[parsimo2010]

Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory.

Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.

[Petersipoi]

> have to eat to live

Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!

[lxgr]

Yes, and now please cut the non-essential philosophical discussion, the server hosting this site doesn't run on thought experiments alone either.

This comment could have been someone's hamburger!

[trvz]

This site, if not overly wasteful, fits onto a single 1U server. A single car is more damaging than such a server.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

HN does untold societal damage.

[rl3]

In other words it's not the car and its energy use, but rather its occupants.

A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.

[cybercatgurrl]

and that hamburger could have fed even more in the form of plant based food! what an inefficient use of resources!

[sandworm101]

HN could run on a cellphone with a good connection. The YouTube video I am watching in another window probably burns more electrons than this entire forum.

[parsimo2010]

If we're shipping the alfalfa to China, I assume that means it's supporting some Chinese person's food source, whether they are directly eating the alfalfa, or some animal is eating it that later becomes food.

If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.

[Ethee]

Pointing to agriculture as a necessity while also wanting water usage to be "productive" is a little contradictory here. We grow things because there is a demand for those products in similar way that there is a demand for datacenters, the nutrition aspect is secondary and has been for a long time now. Would you say that almond growing is a productive use of our water? How about bananas, or beef, or avocados? All of these products use an abnormally large amount of water compared to other agricultural endeavors and if we compare that to data center water usage data center's are a drop in the bucket. We don't 'need' all of products we produce through agriculture to survive anymore, we grow them because we like them.

[bcrosby95]

Lots of Colorado river water goes to supplying year around lettuce. If we didn't have lettuce they would just eat something else. Given the supply constraints of the region, "but someone is eating it" is a really bizarre argument. It can be grown elsewhere without water problems.

The southwest is basically exporting its water very cheaply in the form of agriculture. Why when its such a constrained resource here?

[ShyCodeGardener]

They are pointing out that some locations are not a good place to grow specific things and that there is a lot of water wastage in doing so. Attempting to grow crops in the desert vs. in a temperate climate probably uses more water for the same amount of crops (unless they are desert plants, I guess). This is what's being pointed out. If I decide to grow tomatoes on the moon and then ship them back to Earth to be consumed, it's fair game for people to point out how much of a waste of resources that is vs. just growing them on Earth.

[lxgr]

What makes AI use "illegitimate", and any food use automatically "legitimate"?

People have all kinds of needs in addition to those for food and water.

[tzs]

One difference is that AI data center locations are not constrained by soil quality, length of growing season, climate, availability of cheap seasonal manual laborers, and access to transportation networks able to regularly handle a large physical volume of goods.

Once operational they just need electricity, cooling, internet, and enough local infrastructure to support up to a couple hundred employees. It should be possible to place all of them in locations where electricity and water are so abundant that no one cares about their use.

Heck, people are seriously talking about putting them in space (although I don't see how they will be able to solve the cooling problem).

[cybercatgurrl]

this reminds me of the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”

[ShyCodeGardener]

Don't be disingenuous. They already were dividing things out by type of usage, like talking about water park usage vs. the usage of an entire city for all purposes. They are already admitting that "water usage of a city" isn't only about quenching thirst and maintaining hygiene, it's not a stretch to assume that they also realize that they can be water wastage in agriculture as well. They can't split out every instance of wastage that could be eliminated, and it's ridiculous to expect them to.

[ma3gl1n]

Another example is pistachio farming in California, where it can take ~1+ gallon of water per nut according to some estimates. Much of the industry is enabled by high U.S. trade barriers on a certain country.

[LostMyLogin]

My wife works with farmers professionally as part of a conservation district and just responded "THIS PERSON KNOWS FARMING" when showing her the discussion. I genuinely have no idea what you guys are talking about but she immediately got heated.

Based in Colorado.

[AmbroseBierce]

There was massive controversy about that so I don't know how good counterexample it's that. Unless the argument is "we already waste a lot why would you care about wasting more??" Which is not a great argument.

[tptacek]

The point of the counterexample is a huge component of US agriculture, massively dwarfing data centers in water use, doesn't serve the core needs proposed by the top comment.

[dylan604]

The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.

I'd be on board if for every data center a farm gave up the amount of water to use in that data center. Instead of carbon offsets, we'll let them purchase water offsets. Of course that's not a serious answer.

[Matticus_Rex]

If our water rights system required farmers to actually pay anything approaching market rates for the water they used, it actually would be a serious answer!

Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert and drain the western US's aquifers and rivers because we have insane water rights doctrines that entitle them to trillions and trillions of gallons of free or almost-free water far in excess of what the watershed regions can bear.

If we don't change that system, data center water usage is a rounding error that is barely noticeable at the scale of the problem. If we do change that system, data center water usage isn't a problem at all.

[yongjik]

> The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.

Well, to me, this sounds basically like "Jeff Bezos already exists, this school does not. Increasing the government budget to build a school here is not going to help our finance, so that's where we will push back."

(I don't think Jeff Bezos should lose all his money, but he could definitely pay more tax.)

[xigoi]

How does building a data center, which benefits a single company, compare to building a school, which benefits the general public?

[deaux]

Private jets already exists. Your new EV still doesn't. Adding more emissions on top of what private jets are using is not going to help. We can prevent the new EVs.

Scale matters, and you're completely ignoring it. A single hamburger takes about 2,500 liters of water to produce. The US eats a lot of them and produces a lot of them.

[Levitz]

It's not explicitly a great argument, but it's an excellent premise to set.

Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into.

It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people talking about how terrible this is for the environment deserve to be ignored first, scorned later.

[deaux]

This is 100% true. Every person I know - and I know a lot of them because I'm one of them myself - who already seriously cared about the environment pre-AI, including making personal sacrifices for it, doesn't place outsized importance on AI's environmental impact compared to other sources. Every person who frequently brings up AI's environmental damage are those who honestly never really cared about the environment/climate, at most paying lip service to it for brownie points/to feel better but never took any actions that would inconvenience themselves.

Because we who actually care about this subject go through the effort of educating ourselves and tend to use our energy in ways that actually make a difference, that are effective. Because we care about making an impact, not about brownie points.

People are just embarrassed to admit they're scared they might lose their job. They shouldn't be but they are because they've attached their identity to their career and to the concept of it making them uniquely skilled and creative, in a way that a machine could never replace.

Please don't take this as saying they are replaceable by AI. Maybe it never will. That doesn't matter, what matters is that they're scared that it will, and they're too embarrassed to admit they're scared of it, so they point towards the environmental damage.

[pigeons]

There aren't a million better places to put efforts into. This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched, and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.

[Levitz]

>This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched

Oh yeah, excellent place to put effort, it's not entrenched, it's just straight up against technological giants in a race that is considered relevant for national security. That should be easy yeah, outstanding target to set.

>and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.

I'll just repeat myself here:

>Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively.

[hugeBirb]

You are a deeply unserious person :'D

[hugeBirb]

Bob: "I hate <company> and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that"

Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as <other company> to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them"

Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.

[JuniperMesos]

Why is your hypothetical Tom wrong to claim that Bob primarily cares about hating <company> and is using fluffy creatures as an excuse because it sounds superficially better than the actual reasons Bob has a problem with <company>?

[Levitz]

And I'm guessing that I'm supposed to believe here that the reason Bob hates explicitly this one company and is dismissing 99% of the damage done to the cute fluffy animal by corporations that seemingly get paid to exterminate them in brutal ways, the reason many people seem to spouse this extremely bizarre, specific belief is "just because" right? Not an obscene amount of hypocrisy and dishonesty?

Because I don't have anywhere near enough brain damage to do that and I'm not sure I can get there in a medically safe manner.

[bryan_w]

I'm pretty sure most people would see Toms point as valid?

If Bob made a huge deal about company's abuse of fluffy animal and never otherwise talked about fluffy animal, that would seen as inauthentic

[eloisant]

The point is that we should start by working on the bigger waste. If agriculture represents 1000x the consumption of AI, even cutting the AI water usage by half would have the less impact than reducing agriculture water usage by 0.02%

[jrflo]

A pretty easy 'optional' comparison would be golf course watering. I saw a much more detailed write up on this that I can't find now, but a quick google shows 500 billion gallons a year for US golf courses and 180 billion gallons a year for all data centers, not just AI data centers.

[XorNot]

The problem with these numbers though is water isn't really lost in those processes and has another dynamic: you can't really bank it. There's tons of ecosystems where the biggest problem is we have to ensure a certain amount of water goes through them to keep them alive.

And so in that context all water usage is not equal: watering a golf course where run off goes back to local estuaries is different to evaporative cooling is different to industrial or residential usage.

[jrflo]

agreed, you could also argue that runoff from golf courses needs to be processed which costs energy, versus total evap cooling where the water immediately re enters the water cycle in the form of vapor. It's not an easy comparison, but it does put it in context.

[js2]

Possibly one of these, shared to HN in the past year:

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

[cybercatgurrl]

clearly the reasonable course of action here is ban new golf courses!

[jedimastert]

I mean, I know a lot of people who are also against golf courses for very similar reasons

[em500]

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking

Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.

[cybercatgurrl]

in a desert city this is massively irresponsible but people do it anyways because they’ve forgotten they’re living in a desert

[pj_mukh]

This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately.

Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.

[quadrifoliate]

> anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose.

This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods.

Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.

[pj_mukh]

I think that’s fine, having an extremely small group of subsidized industries because of historical reasons are fine.

Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.

[narrator]

As the AI/Robotics genie emerges and who gets to feed the AI robot genie resources and for what becomes the central civilizational question, you're going to see the whole economy back its way into central planning.

[rsoto2]

let's have the tool we created as a society called "the government" regulate it instead of waiting for "the market" to price things accurately.

Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen

[anubistheta]

It's better to have everyone pay the fair market price. Price isn't arbitrary, it reflects the real cost to produce the good. It encourages efficient use. If you feel one usage is more worthwhile, you can subsidize it.

[JuniperMesos]

The government is the entity that enforces the existing water rights system.

[matthewfcarlson]

In the article it lists a data point that beer production in Arizona used more water than the data centers in Arizona. People may vehemently disagree, but we absolutely do not need beer. Would I trade beer for AI? That's an easy choice, AI every time. If you just keep track of the water to keep a person alive and the bare minimum water required for agriculture (which isn't particularly efficient in most cases), it would be a fraction of a fraction of what we use now.

Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.

[pashabitz]

This is a hilariously misleading "study" and I would bet "beer" wasn't chosen arbitrarily for comparison:

The important difference WRT beer is that the water used in the process likely in a larger part goes towards... the beer itself. This in turn is going into the person who drinks it. So, the water here is actually hydrating human beings.

This can be argued as one of the 2-3 absolutely necessary uses of water. Hydrating people.

So, spending less than the beer industry is not that great of an achievement.

However, a casual reader may see comparison to "beer" and think "oh yeah, beer, just a random thing out of a million, so yeah AI is totally ordinary".

Which is a very incorrect conclusion to reach.

[beepbooptheory]

Beer has been around for like a thousand years and we haven't decided to get rid of it. We're five years into this fever dream and everyone either literally hates AI or has been driven at least a little crazy by it. It's a pretty darn easy choice for me (and most people I imagine).

[satvikpendem]

Beer is a physically addictive mind altering substance, so of course we haven't decided to get rid of it (because it literally drugs you), but people go sober all the time because they know how bad it is.

[jerlam]

The entire United States banned beer in the 1920s, and then un-banned it in the 30s, using a process that is unthinkable today.

[topham]

"either literally hates AI or has been driven at least a little crazy by it. It's a pretty darn easy choice for me (and most people I imagine)."

Careful, your bias is showing.

[Levitz]

Great news, you are free to stop using AI and to drink beer, and so are we all.

[beepbooptheory]

thanks

[dwb]

LLMs make my job easier on balance and I hardly drink beer any more, but I would choose beer over data centres every single time.

[km3r]

We absolutely do not need to waste as much water as we do on agriculture. Their is more efficient watering systems, crops that do not feed humans, and inefficient crops that aren't needed. Any one of those improvements would dwarf the water usage by AI.

Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.

[rsoto2]

Yeah people aren't mad about datacenters because they are "anti growth"

They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.

[km3r]

Don't expect them to do anything for the greater good. Regulate and require that to happen, don't ban.

[Aurornis]

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live.

Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage.

Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.

[lxgr]

It seems strange to draw the line at car washes.

But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?

[kmeisthax]

Basically any discussion of water allocation is stupid. We already have a way to allocate water (or, really, any scarce resource) - markets. Instead of arguing over whether or not a hamburger is worth a car wash's worth of water, bill the person using the water for that amount of water. Let the water user and the price discovery mechanism fight it out. If it is not worth it to them, then they can move to somewhere where water is cheaper.

We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to.

This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it.

Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system.

[0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.

[senko]

> we have to eat to live

You don't have to eat a burger.

Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).

[adrr]

What about golf courses which use up 476 Billion of water every year? Way more than data centers. People complain about Nestle using water in californa for bottled water but it doesn't compare to what single golf course uses in a year.

[rsoto2]

yes I think these datacenters AND golf courses are a waste. crazy

[Marsymars]

> Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks.

There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded.

Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)

[crabbone]

Yes and no. We shouldn't compare datacenter water usage to residential water usage. We should compare it to industrial water usage, as that is what it is. The question like "how does datacenter water cooling compares to concrete factory water cooling?" makes some sense from engineering perspective, as you are comparing oranges to oranges to a degree.

Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...

[notJim]

A lot of agricultural water usage (more water than AI) is for growing corn to turn into ethanol so we can add it to gasoline. It's not a small amount either, 40% of all corn in the US is used for this purpose.

[Matticus_Rex]

We use about two orders of magnitude more water (each!) on corn and alfalfa than on data centers as of 2023, and while we're ramping data centers up fast, it'll still be an order of magnitude at the 2030 data center estimates (which may heavily overestimate, now that there's so much opposition popping up).

[skwirl]

This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory.

If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.

The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.

[TaupeRanger]

This is the response to have in mind when confronted with AI-water arguments. It's not about HOW the water is used, it's that, if you're truly concerned about water usage, AI is a non-factor compared to basically everything else you do on a daily basis.

[BosunoB]

We don't need AI in the same way we don't need washing machines and dryers. Like, sure, we don't need a machine to do our laundry, just like we don't need an AI to do our skilled labor, but it sure saves us a lot of time and energy.

[throwaway_95283]

There's not really any NEED to grow almonds. Most agriculture in California is not required to sustain life in CA. However, without AI people wouldn't have jobs that could afford CA rents, so AI is required so people can live. Lets get rid of unnecessary uses like agriculture, unless farmers can justify that the usage is actually required to sustain life.

If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.

[yqx]

> Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?).

A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.

[matheusmoreira]

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking.

Nothing but costs! All of those people have been replaced by AI. What's the point of keeping all those economically useless people alive?

This is our future if we don't achieve the fabled post-scarcity society soon.

[adammarples]

Loads of agricultural water usage in the western states is on totally optional stuff like beef and almonds

[singpolyma3]

And corn for putting in gas tanks

[deejaaymac]

Where's the beef?!

[bastardoperator]

My understanding is that data centers (at least in LA) are using mostly grey/industrial water, not water you can consume or use for agriculture. It feels like we're measuring water as one entity when not all water is equally useful to a human.

[m463]

> Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading

Kind of reminds me of things like "low fat" labels on foods that have little fat anyway, but tons of sugar.

In this case, electricity is the elephant in the room.

[Romario77]

one of the biggest health problems in US is obesity. 30 to 40% of the food produced in US goes to waste.

Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans.

It's a strawman.

[impulser_]

Yeah, but data centers allow for jobs which gives people money to buy food.

[wahnfrieden]

Agricultural water usage distribution prioritizes luxury consumption and drought areas are subsidized

[mc32]

Rice is not a luxury for most people. It’s a staple. It uses ca. 40% of all irrigation water globally. Also cotton is not a luxury, though it also uses quite a bit of irrigation water.

[traderj0e]

But normally they grow rice where there's abundant water. There's no shortage of water globally, it's just not always where you want it. Like they want water in the middle of the California desert to grow crops.

[mc32]

Rice in Pakistan, northern India, Mali, Calif., US irrigate their rice because rainfall is insufficient. Cotton grows in semi arid regions as well.

[aoeusnth1]

Meat is optional.