> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.
I do not understand how that is even possible.
If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.
I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.
I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.
I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that.
Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
Data centers tend to concentrate their water usage within urban areas, causing a strain on local resources. The value of their output is much less tangible. Their water consumption scales up around tenfold if you consider the indirect usage from generating the electricity.
But on the other hand; yes, it would also help enormously if people ate less meat.
They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.
Here in France at least, companies can also be subject to FOIA requests for information pertaining to contracts they have with public entities. E.g. if a city publishes a tender to run tye local bike share program, then the company that gets the contract may have to directly answer (some) requests about that program.
But like I said, not sure if this applies to data centers which are, iiuc, mostly private ventures.
I live right next to a waste valorisation plant[1]. They have to exactly specify what amount of water they use and what amount of water they then send out to the waste water treatment facility. It also has to be clean to a very specific standard before it leaves which is also checked.
We have datacenters in Switzerland too, but very little outrage or debate because there are strict rules in place in most places. They can build all they want but it costs significantly more to meet environmental requirements.
The valorisation plant next to my home has a water cooling tower/fans significantly oversized just to make sure the noise is keep under the required level.
This is a Dutch website and here in the Netherlands we have demand issues. In these same areas where issues exist, data centres are being planned and built. There are waiting lists now for normal businesses who want a new connection to the net, or connections with more capacity. These are lists waiting for capacity to become available: The demand on the current net is already too high.
Because there's a building populist push against these developments.
Presumably they still want to build these things. If I was trying to convince people who hate me to let me do what I want, I would not play so secretive as it may look suspicious. Especially if, ostensibly, the data is in my favor.
Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
In data centres all that water is so that some wimpy cunt gets to hit return after spending no more than 5 minutes in an half baked prompt so he can insert the answer into his pitch deck, or PR review — and now with pacing the frontier models, he actually doesn't need to insert it, it's inserted automatically wherever it might fit. When it comes to agriculture, that is to produce things like food. This requires obviously much more water, which means that's what we really should be cutting down. Agents don't need food so the solution is just to replace humans with agents.
If you have any other stubborn question resisting clarification just hit me up, and I'll explain it to you immediately and clearly.
The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.
That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.
> Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution.
Belittling criticisms that way is childish and doesn't address a single one. Literally nobody on the whole planet, at least in public discourse, is using "I am angry" as an argument in any of this. Yet it's the first thing that is always brought up. It's just a cheap, thought-terminating stereotype.
The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.
Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).
In the Netherlands it is not just about AI datacenters, even before the rise of AI pushback against Meta's planned datacenter made them cancel it. There has been a lot of criticism of the municipality that allowed Microsoft to expand its datacenters. The argument is that this is a small country that already has to make tradeoffs to get to its desired energy mix (wind turbines near cities on land) and then these datacenters are built that consume the power that is generated by sacrificing the little remaining open space. In the last few years there is actually a electricity shortage in some regions so "we can hook up this 200 MW datacenter but not your house" is a bad look.
Just because people haven't cared about the environment before doesn't mean they shouldn't start now. And just because there are worse existing polluters doesn't mean we shouldn't resist new ones.
A new golf course used to be seen as a great thing to have in your back yard and now we know their pesticide use increases the risk of Parkinson's. People are waking up and caring more. We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
It's kind of sad that the only European LLM lab of significance is not even setting their model as a default one any longer.
Realizing something is not the same as acting on it in Europe is falling further and further behind.
I think that currently the EU is focusing on strengthening itself from a military perspective due to US policy shifts, so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people, thus prioritizing safety and perhaps energy production, as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China. If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
If the EU does not build their own factories, then they will be reliant on factories built elsewhere.
> In the Netherlands, it is estimated that they account for about 0.1 percent of total consumption.
If that's true, what's the problem?
The main problem is, in my opinion, that those are just estimates. If we are supposed to accommodate the current and potential future needs, we need real data. Not estimates.