Thread

Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use

216 points · 199 comments · Thom2503

stingraycharles · 1790769649 · focus · HN ↗
Playing the devil’s advocate: don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies? If so, why would a private company provide this information?
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.
1. usrnm · 1790769905 · focus · HN ↗
  > where electricity is abundant and/or cheap
  Definitely not the Netherlands then
2. black_puppydog · 1790770029 · focus · HN ↗
  Actually your premise is already wrong, although to be fair I'm not sure what bearing that has on the conclusion.
  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.
3. customguy · 1790770260 · focus · HN ↗
  If the numbers would make them look good they would publish their numbers.
  > 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.
4. n4r9 · 1790771200 · focus · HN ↗
  > the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry
  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.
  1. kemotep · 1790772079 · focus · HN ↗
    Essentially, telling people to go vegan and get rid of their golf courses is going to piss them off, hence the reaction people have to being told that datacenters are more important than their comfort.
    bayindirh · 1790772637 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not black and white as it looks.
    I'm personally willing to change my life to help the planet and nature in general to the point it doesn't affect my wellbeing (as in health and safety). For me, personally, the problem is not changing per se, but people finding no amount of change enough, always moving the goalposts with "but, what if" clauses.
    The problem with datacenter water use is the state of the water leaving the data center. Agriculture and meat industry can reuse the water multiple times from cleaner to dirtier processes and return it to the nature with reasonable processing.
    The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
    MC995 · 1790773416 · focus · HN ↗
    > The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
    Why would any water be returned? Datacenters (and literally every industrial process that requires cooling) use water for evaporative cooling. The water evaporates, then returns as rain elsewhere.
    The only water being "returned" I can think of would be from the intermittent or continuous blowdown systems to maintain TDS levels; but blowdown is a small fraction of the water consumed and is typically returned back via the city sewer system.
    n4r9 · 1790773573 · focus · HN ↗
    Roughly 80% of the water evaporates into the atmosphere. The remaining 20% is flushed out of the system to remove mineral build-ups and sent to local treatment plants.
    BikiniPrince · 1790778183 · focus · HN ↗
    I have yet to see the standardization in that claim. Are there some reliable papers on this topic?
    MC995 · 1790780843 · focus · HN ↗
    It's complicated, and depends on the hardness of the water entering the system from the water supply as well, since blowdown is ultimately to control the level of dissolved solids in the water so it does not contrate enough to start coming out of solution. Rarely if ever is true demineralized water used in open loop cooling systems; it's simply too expensive to produce to then "throw away" into evaporation.
    The previously stated 80/20 isn't a bad general estimate, but it varies depending on the specific site. 10%-25% of makeup water being lost to blowdown is a reasonable range.
    As for papers about it, I was only able to find a few in my brief search, but they don't land on a single number since it depends on the ratio of dissolved minerals/solids in the circulating cooling-tower water compared with the incoming makeup water, which varies due to acceptability for the process and due to the incoming water quality.
    This short PDF on "Mechanical Systems Water Efficiency Management" from the EPA goes over the concepts pretty well though
    - <a href="https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2017-12/documents/ws-commercialbuildings-waterscore-mechanical-systems-guide.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2017-12/documents/ws...
    This document from the US DOD (UFM 3-230-13, Industrial Water Treatment Operation and Maintenance (2026), Chapter 5) says that most cooling towers operate at 3-10 CoC, with 5-7 CoC identified as a cost-effective range. Where CoC is Cycles of concentration described in the previous PDF, and a higher CoC means less blowdown and better water efficiency, with the trade-off of a greater risk of scaling, corrosion, and biological/water-chemistry problems.
    - <a href="https://www.wbdg.org/FFC/DOD/UFC/ufm_3_230_13_2026.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.wbdg.org/FFC/DOD/UFC/ufm_3_230_13_2026.pdf
    Veolia also has a "Open Recirculating Cooling Systems" handbook that shows some good examples with real numbers in table 31-1.
    - <a href="https://www.watertechnologies.com/handbook/chapter-31-open-recirculating-cooling-systems" rel="nofollow">https://www.watertechnologies.com/handbook/chapter-31-open-r...
    Dylan16807 · 1790774352 · focus · HN ↗
    Additives like what?
    We're talking about water that's released in general use, right? I would expect a closed cooling loop to have some biocides but have almost none of that leave the system.
    And one datacenter had a weird bacteria that one time.
  2. [deleted] · 1790772155 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  3. SiempreViernes · 1790772320 · focus · HN ↗
    > But on the other hand; yes, it would also help enormously if people ate less meat.
    At first you had me, but then I realised it's not true if the price is building more data centres! That was just a trick to make the climate worse! Grr /s
  4. thenthenthen · 1790773362 · focus · HN ↗
    Mmm most datacenters i went to were in the middle of nowhere, sharing land with farms (and oil/gas mining)
    n4r9 · 1790774098 · focus · HN ↗
    > we demonstrate that data centers are an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon, with 97.5% of facilities situated in metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas
    <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00487-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00487-z
    Aurornis · 1790774455 · focus · HN ↗
    “Metropolitan area” is doing a lot of work. Every metropolitan area I’ve lived or worked in has had industrial areas, too. Those industrial areas have buildings that use a lot of electricity, water, or natural gas and produce a lot of noise.
    This isn’t some unusual outcome. It’s like one of those maps that purports to show one thing but really just shows population density.
    jeffbee · 1790775470 · focus · HN ↗
    Also using N as the denominator, instead of weighting by floor area?
    n4r9 · 1790775539 · focus · HN ↗
    The point is that they create a heavy and volatile local water demand on those metropolitan areas.
    BikiniPrince · 1790778052 · focus · HN ↗
    Industry uses resources and they pay for those resources at significant cost. It’s not a surprise when the pipes are enabled.
    n4r9 · 1790848829 · focus · HN ↗
    If the data center is built despite multiple demands to desist, then it may not be a surprise per se, but it can still be an unaccounted stress on local resources.
    jmye · 1790779226 · focus · HN ↗
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    Joakal · 1790781614 · focus · HN ↗
    Most data centres in Australia (even the announced biggest one in the Southern Hemisphere) are close to a water processing plant in an industrial zone in Sydney. The same plant that supplies 85% of Sydney with drinking water. At least there's an upgrade.
    quickthrowman · 1790787110 · focus · HN ↗
    94% of the US population lives in a metropolitan or micropolitan area. There are ‘micropolitan’ areas in my state that’d I would colloquially consider rural, and there are large areas of the metropolitan area I live in that I would consider rural.
    n4r9 · 1790848935 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't dispute your lived experience. But if you have evidence to cite in contrast to what I've cited, then please do so.
  5. Aurornis · 1790774302 · focus · HN ↗
    > causing a strain on local resources
    By “strain on local resources” are you just stating the fact that they use resources? Or are you trying to imply that it causes problems for those resources?
    Companies don’t just buy land, connect to water and power, and then the utilities get caught off guard when the water system is suddenly strained by water going somewhere. There are processes for approving this before connection.
    If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.
    n4r9 · 1790775155 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree that utility planners have their work cut out to plan for data centers. It's a different paradigm than what they're used to. I think they are being caught off-guard, but it's a matter of process and infrastructure. They typically plan around averaged or linear trends, but data centers can have volatile usage spikes, and supply can depend on e.g. seasonal rainfall which is challenging to predict.
    vel0city · 1790777055 · focus · HN ↗
    Households with yards will have far more volatile water usage spikes related to seasonal rainfalls than a fully built out datacenter will.
    A recent datacenter proposal near me was going to be built on a ~35 acre site. The entire site projected to use ~300 gallons of water a day when fully operational. That's including toilets, irrigation, etc. A household on a quarter acre lot in that area often uses 10-15,000 gallons of water in a month. 35 acres cut into quarter-acre-ish lots means a bit under 140 households. We'll cut it down and say 100 after streets and what not. That lot being a neighborhood like the others nearby would probably use at least a million gallons of water in a month, about 33,300+ gallons a day.
    n4r9 · 1790780043 · focus · HN ↗
    > A typical data center uses 300,000 gallons of water each day (equivalent to the demands of about 1,000 households), but large data centers can use an estimated 5 million gallons of water each day
    <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water...
    vidarh · 1790780452 · focus · HN ↗
    Only if allowed to. Most data centres I've used have no connection to water from the data centre halls other than to the toilets. Using open loop water cooling is a cost cutting measure it's a choice whether or not to allow.
    n4r9 · 1790848470 · focus · HN ↗
    Firstly, who is deciding whether to "allow" open loop cooling? And secondly, from what I gather, closed-loop sites require an order of magnitude more power than open-loop to run. That's still going to have a large impact on local resources, especially as around 2/3 of power plants supplying data centers are also ocated in water-stressed regions [0].
    [0] <a href="https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data-centers-impact-surface-and-ground-waters/" rel="nofollow">https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data...
    vidarh · 1790852594 · focus · HN ↗
    > Firstly, who is deciding whether to "allow" open loop cooling?
    Your government.
    And I don't know why you put allow in quotes. This is a matter of laws and regulation, so it is used in its most literal meaning:
    Forbid construction that does not account for the externalities imposed by its water and energy usage.
    > And secondly, from what I gather, closed-loop sites require an order of magnitude more power than open-loop to run.
    Are you suggesting that removing x kilowatts of input takes at least 10x killowatts?
    Or are you suggesting they spend 10x more energy on the cooling than an open-loop system?
    The latter might well be true - an open-loop system is after all trading water for energy in a very extreme way - if you have a water source with pressure the simplest water cooling system "just" routes water over radiators. In practice you'll want a bit more than that for most setups, but it can be very cheap if you can ignore the volume of water used.
    That is still a regulatory issue. You can decide which resources are critical to you in a given location, and you restrict or allow different approaches accordingly, or require funding or licensing to suit.
    > That's still going to have a large impact on local resources, especially as around 2/3 of power plants supplying data centers are also ocated in water-stressed regions
    Still entirely a question of regulating externalities.
    Not all power generation requires significant water use. Your government is free to e.g. require new data centre capacity to be accompanied by an according buildup of generating capacity with according restrictions on water use.
    If that means data centres moves elsewhere, then so be it. That is part of the goal if you argue for pricing in and regulating externalities:
    Ensure that the cost of operating in a way that doesn't negatively impact the community is priced in so that decisions are taken based on the actual full cost to society.
    So to go full loop to my original comment (sorry): It's entirely a question of whether or not you want to allow it.
    This is what governments are for.
    n4r9 · 1790860007 · focus · HN ↗
    The government obviously has the power to regulate data centers. That's why people are petitioning them to do so, and why the lack of data transparency is frustrating. I'm not sure what argument you're making.
    vidarh · 1790935662 · focus · HN ↗
    The point I made was that the water use is not a property of building a data centre, but of building a data centre without regulating water use. As such there are plenty of data centres that don't use much water.
    That matters when considering what to regulate. A lot of people pushing for regulation are pushing for blocking data centres instead of regulating the externalities they claim is their issue.
    n4r9 · 1790938011 · focus · HN ↗
    I disagree. There is community opposition against individual data centers. There are calls for moratoriums until rules and regulations are improved. Calls for outright blocking data centers even with improved regulations are a small minority in my experience.
    RHSeeger · 1790779457 · focus · HN ↗
    You say that, but over and over we see things like
    > You can't build an apartment complex here, because our water/sewer system is already over capacity
    /ignores that statement and builds the apartment complex because "omg, we need more housing" arguments are used to not pay attention to consequences
    /water and sewer system can't keep up and all kinds of expensive problems occur
    troyvit · 1790780296 · focus · HN ↗
    > If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.
    Call it an echo chamber but when it comes to data centers that's the preponderance of news that I read. These two stories are about the county next door to mine. The first story highlights how the builders of the data-center continuously broke zoning laws. The second story from a month later describes how the board of commissioners let all that slide and approved construction to continue.
    <a href="https://www.cpr.org/2026/08/07/weld-county-ai-data-center/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cpr.org/2026/08/07/weld-county-ai-data-center/ <a href="https://www.cpr.org/2026/09/10/weld-county-officials-approve-data-center/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cpr.org/2026/09/10/weld-county-officials-approve...
    But it's not just my state:
    <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/25/new-jersey-fines-datacenter-unpermitted-generators" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/25/new-jers...
    Those guys were fined a "record" $1.1 million, and:
    > The state is mandating DataOne apply for and obtain the required permits or cease operations, but is giving the company 45 days to do so, according to a NJDEP spokesperson. During that time, regulators are allowing the facility to continue running the generators.
    That fine is a slap in the wrist.
    tzs · 1790794357 · focus · HN ↗
    We're talking about an order of magnitude increase in the number of data centers in less than a decade and way more than an order of magnitude increase in the power needs because the AI data centers use a lot more power than even the big data centers of several years ago.
    That's way beyond what utility planners can reasonably plan for.
  6. quickthrowman · 1790786973 · focus · HN ↗
    If a water system doesn’t have capacity for a data center, they shouldn’t connect the data center to the water system.
    When you apply for a connection to a utility, they make you tell them your potential usage so they can assess if they can even connect you.
  7. brnt · 1790789170 · focus · HN ↗
    The Netherlands does not have areas sufficiently far removed from urban areas for this to matter. In fact the entire country has a managed water table, the bodies which govern it are the oldest demicratic institutions in the world (over a millenium), and survived any change in ruler country and government in the meantime.
    There's no river or creek not used for drinkwater consumption or management, and they are all connected to agricultural use and transportation (canal water levels) as well. It's one big system, and farmers cheating on how much they pump up is already too big of a proboem for this to not matter.
  8. AngryData · 1790797581 · focus · HN ↗
    In my part of the US there is enough rain that no extra water is used to grow alfalfa. The only water usage from beef production here is what the cows themselves drink.
  9. throwaway2037 · 1790805024 · focus · HN ↗
    > Data centers tend to concentrate their water usage within urban areas
    Ahh, what? The world's greatest concentration of data centers is in the suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C., USA. Almost none of that would be classified as urban. I offer a counterpoint: The vast majority of data centers are suburban, rather than rural or urban.
    > Their water consumption scales up around tenfold if you consider the indirect usage from generating the electricity.
    This is bullshit. I already disproved this myth here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49119054">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49119054
    In short, "More than 90% of this is returned to source."
5. hnedeotes · 1790771565 · focus · HN ↗
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  1. nekusar · 1790771902 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    hnedeotes · 1790777085 · focus · HN ↗
    1) If you have fingers - go touch grass 2) Otherwise, pull the plug for 5 min
  2. NDlurker · 1790772543 · focus · HN ↗
    Agriculture is incredibly wasteful because it's allowed to be. Water intensive crops are grown in dry climates with restrictions on everyone else.
    hnedeotes · 1790777038 · focus · HN ↗
    And so what, it's probably because it makes sense economically no? It seems tokens are wasteful too, yet here we are.
    Meat too is wasteful, but yet again, here we are. All these are direct result of choices made by the majority...
    vel0city · 1790777310 · focus · HN ↗
    > it's probably because it makes sense economically no?
    Only because the government forces the cost of the water to be $0 for those who got in early, a policy that's causing extreme issues ecologically and causing the collapse of tons of environments and screwing over many millions downstream.
    If we actually allowed the real price today it wouldn't be anywhere near economically sane to do such a thing.
    hnedeotes · 1790777773 · focus · HN ↗
    Hmm. I live near some water intensive cultivations (olives, almonds, not USA) in a relatively dry area, but there's dam water at very cheap prices and obviously, for these products it's required, because otherwise you wouldn't have olive oils being sold at current market prices (already quite higher than just some 6 years ago), they would be astronomically higher. But this is to serve global markets. People in the region have done olive oil since forever without dam water, just not at this industrial scale.
    But compared to meat and the whole chain of production required for that it certainly pales many moons below. Well, everyone loves their bacon.
    vel0city · 1790778364 · focus · HN ↗
    > but there's dam water at very cheap prices and obviously, for these products it's required
    So yeah, an example of the government coming in and ensuring cheap water for this crop production at the expense of those downstream. You agree, if the government didn't artificially and massively change the hydrology of the area, this industrial level wouldn't really be economically possible. This can make sense and not be terribly destructive depending on the region.
    I and the poster above were probably talking about the American Southwest. In this case, its even more extreme. Old land owners got the rights to flood their fields from the river water and dig massive canals to turn extremely arid deserts green. They get the right to have that water for free, forever, because the government gave them the land at one point in time in the past and allowed for that taking based on deeply flawed hydrological models. They use that for agricultural products sold worldwide, including growing alfalfa for Saudi Arabia in the deserts of Arizona[0]. The government won't go in and actually start putting restrictions or calling back their grants to that water allocations, and its resulting in environmental catastrophe for many parts of the region.
    [0] <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-arizona-fresh-scrutiny-of-saudi-arabia-owned-farms-water-use" rel="nofollow">https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
    hnedeotes · 1790779883 · focus · HN ↗
    That does seem a bit extreme - in dam water you still pay, just much less because the water is also not treated in the same way as regular consumption water, storage is part of a second effect of electricity-gen damns many times, it enables agriculture and other things for communities, etc.
    NDlurker · 1790788197 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, I was thinking of places like Arizona, California, central Washington. Even in the Midwest, farmers are allowed to drain aquifers.
6. philipp-gayret · 1790771713 · focus · HN ↗
  > And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
  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.
  1. baranul · 1790772331 · focus · HN ↗
    This is something that certain AI advocates are refusing to acknowledge. The concerns are legitimate and can only be alleviated with open access to information by companies and the state. Then it can be clear that the project is doable or not, and let the people decide, as they are the ones that will have to live near it.
7. sschueller · 1790771735 · focus · HN ↗
  These are resources acquired from the governments in most places. You have to be able to plan and expand capacity which requires public funds.
  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 water cooling tower/fans significantly oversized just to make sure the noise is keep under the required level.
  [1] <a href="https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/" rel="nofollow">https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/
8. maomao5 · 1790771889 · focus · HN ↗
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  1. dghlsakjg · 1790773273 · focus · HN ↗
    > Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
    This is extremely inappropriate on HN. Or anywhere, really.
    I can think of a few reasons that companies might not share data. A big one is that people have no idea what a responsible amount of water usage is, so your information will be weaponized no matter what.
9. stonogo · 1790772118 · focus · HN ↗
  People keep comparing datacenter water use to agricultural water use, and it doesn't make sense to me. I can't tell if it's a bad-faith comparison or if people really know that little about how water is used in these industries.
  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.
  1. bluefirebrand · 1790772552 · focus · HN ↗
    Bringing up agriculture is definitely a bad faith attack.
    People need to eat, it's non negotiable. We do not need data centres.
    GrantMoyer · 1790773809 · focus · HN ↗
    People need to eat, but they don't need to eat meat.
    bluefirebrand · 1790774038 · focus · HN ↗
    It's true we're not obligate carnivores, but we do need a lot of the nutrients that meat also provides and is an easy source of
    Providing a fully vegetarian diet for everyone is kind of non-starter.
    GrantMoyer · 1790776671 · focus · HN ↗
    On a biological level, there'd be no problem providing a vegetarian diet for everyone. A healthful vegetarian diet is not hard to achieve, at least no harder than a healthful non-vegetarian diet.
    From an infrastructure point of view, providing everyone vegetarian food sources overnight would not be possible, but that's not a realistic scenario. With a gradual transition, the transition would reduce overall resource use on basically all fronts, so there's no reason to expect extraordinary problems.
    Of course, this is all theoretical unless people care enough to change their lifestyles.
    bluefirebrand · 1790777860 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course the reason that people don't care enough to change their lifestyles is because
    > A healthful vegetarian diet is not hard to achieve, at least no harder than a healthful non-vegetarian diet.
    Might be true but isn't sufficient
    It's still way easier to have an omnivore diet than a strictly vegetarian one. Partly that's due to how society is currently structured, but people still ate meat long before society was structured this way. Because it was easier.
  2. ajsnigrutin · 1790772561 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn't make sense to me either, but in a different way...
    We need the food, we'll die without food, telling people to eat less of whatever food, so a few "tech bros" can build a new datacenter is outright evil.
    edit: considering this is HN and the downvotes, people here prefer datacenters over food
    zamadatix · 1790782582 · focus · HN ↗
    People here generally don't believe that the water usage in DCs is enough to affect agriculture or that the areas so short on water are the ones we should be growing food in anyways.
    The downvotes are probably about reasoning about your your conclusions instead of the things that led you to them. Though it'd be nice if that had been discussion instead of silent downvotes.
  3. pseudo0 · 1790777076 · focus · HN ↗
    Golf courses are a better comparison. Data centers use a fraction of the water that it takes to keep the grass green for a hobby enjoyed by a handful of people.
10. NDlurker · 1790772273 · focus · HN ↗
  >And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
  They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.
  1. dansquizsoft · 1790773505 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure why you think your finger-in-the-wind wind understanding of future AI compute demand should trump the projections of companies who actually operate in this area?
    But if you do end up being correct, then the data centers in question will just sit partially or fully idle, using no / a tiny fraction of the electricity and water they could use (which as others have said on this forum, water usage concerns are massively overblown in most data center builds anyway)
    NDlurker · 1790775400 · focus · HN ↗
    My biggest problem is that this is surveillance state infrastructure
    MC995 · 1790775708 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a perfectly valid concern, but isn't specific to data centers or their construction. That's like being mad at a factory that produces pens because you don't like what people are writing with them.
    NDlurker · 1790788308 · focus · HN ↗
    If they're building pen factories specifically to satisfy the demand of people buying pens to log the daily lives of the public, yeah, I'm mad at the factory.
    dansquizsoft · 1790806988 · focus · HN ↗
    Got any credible sources that data centers are being built with exactly this objective in mind?
    Instead of, you know, people who just want to talk to ChatGPT or use Claude models for their software engineering work... I.e. the vast majority of grass-roots AI demand...
    streetfighter64 · 1790776038 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure why you think the interests of companies who operate in this area, should trump environmental concerns for the people who live next to where they plan to build the data centers? I for one prefer quality of life for actual people over speculative profits for tech billionaires.
    I'm also not sure why you think it's a good thing to produce a bunch of electronics using conflict minerals and let them sit idle? Surely you must see the negative "externalities" of this?
  2. MC995 · 1790773654 · focus · HN ↗
    > They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at.
    According to whom and by what metric? The companies investing vast amounts of capital into them seem to disagree.
    NDlurker · 1790775415 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes and I disagree with them. Ok?
    streetfighter64 · 1790776147 · focus · HN ↗
    And as we all know, investments of vast amounts of capital by companies can never be contrary to the well-being of humans... See Purdue, Monsanto, Union Carbide, etc.
11. streetfighter64 · 1790775758 · focus · HN ↗
  > don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies?
  As others (including TFA) have noted, this is false because there's an EU directive requiring "private companies" to disclose this.
  In any case, the "it's a private company" defense is as tired now as it was when it was about blocking people from social media, or debanking etc. Just because the legal system hasn't yet caught up to regulating companies in a certain way, doesn't mean that it's not in everyone's best interest (except perhaps the owners of the companies in question) to have such regulation.
  > I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry.
  The important distinction being that agriculture provides food, while data centers provide AI slop and advertising.
12. testing22321 · 1790775822 · focus · HN ↗
  > water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry
  Are you suggesting we should stop using water to grow food for humans?
  1. Carrok · 1790776553 · focus · HN ↗
    We should absolutely stop using water to grow alfalfa in the desert that we then ship to foreign countries so they can feed it to their cattle.
    IAmBroom · 1790786958 · focus · HN ↗
    Also to feed US dairy cattle making milk in excess of market need, on subsidies.
13. GuB-42 · 1790776301 · focus · HN ↗
  > If so, why would a private company provide this information?
  Because the law says they have to.
  Water usage in terms of total volume is meaningless and certainly an overblown concern on a global scale. In fact, it is not a concern at all on a global scale, but it can be a local problem. If a datacenter uses water normally intended for households and the infrastructure is not designed for this, it is definitely a problem. And that's a good reason for having to report water usage, not just to punish them, but also to plan distribution accordingly.
  1. stronglikedan · 1790778771 · focus · HN ↗
    > Because the law says they have to.
    That isn't a good reason for them to do so. Laws need to be enforced to be effective. If no one is going to make them disclose the info, then the smart move it to just not do it, as they are.
    alwa · 1790779937 · focus · HN ↗
    My private company complies with laws that make sense to us and also with laws that we find annoying. We do that because we prefer the efficiencies and benefits of living in a high-trust society, and part of that is behaving that way ourselves.
    “Smart” in a selfish way, but not in a bigger-picture kind of way.
    I’d rather spend tax money on bridges (or tax rebates) than on bankrolling a muscular cadre of enforcers on the assumption that laws are meaningless and everyone will cheat without a cop breathing down their neck.
    freecodeio · 1790782646 · focus · HN ↗
    mate the reason why you can't just build a house without a permit is because the government needs to account how you're using existing public infrastructure, not because they just wanna throw bureaucracy at you (though it might be the case most of the times)
    that's all there is to it, accounting for existing infrastructure, and somehow 500kwh is enough to invoke a reason to do so
    quickthrowman · 1790787370 · focus · HN ↗
    Construction permits for housing also ensure that the next owner of the house isn’t dealing with a bunch of problems down the road due to substandard methods and materials. That’s the primary benefit in my opinion, along with life safety.
    pjc50 · 1790784634 · focus · HN ↗
    We're really not ready for capitalist-anarchists who think the law doesn't apply to them but still protects their valuable property.
14. teeray · 1790782855 · focus · HN ↗
  > I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry.
  Apples and oranges comparison. We eat the direct products of water usage in the agriculture industry. It keeps people alive. It’s fallacious to compare that with water usage that goes to serving ads.
15. alpineman · 1790783316 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes, a single hamburger takes 620 gallons(!) of water to produce. Eat plants. Plenty of great plant protein alternatives available, plus they are healthier and don't depend on killing living beings.
16. m3047 · 1790797056 · focus · HN ↗
  "California could solve its water shortage if every household ate sixteen less almonds per day." -- I said this [edit] A DECADE AGO at the conclusion of an all-day water resources hackathon to illustrate the fact that ag water and urban water are not the same.
  Conflating them is category confusion. Lying about water usage is part of CA culture.

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