to replace it. And that's why they say data centers consume water. The water isn't destroyed, but it is released into the atmosphere as steam or humidity and thus is no longer usable until it rains again. Which, depending on your climate, may be sometime away or may be some distance away.
Fuck all these thirsty clankers and their apologist simps.
Albania showed us the way. Doing nothing is a choice. Vive la revolución ✊🏼🇦🇱
Last time I looked at this the numbers were essentially meaningless, is it different this time?
Super El nino will make it worse too.
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