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by JuniperMesos 20 days ago
Data centers don't poison a community's water and the people claiming that they do are lying because they dislike generative AI and want to weaponize populist environmentalist sentiment and state regulations against the institutions doing AI inference and training.

They also don't particularly drive up the cost of energy any more than any other phenomenon in human society that uses energy, and the right solution to this is to build more power generation capacity, which is something we should be doing anyway because abundant energy is the foundation of all human prosperity.
1 comments
wyrdcurt 19 days ago
I'm not anti-AI or anti-data center, in fact I lean more towards "pro-AI" overall, but to say that everyone who claims data centers can contaminate water is lying is a strong claim that doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. If they're saying "every data center without exception poisons water" then sure, they're lying, but that's certainly not what I'm saying. A couple examples from this year are linked below. I understand if you're skeptical of politicization in the highly-publicized Georgia case [1], but it's harder to dismiss what happened in Wyoming [2].

[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/epa-to-... [2] https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/local_news/cheyenne-bopu-tr...

As for energy: honestly I agree with you that the solution is to build more power generation capacity, but that doesn't change the fact that in the meantime energy prices are already increasing substantially in many areas because of data centers [3].

[3] https://www.eenews.net/articles/data-centers-drive-76-surge-...

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JuniperMesos 19 days ago
I'm actually more skeptical of the politicization of the Wyoming case than of the Georgia case, after reading the linked article.

The thing that Wyoming News describes happening was:

- a construction contractor working on building a data center for Meta was using normal utility water for some construction purpose that might have been related to preparing the building's coolant system for use (the article is actually not clear about whether that was the specific source of the water), and then discharging it into the normal sanitary sewer system

- the local utility district was doing routine testing of their wastewater for fecal bacteria and accidentally discovered "Cupriavidus gilardii is a rare type of bacteria found naturally in the environment, such as in soil and water", which they tracked down to the construction discharges

- because the city of Cheyenne uses reclaimed and treated wastewater for some irrigation purposes, and because this bacteria has a risk of being harmful to immunocompromised people, out of an abundance of caution the utility district banned the construction project from discharging wastewater into the sanitary sewer

- it's still unclear exactly where the bacteria was coming from

These facts strike me as basically having nothing at all to do with data centers being harmful in a way that literally any other aspect of the built human environment isn't. Every construction site for anything uses water industrially and discharges it somehow. It's basically normal for wastewater to have bacteria in it, because it's wastewater - and ignoring the fact that it's not clear the bacteria have anything to do with the construction site being a data center as opposed to any other type of building - it's not clear that this type of bacteria being in the wastewater is actually harmful to anything. Every time I've seen reclaimed wastewater being used for irrigation somewhere I've seen signs posted saying so, in order to prevent people from thinking that the water is potable or treated.

The article says "Instead, BOPU now requires industrial companies using closed-loop cooling systems to construct separate collection systems so any water from cooling equipment or associated floor drains is directed into storage tanks, rather than the city’s sanitary sewer." and I'm frankly extremely skeptical that this is a good policy. It makes constructing a building that uses a closed-loop cooling system more expensive, which includes (some) data centers but also lots of other types of building, and I don't think there's any reason to assume that the health risk from this bacteria being in wastewater justifies the cost, nor that the policy even prevents this bacteria from getting into the wastewater.

I'm sure that despite Meta's public words about "being a good neighbor in Cheyenne", the people actually working on this project are pretty pissed off at the local utility district officials for making their job harder and more expensive, and I don't think they're wrong to feel this way. And I strongly suspect that the reason this story is being spread, and possibly the reason the journalists at the Wyoming Tribune Eagle chose to write about it to begin with, is because it involves the keywords "data center" and "water" and superficially seems bad. Certainly if this same incident happened during the construction of, say, a grocery store, I'd be unlikely to hear about it - unless a lot of journalists had an ideological problem with that grocery store, in which they'd report about it in exactly the same terms they're reporting on this incident.

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