Thread

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

216 points · 199 comments · Thom2503

unglaublich · 1790770721 · focus · HN ↗
They refuse it because if they would say "1 million liters a year!" the knee-jerk reaction will be completely predictable even though that's just tiny compared to a small swimming pool or industrial or agricultural site.
The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.
Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).
1. n4r9 · 1790771101 · focus · HN ↗
  A swimming pool requires maybe 60k liters a year...
  1. dbalatero · 1790771484 · focus · HN ↗
    Now GP comes off as knee jerk.
  2. amelius · 1790772175 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  3. vidarh · 1790773992 · focus · HN ↗
    One cubic metre of water is 1000 liters. A typical 25m swimming pool ("short course" / half of olympic size) is 20-25m wide. That's at least 500 m^2 surface area. At an average depth of only 1m (very conservative even for a recreational pool), that is 500,000 liters just to cycle the water once a year. Estimates I can find suggests 3-7 times as much as that on a yearly basis for a typical recreational pool.
    So unless you're talking about a tiny private residential pool you're at least an order of magnitude off.
    n4r9 · 1790775625 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, OP said "small swimming pool". I guess it's ambiguous.
    [deleted] · 1790778534 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    vel0city · 1790777522 · focus · HN ↗
    As someone who has been maintaining a pool for several years, you really hope you don't have to cycle the full amount of water once a year. You're really doing something wrong or incredibly unlucky if that's the case. That's at least true for the climate I live in. If I lived in a different climate, I'd probably forego having a pool.
    It was incredibly painful when I had to drain the pool for deep maintenance a few years ago, and I'm not looking forward to having to do it again in a little while.
    Also, most residential pool owners don't have half olympic pools in their yard. They're usually much smaller than that.
    vidarh · 1790778423 · focus · HN ↗
    > Also, most residential pool owners don't have half olympic pools in their yard. They're usually much smaller than that.
    Hence my caveat at the end. When talking about swimming pools, tiny residential pools is certainly not what springs to mind for me.
    Most pools near me are in fitness centres etc. and are 25m pools.
    And I certainly wouldn't go swimming in one of those if the water wasn't cycled regularly. Thankfully the data suggest they are.
    If we're talking tiny little residential pools, then using a swimming pool worth of water isn't very shocking. Unless I'm way off, a 10-15m shower every day would use a similar amount of water in that case.
    vel0city · 1790778888 · focus · HN ↗
    > I certainly wouldn't go swimming in one of the water wasn't cycled regularly
    Once again speaking as someone who has maintained pools for a while, if the water was properly monitored and maintained I probably wouldn't mind. I'd absolutely take a pool that's actively properly maintained but hasn't had a full replacement in a few years over one that's poorly maintained but was fully drained and refilled a couple of months ago.
    vidarh · 1790780067 · focus · HN ↗
    In a public pool?
    From experience while my son was swimming competitively, they had to drain most of the pools he swam in completely more than once a year because of various contamination, in addition to the ongoing cycling...
    I can't imagine the state they'd be in after a year.
    vel0city · 1790780923 · focus · HN ↗
    Once again, if its monitored and maintained properly, sure why not? Partial cycling when things that can't be filtered get too high (like TDS or CYA for an outdoor pool) but otherwise make sure sanitization is happening properly, pH and other metrics stay balanced, and good filtering is happening, I don't see a problem.
    > more than once a year because of various contamination
    Sounds like that falls into the "unlucky" category.
    If its that you don't like thinking about tons of other bodies have touched that water you're swimming in, remember that dinosaurs pooped in much of the water you're drinking today.
    vidarh · 1790781931 · focus · HN ↗
    > Partial cycling when things that can't be filtered get too high (like TDS or CYA for an outdoor pool)
    Partial cycling in a high traffic environment seems like it is clearly ending up being a lot of water when every number I can find suggests it is generally expected to add up to several times the total pool volume per year.
    > Sounds like that falls into the "unlucky" category.
    To me it feels like it falls in the "expected" category somewhere that is dealing with hundreds of swimmers including small children every day.
    Keeping in mind this was across dozens of pools - he swam competitively, not a one-off or rare occurrence in a pool or two.
    vel0city · 1790782421 · focus · HN ↗
    > Partial filtering
    It seems like we're mixing up terms here and miscommunicating. I thought we were talking about actually replacing the water here (as in, down the drain, fresh water from the tap), not just filtering as in recycling water through filtration systems. The total volume of the water should go through filters every few hours. I'm 100% not for the idea of only "partial filtering".
    > To me it feels like it falls in the "expected" category somewhere that is dealing with hundreds of swimmers including small children every day.
    Nah, that is definitely not normal to have to completely replace the water multiple times in a year because of water contamination events happening. The water can usually be sanitized. It might require a day's worth of hyperchloronation, but not often an entire drain and fill. That will happen often, probably several times a year. Usually only if your CYA is too high will it require you to actually drain a significant volume of water, which I agreed was one of the reasons to at least do a partial drain and really only applies to outdoor pools. Doing a hyperchloronation will likely increase your TDS, which won't go down until you drain those contaminates. But usually you can get those numbers back in an acceptable range without having to drain and fill the whole pool.
    If the pool was properly maintained, what state do you expect the water to be in after a year without a total drain and fill? Do you have experience actually maintaining a pool?
    vidarh · 1790783289 · focus · HN ↗
    > It seems like we're mixing up terms here and miscommunicating. I thought we were talking about actually replacing the water here (as in, down the drain, fresh water from the tap)
    We are. I changed it while you were writing.
    Everything I'm seeing suggests typical loss to backwash of the filters for a short course pool is in the 5k - 10k liters of water a day range, possibly less if you invest in expensive additional filters. 5k a day is ~1.8 million liters a year.
    To get below a full replacement every year for a small short-course pool, you need to lose less than 1370 liters a day, or ~1.4 m^3
    [deleted] · 1790784433 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    vel0city · 1790785275 · focus · HN ↗
    You're shifting things from normally needing to fully drain and fill the pool multiple times a year from specific contamination events to now talking about routine backwashing events, which I agree do happen as a part of normal routine maintenance (a part of the "partial drain" and "good filtering" I was talking about before).
    I agree you'd probably use something like 5-10k liters of water for a backflush for filters that size, but that wouldn't normally be a daily thing. The amounts needed here would be highly variable depending on a wide range of factors.
    I still stand by if you're having to actually fully drain and refill your pool multiple times a year (as in, an actual drain and fill, not slow partial replacement from weekly/every other week filter flushes) you're either very unlucky or you don't know what you're doing maintaining the pool.
    n4r9 · 1790845294 · focus · HN ↗
    This went into the weeds a little bit, but I've tried going over the figures again. I'm not sure if I'm missing something here or someone got some units wrong somewhere, but data centers seem to use far more water.
    A medium size data center consumes 300k gallons of water per day [0]. That's over 400 million liters per year.
    Even if we go with the highest estimate vidarh gave of 1.8 million liters per year for a full-size olympic size swimming pool, that's a tiny fraction of what a typical data center uses.
    [0] <a href="https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption" rel="nofollow">https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
    vel0city · 1790856129 · focus · HN ↗
    > A medium size data center consumes 300k gallons of water per day
    Not always true. This can vary greatly based on datacenter design. A medium sized datacenter proposed near me was planned to only use 300 gallons a day for example.
    Your source even points to this being highly variable, assuming you pay attention to their wording.
    > Large data centers can consume up to
    "Can consume", "up to". Not some hard truth that they will consume that much.
    n4r9 · 1790860313 · focus · HN ↗
    Fair point. If you divide the 163.7 billion gallons annually among the 5426 data centers, the figure does come out lower at ~30 million gallons or ~100 million liters annually. That's still far, far larger than the largest swimming pools.
  4. xaitv · 1790774075 · focus · HN ↗
    And besides that: news sites love comparing water usage to things like bathtubs, the average household or swimming pools. The headline would likely be "datacenter uses 100 swimming pools of water per year!" and not "datacenter uses 6 million liters of water per year!"
2. goda90 · 1790771460 · focus · HN ↗
  If they are taking reasonable steps to mitigate consumption and pollution then they should be able to clearly explain that to the public. The fact they won't suggests they aren't.
  Just because people haven't cared about the environment before doesn't mean they shouldn't start now. And just because there are worse existing polluters doesn't mean we shouldn't resist new ones.
  A new golf course used to be seen as a great thing to have in your back yard and now we know their pesticide use increases the risk of Parkinson's. People are waking up and caring more. We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
  1. ckdarby · 1790772089 · focus · HN ↗
    HN has never been friendly to comments like this, have you ever tried explaining something clearly to an emotionally triggered crowd? There are many examples, masks, vaccines, gun laws...
    goda90 · 1790772418 · focus · HN ↗
    Why is the crowd emotionally triggered? I posit it's because of all the secrecy and bad faith. Data center builders and their supporters in government brought this opposition on themselves.
    esikich · 1790775623 · focus · HN ↗
    I posit it's because people say it's killing and stealing art and jobs and destroying farmland (it's not). In my neck of the woods, people show up to the actual meetings and loudly protest and have zero intention of listening.
    goda90 · 1790775845 · focus · HN ↗
    It is doing those things too, but first and foremost on most people's minds is the issue of power bills, water availability and cleanliness, other local pollution of varying kinds, local taxes, and eminent domain for private profit.
    streetfighter64 · 1790792606 · focus · HN ↗
    If your explanation is simply "it's not" to things that are pretty obviously happening ("stealing art"), then I'm not surprised people aren't interested in listening to you. Even less so if you're calling them "emotionally triggered".
  2. streetfighter64 · 1790792903 · focus · HN ↗
    > We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
    Funny thing is, we could probably have a very sustainable economy if we just changed a few laws to limit the influence of the 1%-ers and their current abilities to extract rent and profit off the work of normal people.
    Just need to hope enough people "wake up" so to speak. Unfortunately way too many people are still dreaming of becoming such a 1%-er and themselves living off the backs of others. "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" so to speak.
3. Sharlin · 1790771534 · focus · HN ↗
  Well, water usage is usually metered in cubic meters. A thousand m^3 per year sounds much less than a million litres.
  1. emil-lp · 1790774870 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps for people in the US, but this would be elementary school arithmetic in Europe.
    Sharlin · 1790777761 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m European and I’m extremely sure that when 90% of people hear "x m^3" they don’t think of it as "1000*x litres". And the majority of people likely can’t recall on the spot that 1 l = 1 dm^3 (a unit nobody uses), even if they remember that you multiply by 1000 to go from m^3 to dm^3. In any case most people don’t do conversions like that unless someone specifically asks them to.
    Volumes are in general very unintuitive to people due to the cubic scaling. It’s further confused by the fact that the widely used decilitre, centilitre, and millilitre do scale linearly, unlike cubic metres. So 1 l = 1 dm^3 but 1 dl = 100 cm^3…
    freecodeio · 1790782823 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know where do you live but even my small nephews and nieces understand that a 1 meter cube of water is A LOT OF WATER, because mentally, we have lots of 2 liters bottles to compare it to
    Sharlin · 1790793091 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure. But the average water use per person per year where I live is in the tens of cubic meters. So 1000 cubic meters per year isn't that much.
4. yourusername · 1790772138 · focus · HN ↗
  >Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way.
  In the Netherlands it is not just about AI datacenters, even before the rise of AI pushback against Meta's planned datacenter made them cancel it. There has been a lot of criticism of the municipality that allowed Microsoft to expand its datacenters. The argument is that this is a small country that already has to make tradeoffs to get to its desired energy mix (wind turbines near cities on land) and then these datacenters are built that consume the power that is generated by sacrificing the little remaining open space. In the last few years there is actually a electricity shortage in some regions so "we can hook up this 200 MW datacenter but not your house" is a bad look.
5. pbasista · 1790772679 · focus · HN ↗
  > They refuse it because ...
  It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.
  From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.
  1. Aurornis · 1790774587 · focus · HN ↗
    > From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law.
    That is not corrective. There is an EU directive, but it would have to be adopted as local law to become actual law.
    The datacenters are following the laws in their jurisdiction.
    fwip · 1790791617 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course, they are choosing the jurisdiction for their data centers partly based on what laws are in place.
6. dgellow · 1790773579 · focus · HN ↗
  The people who don’t care about environmental impact and resource use are the same people pushing for more and faster datacenter deployment. The Republican Party is the one getting rid of environmental protection rules, it’s the party most financed by fossil fuel companies, and the party that was/is against solar and windmill development. The party that gutted all the regulatory agencies and is colluding with the AI industry.
  There is a very obvious pattern here
7. vidarh · 1790774266 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm all for data centres.
  But they should be made to report this. AND their use of water should be regulated - they don't need to use any water at all, it's just cheaper for them - and they should be contributing enough to mitigate negative effects on energy prices.
  The problem isn't data centres. The problem is not pricing in and regulating externalities, whether caused by data centres or other things.
  It would also quickly show us who actually cares about the environmental effects and who are using it as an excuse.
8. fullshark · 1790775531 · focus · HN ↗
  Most of it comes from concerns about water and electricity rates sky rocketing and also simply not being available when humans need it. At least at the local level.
9. [deleted] · 1790777406 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
10. streetfighter64 · 1790791550 · focus · HN ↗
  > the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment
  And here you have people seemingly caring about the environment, even if it's only as you say a "green-washing" (that's not what that term means, normally) of AI fears. And you're telling them to stop it?
  Also, the claim of "people would misinterpret the information, so better not release the info at all" is just some sort of elitist "the average person is dumb" sentiment. If you take that to its logical conclusion, nobody should tell the public anything at all. Reminiscent of a lot of the public debate during the covid times.
11. throwaway2037 · 1790806187 · focus · HN ↗
  > the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment
  Is this specific to data centers? If yes, no one complained about data centers for the last thirty years before the AI/LLM building boom (say, last 3-5 years).
  If more general, I completely disagree. All rich countries have much cleaner environments since the 1940s, thanks to a wave of environmentalism and new regulations that started in the 1960s and 1970s.

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