[uncertainrhymes]

I was taken aback recently when a Gen-ish Z person told me AI was 'destroying all the water'. I've done data center work, and while I know it is used for cooling, I don't think I've ever personally destroyed any large bodies of water.

There is a perception out there about GenAI and water that goes surprisingly deep. I was told we are will be living in a drought-stricken hellscape, and AI is to blame.

I'd like to know the equivalent energy consumption of a single TikTok video, but that is probably arguing the wrong thing. My bigger question is ... where do they think that water goes? Steam? The assumption is that it is gone forever, and I can't get over how people could just take that at face value.

[kmod]

I was also surprised when someone asked me about AI's water consumption because I had never heard of it being an issue. But a cursory search shows that datacenters use quite a bit more water than I realized, on the order of 1 liter of water per kWh of electricity. I see a lot of talk about how the hyperscalers are doing better than this and are trying to get to net-positive, but everything I saw was about quantifying and optimizing this number rather than debunking it as some sort of myth.

I find "1 liter per kWh" to be a bit hard to visualize, but when they talk about building a gigawatt datacenter, that's 278L/s. A typical showerhead is 0.16L/s. The Californian almond industry apparently uses roughly 200kL/s averaged over the entire year -- 278L/s is enough for about 4 square miles of almond orchards.

So it seems like a real thing but maybe not that drastic, especially since I think the hyperscaler numbers are better than this.

[Manuel_D]

Water shortages are highly local problems. Sure, running a data center in Arizona might have some genuine water concerns. But even then, it can be mitigated by changes like using wastewater. The Palo Verde plant does that for its heat exchangers.

[jeffbee]

The existing golf courses in Arizona alone use more water than the entire global data center industry.

[more_corn]

I’d love to believe this but maybe a citation would help.

[kmod]

https://azallianceforgolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/C-S...

page 21, says Arizona 2015 golf course irrigation was 120 million gallons per day, citing the US Geological Survey.

https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/

says Google's datacenter water consumption in 2023 was 5.2 billion gallons, or ~14 million gallons a day. Microsoft was ~4.7, Facebook was 2.6, AWS didn't seem to disclose, Apple was 2.3. These numbers seem pulled from what the companies published.

The total for these companies was ~30 million gallons a day. Apply your best guesses as to what fraction of datacenter usage they are, what fraction of datacenter usage is AI, and what 2025 usage looks like compared to 2023. My guess is it's unlikely to come out to more than 120 million.

I didn't vet this that carefully so take the numbers with a grain of salt, but the rough comparison does seem to hold that Arizona golf courses are larger users of water.

Agricultural numbers are much higher, the California almond industry uses ~4000 million gallons of water a day.

[theshrike79]

Keeping grass growing in the desert takes a ton of water. Who would've thunk it? =)

[yodon]

Data centers use evaporative cooling.

Data centers don't just heat up the water and return it - they evaporate the water into the atmosphere (yes, I know, the H2O still exists, but it's in a far less usable form when it's gaseous atmospheric H2O)

[kleton]

The Meta FTW data centers use evaporative chillers, but they re-condense the water so that it's a closed loop.

[sdenton4]

Yeah, the funny thing about the water claims is that there's a pretty simple technological fix: closed loop exists, and seems to be simply the better choice going forward as new DCs are built (excepting of course things like musk's 'rolling coal' bullshit).

[Bratmon]

The implicit claim that data centers don't recondense the water they evaporate is surprising to me.

Do you have a source?

[bruckie]

The claim that they would recondense the water is surprising to me. :)

I'm genuinely curious how recondensing would work. It seems like a Rube Goldberg machine to me. To recondense the water vapor, you would need to move a large amount of heat out of the water vapor into a heat sink so that it could cool down to the boiling point and undergo a phase change. What would that sink be, and how would you move the heat into it fast enough?

Air is the obvious answer, but if you are dumping heat into the air, why would you do it by evaporating and then condensing water, rather than transferring it directly (e.g. via a heat exchanger and fan)?

[yodon]

> Do you have a source?

Just what I've been told by people in the industry. I too would love to see more solid data.

[xnx]

Water molecules are definitely not being destroyed, but they are often completely removed from a place where they were useful.

Aral Sea was destroyed by farm irrigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBjDF4SFIlk

[richwater]

Destroying the water originates as a NIMBY talking point (to stop data centers) that was co-opted by anti-capitalist groups (higher membership rates among GenZ) as a boogeyman to blame for why AI is bad.

[more_corn]

Data centers do consume a lot of water, but even more power. AI is causing us to forget our climate change carbon goals. The global increase in drought is probably more a result of climate change temperatures than direct consumption. (Yes AI is doing it but not in the way most people thought)

[richwater]

Stopping AI development in the name of Climate Change so that we lose to China (who pollutes 3x as much as we do) is idiotic as best, self-destructing at worst.

[AlecSchueler]

Since pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, defunding climate research and doctoring past data, it's no longer possible to take the moral high ground here.

[scruple]

It's probably best (for your mental health) to not ask these questions in earnest.

[gjsman-1000]

It's probably best, for your mental health, to ask these questions in earnest, and stop dismissing people as illogical. The communities living near data centers have real water problems, making it believable. If you're wondering why NIMBY happens, just watch the first 30 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjj7wDYaiI

[Manuel_D]

The NYT article says that the couple suspects that sediment buildup is blocking pipes, not that there is a water shortage causing taps to run dry: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-cent...

And there isn't solid evidence that this was connected to the data center construction:

> Ben Sheidler, a spokesman for the Joint Development Authority, which manages the industrial park that Meta’s facilities occupy, said the cause of the water issues was unknown. The Joint Development Authority did not do a well water study before construction to determine any potential effects, but the timing of the problems could be a coincidence, he said.

> “I wouldn’t want to speculate that even the construction had something to do with it,” he said. “One thousand feet away is a pretty significant distance.”

[gjsman-1000]

There isn't solid evidence that it isn't the data center construction. I do know that correlation + obvious dirt upheaval = likely chance.

[Manuel_D]

So now we're asking data center builders to prove a negative?