The average Nebraska farm is 989 acers[1] as of 2022 and uses roughly ~1,200 acre-feet of water (or roughly 390 million gallons) per year[2]. So a single average Nebraska farm uses roughly 30 times the water the Lincoln data center uses per year. There are 44,479 farms/ranches covering 44 million acres, which accounts for over 90% of the state's total land area.
Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming (even in a state like Nebraska that gets a large amount of rainfall compared to Central or Southern California). I hope that the current data center environmental focus continues to shed light on our industrial water and electrical usage.
[1]http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-... [2]https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-man...
That's to say, farms basically convert water to food and CO2 to O2. I'd say this is the water well spent.
If it cools the plants and the ground through evaporation, it's used as effectively as a datacenter.
The lack of drip irrigation used in more arid areas, jsut because they have water today, is kind of shocking, and stupid.
[0] https://www.mygeoquest.com/ogallala-aquifer-depletion-map-an...
[1] Unless cooling is somehow critical, or there is a fungus growth problem from watering at less-hot times of day.
I stand by what I say, 90% are brain dead, have 0 understanding of sustainable practices, only care about their bottom line, use absolutely outdated ways of managing and growing crops. They're basically brute forcing life with technology, destroying their own source of income year after year.
I worked for years in small scale bio farms, I can certify most farmers are clinically retarded
If it's fed to farm animals for meat, that reduces its efficiency by an order of magnitude. There's still plenty of discussion to be had if that is water well spent. It probably depends on a lot of factors.
And then find out how much Oracle uses per site as I figure their provably running much less efficient operations.
Im with you being some numbers to the battle. Its either going to be obviously bad or non-issue. Next question is, what is the quality of the recycled water.
Final comment - you used Nebraska as a location - what about all the drought states?
Opinions don't necessarily equate with a desire to remove them, there could also be (dis)-incentives like taxes, removal of subsidies etc.
They varies wildly between different crops. Ideally, farmers in drought prone regions should be choosing crops that don't just dump all the water into the atmosphere (but current economic incentives/excessively cheap industrial water mean this is not happening).
Also, a lot of water evaporates from the soil before it ever gets sucked up by the plants.
The general public really has no barometer for judging industrial scale numbers. Anything "million" to the general public is interpreted as "infinity"
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
> The case represented a major test of Oregon public records law. After The Oregonian/OregonLive requested Google’s records last year, The Dalles sued the news organization to prevent the information’s release. It argued Google’s water use was a “trade secret” exempt from Oregon disclosure requirements.
https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/
> Updates: Following the settlement reached between The Oregonian and the city of The Dalles, a Google spokesperson told the Associated Press that the tech company would no longer seek to protect its site-level water-use numbers as a trade secret at any of its data centers nationwide. And after the city turned over Google’s water-use data, The Oregonian reported that the tech company’s water use “nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city.”
> ...
> The Oregonian first requested records about Google’s water usage in The Dalles last September. But city officials denied the request submitted by business reporter Mike Rogoway, arguing that the records are “trade secrets” exempt from disclosure under the Oregon Public Records Law.
> The newspaper decided to challenge the city’s denial, asking the district attorney for Wasco County to weigh in. After reviewing the city’s rejection, the district attorney sided with The Oregonian, concluding that the city failed to meet its burden to show that Google’s water usage is a trade secret and ordering the city to disclose the requested records.
---
In the Nebraska one... https://www.1011now.com/2026/09/30/more-questions-than-answe...
> The Google Data Center in Lincoln, named Agate LLC, claimed their electricity usage and water usage were trade secret information, citing Neb. Rev. State §§ 81-1527; 84-712.05 and NAC TITLE 115, CH. 2. In fact, Google did this for all three data centers, including their sites in Omaha and Papillion.
This isn't only Google claiming this...
https://midwestadvocates.org/legal-victory-judge-orders-rele...
> In an oral ruling delivered during an August 17 hearing, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Ehlke found that the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) acted unlawfully when it denied a public records request seeking unredacted documents related to electrical load projections at Meta’s Beaver Dam data center. The PSC defended its refusal to release the information, claiming it was a trade secret. Judge Ehlke, however, was not convinced. He ruled that the information did not qualify as a trade secret because it lacked independent economic value, and he ordered its release.
Especially if the resource is drinkable water.
We have real environmental problems, like excess CO2 in the air and forever-chemicals in our biosphere. The narrative must stay with those material issues and not be diverted by trivia.
These arguments about data center water use are so dumb they distract from actual water conservation efforts too.
Evaporated water becomes drinkable water again but not necessarily in the place it was consumed.
And don’t forget that consumption comes on top of the already existing consumption, so at some point you could reach the point of too much consumption. The straw that broke the camels back. There is a reason for that saying.
Agricultural consumption is already a problem but raising the consumption doesn’t help.
Like with CO2, more is more
It's really just a matter of appreciating how much land is involved. Converting to metric, that's 370mm of water per year across the entire land surface. For comparison (per Wikipedia) that's about double the annual rainfall in Phoenix AZ, but considerably less than in San Fransisco (and way less than East Coast cities). Of course, that's in addition to the natural Nebraska rainfall, but you get the idea. It's not an absurd amount.
Now that we know that farms use a lot of water, we are clean to waste any lower amount of water.
Thank you!
It's a weird carbon offset for the fuel industry that isn't effective and it diverts huge amounts of farm land away from food crop usage. It ties farms to industry rather than supplying food, binding their profitability to the price of oil far more and that only exists because the US Gov mandates the ethanol blend.
It's supposed to be because it's renewable/sustainable using a biological product, but the industry is heavily dependent on synthetic fertilisers which come from refineries.
There are a great many reasons to get rid of the ethanol mix. Lower food costs being the biggest. Now that EVs are practical the need for trying to whitewash combustion fuel is overbaked.
If the difference is 1000x then definitely yes. Spending any attention talking about the 0.01% is a waste of time or deliberate misdirection.
Newer data centres use closed loop electric (refrigeration) cooling instead of induced draft open loop evaporative cooling.
There's a cost either way (electricity or water), but electricity is much easier to get to your data centre so the capex cost at the start is lower, and municipalities have this annoying tendency to ban cooling towers because they're not pretty enough.
The water used, whether evaporated or returned into soil (which includes rivers) is unusable any more. Unless the runoff is collected and reused again, which is a form of recycling, and should also not count towards usage of water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence
true for some agriculture, but growing the corn for ethanol is stupid
100%
> arguably a more malicious crime against animals and the planet
Personally disagree, it entirely depends on your moral and ethical alignment though, of course. Generative AI will be used to divide and conquer us at a pace never seen before, it will destroy the internet/digital realm by burying it in generated content.
Plenty of delicious (if prepared properly) and healthier plant-protein alternatives to meat. See: Tofu, Seitan, Lentils, Chickpeas, Tempeh, Edamame, TVP, Lupins, Hemp seeds, Pumpkin seeds, Peanuts, Nutritional yeast, Oats, Quinoa
Yawn... every time people make claims like this the less and less I care to hear their concerns.
When a data center uses water, it's almost entirely evaporated away in an aeration pond.
If the data center building were a pool with a surface area of 6.62 acres, its annual water use of 13.299 million gallons would fill it to a depth of 1.9 meters.
To hold the 391 million gallons in the farm estimate cited above, the same pool would have to be 55 meters deep.
How does that comparison hold water?
Elaborating a bit:
1 acre-foot is 325,851 gallons or 1,233,482 liters.
For easier mental handling: 4 acre-feet are roughly 5 million liters or 5,000 cubic meters.
Allow me to introduce you to the Dutch "ox head"
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okshoofd
I wonder how many British "stones" that is.
For livestock, there was a pre-butcher (14-pound) and a post-butcher (8-pound) value for stone.
A customer brings a lamb in that is very much alive and that weighs, say, 8 stone.
The blood, hide, and offal is kept by the butcher. After that's subtracted, about 8 stone of meat and bone is expected to be returned to the customer.
Acre itself is fun, too: That's about how much land one man with one ox can plow in one workday. It was a convenient way to keep farmland in perspective.
Anyway, an acre-foot of water weighs a little bit shy of 200,000 stone.
It takes very close to 2 acre-feet of water to fill one olympic-sized swimming pool.
Do you have a slightly more recent example?
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.
These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.
With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
It doesn't have to be really bright lighting but that's the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter's request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.
Maybe we should be calling them "compute centers" instead of "data centers".
> At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
> Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
I'd also question whether that is inside or outside. We already have regulations that govern the acceptable noise levels around commercial and industrial properties so I highly doubt that a datacenter is going to have an exception.
A "Rechenzentrum" was a place where lots and lots of people were sitting down crunching numbers with pen on paper. This job also existed in the USA, where originally "computer" was the job title of someone working in such a computer center.
But then electronic computers became better at crunching numbers than human computers, so the job became obsolete. The word stayed around, but the meaning changed. Same way we dial phone numbers despite phones no longer having dials. We also still hang up the phone, despite there being nothing to hang the phone on anymore.
I would have traded a data center for the dairies I lived near as a kid
> At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
> I've read reports from people living near data centers having almost constant 60-70dB noise levels at their houses, which, yeah, it still shouldn't fly.
I absolutely believe that there's leftover noise around the facilities, too, specially low-frequency humming for electrical equipment, but I have yet to see _actual_ reporting demonstrating newer AI-centered datacenters produce even near the amount of noise OP was claiming.
> Noise level ~10m outside a facility is 90dB.
edit: just understood what "Extra zero" meant. The original comment before being edited said 100m and that's what I was quoting.
I still heard almost nothing ~20m from it, but neither I (nor the company who built it) knew what kinds of workloads ran there and I suspect it was mostly traditional workloads.
For someone who knows enough to point out that dB is logarithmic, you seemed to have neglected the fact that sound is inverse-square for distance? Unless these neighbors are _literally_ located 100m outside the data center?
It's also not a uniform medium. Sound gets reflected by houses, the ground, resonance, so it can constructively interfere and have a extra few times the expected amplitude. This can make the sound quaver and become really annoying, too.
dB should generally be expressed at what distance it was measured, and you'll see this done all over the place.
In this case, you'd reach 70dB at about 1km from the 90dB at 100m source, assuming a spherical cow, but they could also be completely different datacenters.
OP was talking about datacenters in residential areas and quoted the 90db @ 100m value, which indeed is 70dB @ 1km distance, which is absolutely absurd and would make it impossible to live nearby. That's the original comment I've answered.
Then, OP edited the post and said it was 90dB @ 10m, which means 50dB @ 1000m, an okayish value (depending on the type and duration of the noise), but that's not a distance we were talking about before.
I know datacenters in my city that are less than 500m from residential zoning (I should note I'm not in the US and this is not a new datacenter), so I didn't think that the original (distance) measurement sounded absurd, that's why I pointed out how much the (noise) measurement seemed to be out-of-scale.
Anyways, I think OP's measures where just completely made up or misremembered, because I'm any way I've framed the data (and the edited data), it doesn't match my personal observations around the few datacenters I've been to nor the data that's been released.
I did agree about the possibility of low-frequency noises being a huge nuisance, though, as those types of noises feel much worse than random noises at random intervals at higher dB.
Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable
- explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)
- played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient
- showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas
- did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record
- did not disclose the actual dB SPL figures measured
- kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.
If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research, at least in this context.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
Yes, data centers are loud. Fortunately, some time ago humans achieved magical technological breakthroughs called "earplugs" and "ear protectors".
I've spent enough time on city council noise ordnance boards and understand enough about acoustics to say that the professional sound system I own would certainly be audible and annoying to my neighbors half a kilometer away even if it were not appreciably above the noise floor of the surrounding environment.
Folks are great a signal detection and it's very annoying to them to be able to detect an unwanted bass drum or similar, which they can do at pretty long distances. Even distributed noise is still often noticeable to people.
For instance, I live in the literal middle of nowhere and I still encounter real noise pollution from gas well heads and gas processing plants that are several kilometers from my home.
The tax breaks are well-established in the media, see for example [0].
So, a 100MW DC will have about 20-30 people and a 1GW campus will be 200-300 people.
Those numbers can be boosted if the site has a significant non-operational support staff such as security and cleaning. But a significant part of security us heavily automated, to the point where when Meta had a major network failure they couldn't get on-call support staff into the facilities to fix the issue because the security doors were linked to the main network.
That’s the root of the problem.
Even if the data centre raises billions in revenue and pays billions in taxes, that isn’t paid to any government entity close to where the building is.
The locals get replaced by machines, the revenue is pocketed far away.
It’s the equivalent of big mining companies “investing” into mine automation in some developing country. The locals do not benefit!
Who then refuse to sell their machines to anyone except some Taiwanese company.
Sure, some temporary jobs during construction, but I bet it’s nothing like a retail store or factory in operation…
As for taxable revenue, how does that help the community beyond property tax assessments?
Edit: The average household in the U.S. uses 10500kWh of power per year. 28.76kWh per day.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
1.2kw is power, not energy (which would be kWh).
The unit you want is spelled “kW”. There really is a difference, especially when you’re inconsistently correcting someone else.
This is always kind of funny to me. How's an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?
How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed "data" center?
Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they'd like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.
Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can't decide if it's zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I'd be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can't be purely about power consumption.
>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?
What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because you aren't receiving the benefits is naive. No one's doing all this for free.
>If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We've been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?
You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?
And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.
Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you're not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.
tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.
Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.
This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.
I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1tes0rr/ai_data_cen...
[1]https://global.honda/en/environment/initiatives/data/
[2]https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv...
[3]https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/health-care.p...
[4]https://electricityplans.com/how-much-electricity-does-an-ap...
[5]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5058574/ for water usage per square meter for hospitals
[6]https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2017/1131/ofr20171131.pdf for water per person per year
The flood of anecdotal thumping seems to distract and undermine deliberation. The sad lack of peer reviewed data and impact analysis hinders thoughtful policymaking.
I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
The rest of us, who might be on green tariffs usually get a commitment that on average almost all our energy comes from renewables. When supply is short then I'm the one who's paying for gas generation rather than the company who has committed to greenwashing. But that also drives investment in renewable generation, in the UK renewables have gone from 2% of power generation in 1991 to around 50% now.
From a climate change perspective, what happens at one particular moment doesn't matter -- it's CO2 emissions globally over time that do.
Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that's going to impact the company's profitability, but by then your stock options will have already vested - so that's a problem for someone else!
Personally I will forgive them the Datacenter carbon if they are willing to stop flying private jets.
The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
The second problem is that the CO2 is diluted in the atmosphere. Consider the amount of energy needed to remove salt from ocean water, it's not simple.
It just takes a lot of energy to that what was done by burning fossils in the first place.
This is only a problem if AI won't develop cheap carbon neutral energy sources, like fusion or advanced fission, or more efficient solar with cheap grid-scale batteries.
It’s silly to pretend that technology is anything other than a double edged sword.
I'll grant you social media and advertising, but the other two are not new, and were way worse in the past.
Well, it was true in the 90s, and it's still true today. Once climate change becomes important enough (that is, causing actual significant damage to important, wealthy countries), it takes just one such country to start a stratospheric aerosol injection project, or, if space launch costs become low enough, put a sunshade between Earth and the Sun. Such solutions have their own risks, of course. But if climate change really becomes bad, they will be tried. And from what I have read, they have a good change of succeeding.
What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
They are still not melting enough. Most of the negative consequences of current summer heatwaves can be pretty much solved by installing US-style ubiquitous air conditioning.
An extremely wealthy acquaintance in my local circle is happy to endlessly debate whether climate change is ACTUALLY real or just scientists carving out job security, while flying out for monthly ski holidays wherever there's nice snow in the world when it gets a bit muggy at home.
Or to spell it out more clearly, the sarcasm has nothing to do with the truth value of the claim (I’m not making an assertion in either direction).
They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.
They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.
Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.
What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.
Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.
NIMBYism isn't rational, it's a manifestation of fear of change, even if they past state of affairs was worse than the future one. I live in a city where the anti-datacentre campaign isn't about some pleasant locale, but a disused toxic industrial land in a steel-mill complex over half a km away from any actual homes.
The corn field is a known quantity.
Not everyone is a software developer.
I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.
Hasn't it been common knowledge for a while -- as in since well before the ai boom -- that those reviews are in practice mostly tools for obstructionism (I don't want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we'll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?
Is that's even half true, I don't think the "unforced" there really applies.
If you're only saying we need fewer data centres then your argument is against AI, and not in favor of sensible approach to the climate.
Point being that we've been literally eating our environment to death, long before AI was a twinkle in Scam Altmans eye.
Weird how people never cared then. Weird how vegans were constantly shunned as too extreme then.
Shady backroom deals are bad though, and selectively choosing to apply the rules to some and wave them for others isn't cool, in either direction.
In a society of laws you can’t just ignore the ones you don’t like, otherwise it undermines the entire system and suddenly the ones we all generally like/support aren’t being followed either.
You can't just "change laws" when the people building these data centers control the laws.
If the laws aren’t working we should change them. That’s how this all works. Yes we can debate the efficacy but that’s the system we have and just ignoring laws isn’t viable.
Others don't like technological progress to be reduced to the speed of bureaucracies who have no compelling incentive to be particularly efficient. Especially when the technology at hand might end up making quite a few of these bureaucracies much less staffed.
Good luck with this attitude homie!
This was the attitude these leaders took, though. It shouldn’t be downvoted simply for being wrong—it’s wrong in an interesting way.
Lots of folks in Silicon Valley thought they’d be cheered for bypassing bureaucracy. They were wrong and will pay dearly for it, possibly with their wealth and freedom. But it was a commonly-accepted attitude, in part driven by the Bay Area’s obscenely inept bureaucracies around power and building.
"I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."
The global impact of AI doesn't change when you force DCs to build in another area.
Totally not a new robber baron era at all. That's just fake news guys.
/s
Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.
I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).
I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1uleoa2/sound_...
Sound meter shows "only" ~60 db, but that constant audible hum is, IMO, the data center actually assaulting those residents and apparently doing so 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
If someone who lived near that place set fire to the data center and I ended up on the jury and heard these recordings I would do everything in my power to nullify because that seems like a completely justified response to me in the face of the company running the data center not shutting down until the problem is fully fixed.
2. Most heavy industrial users of power are running stable businesses that are often expected to offset some of the infrastructure costs themselves, making payments over time. Not only have many hyperscalers bent the rules to avoid doing this, even if they did do things the right way, much of the rapid investment is highly leveraged and if a bubble pops, taxpayers would be stuck with the infrastructure bill anyway.
I think there's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
More generally, societal fatigue with tech culture overtaking everything, subsuming power from every other corner. Surveillance, the Zuck and Elon, COVID-19, immorality, Luigi Mangione and Elizabeth Holmes, a glut of cat videos and jackal-eared Wikipe-tans, delinquency of minors, 5G and everything else that technology can share some blame for, now focused on their visible manifestations.
The trouble is, once a danger becomes visible and ubiquitous, you’ve already lost. Fighting “A.I. Data Centres” is literally quixotic. If you look up “quixotic” in the Spanish Wikipedia, there is a photo of a chivalrous knight jousting with Nvidia’s CEO.
Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.
The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.
They force these NDAs so people can't collaborate and see what a horrible deal they are getting.
We hear about their tax breaks though. Why don’t they get treated the same as other local businesses, and pay the same rates?
At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology that its most significant leaders say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.
So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.
As a non American, I find this incomprehensible.
So, given that you don't know what makes your company better then the competition, it's better to hide everything you can so you don't accidentally disclose useful information. God forbid competition discover your own strategic advantage before you do.
A competitor with that information might have made a rush on a supply-constrained component market or negotiated longer term pricing agreements.
This is right up there with being able to predict a competitor's total manufacturing capacity for the next year because you have hard numbers on their raw material purchase.
Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything."
... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
Companies put signs on buildings so you can find them. Signs are important for retailers or offices where people need to find it. This isn't really the case for a data center. Data centers typically have a sign with simply the address of the building on it, so delivery drivers can find it. Any sort of a sign with branding is a waste of money at best, and a security liability at worst.
Even if you aren't worried about intentional security threats to your data center, you don't want the name of your company on it, because people will start showing up at the gate there instead of your primary business location.
I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.
The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.
https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...
https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...
The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]
Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.
But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.
1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
Not even close to a true statement.
EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].
According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.
For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. Robert Moses dam in Niagara Falls does about 2,700MW.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh).
It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.
Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.
Meanwhile from a local perspective the fact that a very large datacentre next door is hypothetically aggregating what would have been several other data centres, mostly built elsewhere, is not so reassuring. (Though the other side of that coin is that from the builders' point of view it may be politically easier to get a given amount of capacity built as a few very large plants in places which are less likely or less able to object: regulatory efficiency, distinct from energy efficiency.)
And also conversely, if the mega-DCs (deca-giga-DCs?) really are markedly more efficient, and if they do aggregate lots of new capacity, most especially if they do also end up aggregating existing capacity, that will worsen problems of competition and market concentration in the cloud computing market, at least once the money spigot is turned off again and it's no longer the case that any idiot can get financing for a new datacentre.
If there is demand for it, it's "socially justified". We don't live in a command economy, and thankfully, there's not a panel of woke elders deciding what we get to build. One of the great things about capitalism (indeed, the entire purpose of the thing) is that it does a great job of balancing supply to demand.
The decision of whether or not to build one big datacenter, or a billion teeny datacenters is also well solved by competition, and doesn't need our help.
Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it's not efficient in terms of time to transport.
> Attacking them for size
I didn't attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don't care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.
Just some napkin maths. The best combined cycle gas powerplant (Nat gas + steam) have an efficiency around 60 %. So 9 GW of electricity requires enough natural gas for 15 GW (9/0.6 = 15). Natural gas is about 10 kWh/m^3, so in 1 hour, we need 15E9/10E3 = 15E6 m^3 of natural gas. In BTU this is 5.118E10 BTU. A year has 8760 hours, 4.483E14 BTU or 4.483E8 MMBTU in a year.
According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56380&src=%E... the average Nat gas residential consumption in USA is around 80 MMBTU. So these 9 GW of electricity for datacenter s represent the average Nat gas consumption of 5.6 million home in USA.
For those who haven't clicked through, that article mentions a 9GW datacentre planned for Utah by Kevin O'Leary's company as well as a 10GW datacentre planned for Ohio by Softbank https://apnews.com/article/ai-data-center-ohio-uranium-enric... and Facebook's planned 7GW data centre in Louisiana https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... , all largely to be gas-powered it seems.
1 GW is about a single nuclear rector of the Zaporizhzhia powerplant in Ukraine. Other nuclear powerplants in Europe have about 600 to 900 MW per reactor. The newest generation have reactor of 1.4 GW. Just to give an order of magnitude. Every time a 1GW data center is built, to have a continuous supply and CO2 free, it would require to build one nuclear reactor. I find this insane.
I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.
This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/03/chinas-solar-capacity...
The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.
It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24/7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.
Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.
With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.
[0]: https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delf...
[1]: https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/dat...
A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.
1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.
A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.
Given the current power consumption of states, I find it hard to believe.
Even for smaller sites, 1-2 MW would have been very small.
You see it less now since the shift to the cloud, but in the 00s this stuff was everywhere.
At a large enough scale, it doesn't matter how efficient you are - you're still causing a more damage than the region or the world can take.
There being a grain of truth or a valid angle doesn't wash bullshit from being bullshit.
Or here, in this comment from below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958135
Now where's the data for the popular claim (which as you conceded is not what you just posted, where it's specifically the overall burden that is too big)? I'm amenable even for a complex mix of cases, where some of the local impact is too much. Would be good to know what share of it is true, even if only a sliver. Although this wouldn't change the bullshit conclusion.
All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6121776-gop-worried-data...
This is overstating things.
Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.
You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.
A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.
If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.
hint: An individual 18-hole course uses between 300,000 to 1 million gallons per day
If we can close 1 in 3 golf courses and have all the water we need for data centers - and then some - would that be acceptable to our society?
Do we desire so much golf that we'd prefer to stress our water systems instead?
This is a choice, alternative approaches do exist but we should definitely not assume that datacenter water usage is _always_ benign.
You understand, the water isn't used up? It's not even used up in agriculture. Even when you drink a glass of water, the water doesn't actually disappear, soon someone else will be drinking it. The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today. No need to panic about someone using water.
The only reason to be concerned is if someone is mixing the water with other chemicals at a rate faster than the natural filtration and then not paying for the treatment to purify the water again. But that is not an issue with data centers. Merely using water is a concern only for people who don't understand how matter is preserved, but a school physics book should dispel those concerns.
> Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.
The linked article talks about >500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It's nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it's such a common thing to do then why isn't it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?
However, the source of the water can be "used up" faster than it can be replenished, such as in the case of some aquifers
Nope. Plants turn water into oxygen and (the H part of) hydrocarbons, and animals turn those back into water. And after that, the result is different water than the cycle started with.
Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude
But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north
While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.
Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.
The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].
When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.
However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.
Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.
[1] https://www.tasmaniancountry.com/newspaper/tasmanian-country...
The concern is real and very much deserves the opprobrium voters are showing.
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
Noticeably they initially shared this info and then stopped. It seemed to stop around the time researchers started investigating the projects.
Why not get people riled up over water under the bridge and not unpaid rebates? What can anybody do about it? Send the sheriff to lock out the facility?
https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
The data tables start on p. 90.
Of course, they'd like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won't get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.
Water use has locally been an issue in places where municipalities were taken advantage of and their local water supply management laws weren't set up to account for a giant consumer to just roll up and start pulling past replenishment rate. But there's nothing about datacenters that demand that be the case; those places were cheap to build in (and why they were cheap to build in should probably be its own graduate political theory thesis / series of fraud and mismanagement investigations and prosecutions).
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
If they are using over a certain percent of any public utility (and yes ALL utilities are public) the utility should force it to be disclosed.
Correct. But they can't so easily without Google's (or other big tech companies) big legal departments to make challenging the excuses difficult.
They carefully hid things so they could expand for as long as possible, knowing that having the necessary footprint for services, cloud, and AI would be key to winning the race. When I worked at Google, our leaders were always "proud" they had built such a huge fleet (originally for search + ads but rapidly growing to a wide range of products and research) without competitors knowing just how large, because they figured eventually AWS and MSFT would realize they had to build out massively to handle the coming loads.
So they hide these things to stave off complaints for as long as possible.
I think the disinformation is people thinking that data centers directly use vast quantities of water. What happens is the power use stresses water supplies in local areas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-a...
Now that it has been, though…
Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.
This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.
Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
Are they drawing from a flowing source or an aquifer? Is it depleting a limited resource?
Is it evaporative or does the waste get discharged?
Is the waste water treated for the metal that it leaches from the cooling system?
Is it allowed to reach thermal equilibrium first or is the water discharged warm which can cause algae blooms or other problems?
They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
While this water usage might be not a big deal in places with abundant water, it could be problematic in some areas of the US.
Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas fired steam turbine. And one such installation was proposed for this city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.
Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.
Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.
but trade secrets
I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.
Also, they didn't want you to be able to guesstimate how many machines / computing power they had, for similar reasons.
People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say "No, actually we're not, here is the numbers", because Google doesn't want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I'm sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was "obvious" they couldn't divulge how little/much water the place uses.
It's probably more that they don't want to tell competitors anything they don't absolutely have to.
They published a lot of less specific info (PUE numbers, water efficiency, etc)
They were very sensitive about any site specific numbers.
It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.
Both sides of this issue are doing the same thing, you’d be a fool to believe otherwise.
Creator outreach guy at ControlAI talking about the same type of thing https://lnkd.in/p/ehkuYFkw
Future of life has a program for digital media outreach https://futureoflife.org/project/digital-media-accelerator/
The PACs are well reported on
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/30/ai-safeguards-public-first-...
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/17/ai-safeguards-millions-repu...
Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.
It's not well-paid enough to be immune to kool-aid etc, and it's not on the sociopathic management level either, so we can expect a certain degree of very human rationalization going on.
It offers the compelling counter-narrative of "yes, we're evil, but hell yeah this is lucrative af". That makes the ego even happier, as in that story, one is the clever mastermind playing the system, so we can reasonably assume that that path will be taken.
If that path is unavailable, and cognitive dissonance sets in, the other path left is actually drinking the kool-aid. The corp must be nice, after all.
(This all assumes that people do in fact want to do good and have a conscience, but for those that doesn't apply to, there's the sociopathy path as mentioned in the previous comment. Reality is slightly more murky and dynamic, but I'd argue that this rough if-ladder exists as described.)
That makes it very clear he was an employee of Google working at the data center.
Written communication is hard
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/water/
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
you've hit the silent nail on the head.
The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).
If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?
It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.
None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.
Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.
That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure, our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things, and people collectively lacks the ability to think and talk about these things.
So the best we can do is inconsequential conversation about water usage.
For a small locality it is a real amount of water. And if there's a draining reservoir, then that's _even more_ water being pulled out of a reservoir.
The almond discussion is tiring as well. We're not growing almonds in most of the world. The water in Montana isn't the water in Cali as well.
If the facts aren't on your side on a specific issue, at least have the courage to accept it.
> I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
People protest golf course water usage. Water usage problems in Cali are not as big of a concern to people in Montana than water usage in Montana.
And of course there are people who think that the added buildout of data centers _for AI usage_ (people acting like "oh these data centers are just from everything", let's not kid ourselves what the source of the demand is) is a net negative. People don't think that about food.
Personally I think we shouldn't be setting up massive farms in a desert (and perhaps just figure out how to make society work in a way where during winter we accept having less fresh veggies available) either.
Data center defenders need to get better talking points, cuz they sound very silly (perhaps as silly as the arguments heard on the other side!)
Montana exports tons of petroleum products and beef. Should I illustrate how those industries also uses orders of magnitude more water than datacenters?
In fact, I would be impressed if you could come up with a single locale where a datacenter would be the primary water consumer. Even top 3 would be kind of impressive.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say other than "datacenters use water and I don't like it, and yeah those other industires in the area use 10-100x more, but like, I don't like datascneters so we need to focus on that"
I think the real snag is that average people have absolutely -zero- concept of how much water industry uses. Your local recycling plant washes all that dirty plastic you throw in the recycling to the tune of thousands of gallons an hour. And you're learning this right now for the first time in your life. But sure, datacenters running water through metal pipes, five alarm crisis here
Other issues than water are far worse, like pollution associated with the manufacturing and running of all the data center gear. Water is not the issue.
I wouldn't be surprised if this 4x difference was purely caused by lawns.
Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
If you had to use heat pumps to move all that out of the water, you'd have to spend about a million dollars on their electricity. If you're somewhere that you can use unassisted radiators all year, great. If you need to force the heat out part of the year, that easily gets worse than boiling off water.
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
Do you think people look at big facilities and calculate that they're spending whatever times the medium wage on a crucial service and get mad about it?
Converting things into median wages is a way to put them into scale. They spent this many wages for construction, they spend this many on supplies, they sell this many in product, they hire this many people to work there. If anyone thinks its bad for anything a company buys to exceed a median wage, that's a very silly expectation and I wonder where they got it.
if you look at household water consumption, most places in north america treat their water and return it to a freshwater source. you can scale cities very wide and water use might go up, but the consumption rate is actually low. more depending on how much people water their lawns.
farms on the other hand 'spray water on the ground' but it actually removes the water from the freshwater source and needs to be replenished.
leaks is water loss/consumption. human activity is no guarantee. leak in this case is still bad.
Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.
Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.
none of these are reason for the country not to demand transparent data for monitoring.
Being able to monitor things properly has high societal value - it prevents fraud (more data being visible makes it harder to fake). It prevents skirting regulations, and makes it easier for competitors to sniff out high margin opportunities (which serves to break monopolies in some sense).
Not to mention that statistics collected could have value in aggregate in research sometime in the future.
Like auditing and accounting, the country should mandate transparent data reporting of utilities usage for all industries.
I was replying to "Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?".
So by ignoring the other 33 higher users and just focusing on DCs, what are we actually trying to accomplish?
Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.
I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.
Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
If I remember correctly there are a considerable number of cases where habitants said they would have increased price in their bills or some even saying that their supply will be cut short or completely.
And this is not even considering other problems such as noise, pollution, etc
I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.
> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.
> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.
> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.
One shouldn't assume that evaporated water comes back into the system in the place you want it to. Water management orgs try to reduce loss from evaporation for a reason!
So while pointing to agriculture and saying look there - those guys & gals way more than us it’s a red herring because we need food.
Sure improve efficiency of ag, but a better comp for water usage should be made. Reasonable people tune out.
The comparand here isn't "all the houses in Austin". It's "the number of houses Austin has added in the last 2 years alone". And it's vastly larger than the data center usage number we're discussing.
It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.
It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.
If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.
Alphabet could have named the company “google data center 083941, llc.”
But Alphabet deliberately obfuscated its control of the facility.
How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.
See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...
It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.
A typical single family home uses over 100K gallons.
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.
At what point does it become significant? I’d think 200 olympic swimming pool worth of water taken out of the local ecology would have some impact. I guess it depends on the region.
The article doesnt say though if all the water ends up evaporated.
You’re comfortable making those comparisons and concluding how significant the water usage is but you’re unwilling to check the context of the data in the report? Not sure I follow.
The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon.
Seemingly much better article (pictures, better comparisons): https://flatwaterfreepress.org/data-centers-can-guzzle-serio...
Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one.
Update: in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient. That would be a nice thing for some journalist to research...
Update 2: it seems that Google uses water-evaporation cooling in regions that they don't consider water-stressed. Here's a not-so-great reference (scroll down if the text-fragment link doesn't work): https://www.axios.com/2026/06/03/google-pushes-water-standar...
The city finally got permission from the state and the Army Corps to divert water from a nearby river, but only when the river was at a relatively high rate of flow. So functionally what happened was that once the drought broke they were able to refill the lakes faster, and top them up during storms in wet/dry cycles.
Every place is going to have higher and higher odds of becoming water-stressed over the next three decades. Some places more than others. Will the data centers shut down in those situations?
You might think that using 5% of the municipal water supply isn't much but it's a significant fraction of what austerity measures would be able to conserve to retain water through a prolonged drought. In that situation holding water a few extra months until the rains return is the goal.
Cities are more efficient and large enough to sustain culture.
Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
Don't get me wrong, I think carbon emissions matter but primarily because we should simply do better if we can. But I've never found a study that proves causation, at best its correlation shown primarily through modeling.
That doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it does mean that reducing carbon specifically isn't guaranteed to reduce or reverse climate change.
Surely you must agree thst such a complex system as the global climate can't be driven by a single factor, or a single element on the periodic table.
As I said, have a conversation with a top AI model and try to convince it that there is no evidence of causation between CO2 and climate change. AI is better than me or any other human at pushing back and presenting the right arguments and evidence for a specific line of questioning.
Legislation gets easier once public opinion has turned against an idea or a company. But it takes a while to build that up.
How do we responsibly plan for clean, drinkable water becoming a resource only people/businesses with a certain income can afford?
At what point do we ask “do we need to use drinking water for cooling servers, or is that just the cheapest design?”
Tonto, dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.
I am not really aware of the laws around walking down a public sidewalk with a beer in hand. It is certainly gauche but a done-thing to sit at a bus stop and have a Fireball or two.
However, any drinking establishment that serves alcohol will stop you at the door and won't permit anyone to carry drinks outside of their premises. That's a strict thing. My apartment community bans drinking in walkways and stairwells, which was probably done more by non-residents than my neighbors. So there are a lot of bans on public drinking, even if it is not blanket-outlawed.
A couple of major developments at the shopping mall, though: traditionally all American movie theaters were dry, but that rule has been relaxed, and even the major chains are serving alcohol now. At the mall there has been instituted a "sip & stroll" policy, where designated bars can serve you a plastic cup, and you can roam around the mall with drink-in-hand, as long as you observe the borders of it, where you can't walk into the parking lot or off-premises with your booze.
In general, I have seen many liquor-related laws be relaxed and lightened across my county and state. It seems that there's a general lack of will to crack down on the demand-side, when there is lots and lots of profit to be had on the healthcare-side, where you will get a diagnosis and medication and treatment, whether that is IOP or in-patient, so why not encourage more drinkers to overindulge? Broken window fallacy FTW!
Relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law
tl;dr details vary by state and municipality, but with very few exceptions you can't walk around a random town drinking fireball. Or, well, you can as long as you don't get caught.
I've seen what you're talking about though. It seems like the big trend for millenials has been "<blank> but with booze." Barcades. Sip & stroll at malls. Booze in movie theaters. Paint & Sip. The microbrewery craze that's partly just "bars but make them fancy"
If you really want to get thrown for a loop, go read up about the Tavern League. One of the most powerful lobbies in Wisconsin state government is a massive cartel of... bars.
I find it more and more common that people who disagree online respond by attacking the commenter personally instead of addressing their arguments. Saying "it's bigger" isn't enough; you need to explain why a building full of computers is fine if it's 100 acres but not if it's 1000 acres. You also need to explain why we shouldn't oppose comparable scale manufacturing, research, or warehousing facilities.
Cameras are different than data centers. Trying to connect the two is a rhetorical technique, not an argument.
Because one of them has a ton of GPUs and TPUs in it while the other one doesn't.
And for the cameras, one is doing using state of the art detection and has connectivity.
Both are obvious things to people in here.
I had no idea what 13 million gallons of water was until they pointed out it was like when I filled up my olympic swimming pool 20 times. That was a slow summer.
Given the pressure construed on resources, why not use personal or household usage averages?
Maybe ~450 people-years doesn't have the same impact as Olympic pools.
> Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1]
This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either.
[1] https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?ope...
Do you have a link for this? I'm interested in learning more about why Masley is wrong on heat islands.
Wow!
Id find it difficult to believe that these companies are giving that much money in free loans to the government the way a retail worker estimating their taxes and getting a refund of a few hundred to thousand a year does.
Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Nebraska had a unexpected 86 million dollar gap in tax revenues collected last year[1] and these tax 3 tax breaks on their own account for 130% of that
[1]https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/15/nebraska-ends-fiscal...
Given the numbers I've seen for tax breaks for other big construction projects (malls, factories, etc), I wouldn't be surprised if the state ends up in the red on datacentres. It's not all that uncommon for the state to offset project cost 100% on the promise of job creation.
> Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska.
> Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
The greener solution is to use water.
It's going to come back down as rain, yes, but there is no guarantee it will come down in the place you need it. Fairly minor variations in surface temperatures and evaporation can have a large effect on local rainfall.
In many states it doesn't matter, but out in the arid west, water is constantly a crisis item.
Why do we act like water "used" is like oil "used"? Can't we effectively have nearly unlimited water usage, given enough pipes and energy? To make it extreme but also obvious, a nuclear plant beside the ocean and a pipe could make the driest desert green.
As long as they don’t pollute, I don’t see much a problem with this amount of water usage. And the water doesn’t need to be disinfected either, only cleaned and filtered. So any natural renewable source would do.
Once the outside air crosses a certain temperature, air-to-air AC becomes less efficient and evaporative cooling can be used to get rid of heat instead.
Of course, this has the side effect of using more water during warm periods, when people and agriculture also need more water. That can be rather problematic in drought situations, especially in the decades to come.
If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
If it was irrigation water, instead of drinking water, that would be about 26 acres worth of irrigated crops - in drought conditions.
If they were bypassing the municipal water supply or using post-wastewater treated water for their water usage, I'd be more blase about the situation. But farms are much thirstier than people.
Anything but metric.
How does that benefit Nebraska?
Water that had some heat transferred to it sounds like perfectly well usable water, right...?
Dealing with waste hot-water sounds like a PITA. Piping it straight back to the reservoir would need a dedicated pipeline, probably with insulation so you don't bake everything around it. Harnessing the excess heat on-site would be awesome, although I'm sure datacenters would already doing this as best they can to recoup electricity costs.
[1] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/cooling/evaporative-cool...
The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
Yes water goes eventually back into circulation but that does not help in the place where the system is already at it's limit
The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
The excess minerals don't worry me much.
If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.
For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.
Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
Yes, water rights law is complicated. California's access to water from the Colorado River is due to the Colorado River Compact, which exists because state disagreed on the details of how water "goes back out into the environment".
That said, I was under the impression that many data centers use municipal water, which is more subject to market price, and not water allocated by property rights. While certainly some do, it isn't always so.
Different data centers have order of magnitude differences in water usage depending on how whether they use the water for cooling or not.
I mean, come on, let's drive some competition on something other than profit. If someone wants to buy the greenest compute they can, and they can afford a slightly higher price, let's empower them to do that!
If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that.
If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
There are DCs that use grey water, are built by bodies of water to use them as direct heat sinks, etc. which is better.
The reason they use water at all is ironically to save energy. Evaporative cooling uses a lot less power. It’s a slider: all evaporative is little power and a lot of water, all closed cycles is lots of power and no water, and you can adjust between the extremes when designing the cooling system.
Using DC heat for urban heat in winter is the best idea. Put them in city centers. I think this is done in Europe to some extent.
There will be protests and cases related to water usage of AI, but none of them would hold any ground. And winning the water case would just make the argument in their favour.
> Just few months back
Just a few months more, and the public was still often making Epstein references.
https://archive.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home/gt2040-deeper-... | https://water.usgs.gov/vizlab/water-availability/03-vulnerab... | https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts | https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent... | https://natureforward.org/data-centers-and-water-use/ | https://www.newsweek.com/data-centers-environmental-concerns... | https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275... | https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... | https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data... | https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts | https://www.nixonpeabody.com/insights/articles/2025/09/05/wa... | https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-res... | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri... | https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine... | https://www.worldwildlife.org/our-work/freshwater/water-scar... | https://swefc.unm.edu/home/living-without-water-is-draining-... | https://www.cdcfoundation.org/blog/addressing-growing-water-... | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/millions-of-americans-lac... | https://lifestraw.com/blogs/news/america-has-a-drinking-wate... | https://www.digdeep.org/close-the-water-gap
Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.
That's 1,200 olympic sized swimming pools of treated drinking water lost in leakages per year.
First, the numbers. My searching says that for some particular lake in Nebraska, "Average annual gross lake evaporation ranges from about 48 inches to 54 inches". Let's call it 4 feet per year, which means 4 acre-feet of water evaporates per acre per year. Trusting some numbers someone gave in a comment earlier, the data center in question used about 40 acre-feet per year. So 10 acres of lake would evaporate about the same rate as the data center. At a very rough guess, there are something like 200,000 acres of non-seasonal lakes in Nebraska, so this is indeed a tiny percentage.
Next, the relevance. The lakes are more or less in a steady state. But if you were actually to double the evaporation rate for a 10 acre lake, you might quickly end up with a muddy pit instead of a lake. The fish would be gone, and the users of that lake would have good reason to complain. If lake was 10 times larger, so that you were only increasing the evaporation by 10%, over time you'd still probably have a major effect on the shoreline and any infrastructure there. What used to be a useable pier might look over a mud flat rather than the water, and launching a boat would be impossible until you built a new one.
But the real issue is that water use isn't actually fungible. Water continuing to evaporate from a lake at the rate it always has definitionally doesn't make people's life worse than it was. But suddenly pumping of the same amount of groundwater might be really bad for the neighbors who previously were using the same water to irrigate their fields. And trying to double the output of a small municipal water system might (at least in the short term) make things much harder for all the existing users on the system. This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done, but it's a harm that should be considered.
That's my good faith attempt to answer you. In return, I have a quick research question that I think is essential to understanding whether or not data center water usage is a big deal or not, and that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments: Where is this water for these new data centers coming from? Is it from new wells they drill? Existing irrigation wells they buy and repurpose? From the local municipal water supply? Rainwater collection? Diverting a nearby river?
I feel like there's no way to answer the question of whether data center water usage matters without considering the actual local impact, and no way of determining the impact without considering the specifics of the source. But somehow I haven't seen any mention of this on either side of the debate.
On the substance: 13M gallons sounds huge until you see the context in the article - less than half of what the City of Lincoln uses in a single day, and about 20 Olympic pools for a year of operation. The Papillion site at 548 megagallons is the much larger water user. And the tax refund numbers ($55.8M for Agate alone) explain why Nebraska's reporting law and the governor's executive order exist - locals want to know what they're getting vs giving.
Claiming electricity/water usage as trade secret under 81-1527 feels like a stretch when the state explicitly requires annual self-reporting to DWEE. If everything material is redacted as trade secret, the reporting requirement is meaningless. Would be interesting to see if DWEE fixes their submission portal to reject non-flattened redactions.