[kingofmen]

Points for effort, but this will do literal nothing to appease the opposition, since the "water use" thing is a myth anyway. It's probably good, it sounds like it will be more efficient and efficiency saves resources for other uses, but politically it's completely useless.

[protoster]

Doesn't matter that's it's a myth, it's salient and has become a layperson talking point. This is an official post on nvidia.com that can be quoted: "The NVIDIA DSX reference design for AI factories has zero water consumption"

[jmartrican]

Do you have any references for this comment: '"water use" thing is a myth anyway'. I would like to show my kid who keeps complaining to me about AI water usage.

[harry19023]

The original paper that started this meme said "data centers consume water indirectly through the water used for electricity generation" and then counted water evaporating out of Lake Mead behind the Hoover dam as water use. This made the numbers seem gigantic, people got mad at it on social media, and 1 year later here we are.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

[superxpro12]

how does this square against georgia just ignoring it draining the water supply,

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center...

and reports of undrinkable water due to the ai center construction?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

even in the article you linked, it admits AI data centers CAN harm water supplies

"Individual data centers can sometimes stress local water systems in the way other industries do, but when you use AI, you are not contributing to a significant problem for water management compared to most other things you do in your day to day life. "

What is the point youre trying to make?

He also posits in the popular NYT article about a data center sucking up all the water: "But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater from construction. It had nothing to do with the data center’s normal operations (it hadn’t begun operating yet, and doesn’t even draw from local groundwater). The residents were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this is not an example of a data center’s water demand harming a local population."

And its like he claims "its not ai data centers themselves, its the construction of them" as if its an important distinction that exempts data centers from harm. It's not.

One day, the data center wasnt there, now it is. And the sudden presence of that DC caused the water problems.

[harry19023]

"And its like he claims "its not ai data centers themselves, its the construction of them" as if its an important distinction that exempts data centers from harm. It's not."

But this has nothing to do with data centers, it has to do with construction. I think getting every mad at all new construction in general is a very dangerous path to go down.

[spandrew]

Yeah but that's not what the discourse around water and AI is. When people speak about water and AI/dc's, they're indicating that water is being "taken" from other uses. As if a AI usage will oneday cause you to turn on your facet and nothing but an auto-tuned cackle comes out. That the well has gone dry. That water is a scarce resource (which, sometimes it is, esp. if you're drawing from an aquifer in the southwest)

A data centre's construction sentiment clogging pipes is fixable; an acute issue. The discourse is that AI causes chronic strain.

But like... the same people will watch 2-3 hours of HD Netflix or post on TikTok right after lodging their complaints on Reddit. The MW/h of AI isn't that big compared to these services. And the carbon sync of digital goods, including data centres, pales in comparison to the supply chain of Blockbuster. Nobody gave af then.

The reason they're cherry picking AI is because we're all sick of seeing tech billionaires thrive when everyone else is pressed by inflation and stagnant job markets.

[CarlsJrMints]

That Politico article is a good example of the kind of misinformation that makes the water consumption concern a myth. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2053296197679374365

> What actually happened here was that [...] two water hookups at a data center construction site weren't properly registered or linked to a billable account. When the utility noticed the problem, they sent the data center a retroactive bill for all the water, for $147,474 covering ~29M gallons. The data center paid it.

> Did the data center cause the low water pressure? The article very strongly implies a connection, but doesn't give the reader the right numbers to judge whether this actually happened. To figure this out, we need to know over what time the 30 million gallons was drawn [...] That's about 1% of the county's daily water output. There are a ton of ways a water system like this can experience low water pressure, and a 1% dip just isn't one of them.

> [...] the complaint about low water pressure [which led to discovering the billing problem] was coming from a private well that the data center didn't even draw from

[rcpt]

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

[j45]

Visit datacenters.

[paulrudy]

Why is a data center suing for access to 750K gallons/day of Colorado river water?

https://www.kpbs.org/news/environment/2026/06/15/imperial-va...

[CalRobert]

It always seemed weird - where does the water go, after all? I gather it isn't turned in to H2 and O2. I assume it leaves the data center hotter than when it came in, which seems like the real issue?

[mzhaase]

Evaporates and rains down in a different area which is not necessarily the same it evaporated in. Leading to potentially local net water loss.

[sophacles]

Yeah and it's a myth that fracking makes water undrinkable.

I'll bet anything you'd be the guy that won't drink a glass of the "perfectly safe, completely unaffected" water while making such utterly absurd claims.