Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don’t understand though is where the water goes that it can’t be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It’s my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what’s going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I’m confident that I’m missing something.
Thanks for your time!
First of all, in general it depends what kind of water is used - river, lake, ground water - but in this case it’s almost always easily accessible river and lake water, because it’s the cheapest (surprise, surprise).
This is actually much better than it would have been with underground aquifers, because those take long years to refill.
However, whenever you collect river or lake water and evaporate it, it’ll almost never return as rain in the exact same place. Partially because that’s just how it works, and partially because climate change is affecting rain patterns almost everywhere.
So if you quickly use up half of an entire river - a good amount of the water will return as rain, but away from the river, so the river will still shrink. This is bad, because ecosystems depend on rivers and lakes, including people. It also doesn’t mean new rivers or lakes will be created elsewhere. All our current lakes and rivers have been created over millenia. Depending on where all that extra rain falls - the water may not even have a positive impact, e.g., because it’ll cause a flood.
Depending on the specific geographic location, some of the water may be completely wasted, because the rain will fall into the sea. In the middle of the country (US) it’s pretty much 0%, but closer to the shore it may be nearing 100%.
There’s also the problem of some data centers ignoring ecological regulations, and dumping all kinds of waste into the same rivers they use for cooling. There was at least one case of an xAI data center seriously polluting a river.
The single biggest issue is just the scale of water extraction. Most of humanity’s water use has been slowly growing over thousands of years, with appropriate infrastructure built and ecological research conducted. Not exactly true in the US (go figure), but I’m simplifying.
Big cities obviously use a lot of water, too. But they were built and populated over up to 300 years (or much more outside North America).
Now imagine adding several big citties worth of water consumption, all in just a few years, without any ecological oversight.
There’s ones that use evaporative cooling, meaning they draw water off of a river/lake/creek (or domestic water supply) and cool through putting that water into the air. Lots of power plants do this exact thing, especially nuclear power plants.
There’s ones that use closed cycle cooling, like a bigass water cooled PC. The water generally stays inside. It periodically needs to be cycled.
There’s also measures out there that account for all of the water needed to produce all of the components. The water used for that is one time usage.
Are these things “using up” water? Sure, some of them are in the sense they are accelerating evaporation. Some are using very little water.
Hahaha, future historians. Rich.
As a kid (long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It’s my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Yeah the water used in evaporative cooling on the data canter roofs does later condense as rain somewhere again, but the issue is that it will be far away from the location by then, so that’s no relief for the local water network that is taxed by the demand.
To tack onto this; For recondensing the water you also need a cold area, if you’ve got a heat source such as thousands of computers worth of cooling towers and hundreds of diesel/gas turbine generators running in one spot, you’ve got a recipe for a hot, humid patch of atmosphere in the area surrounding the datacenter which can hold a lot of water and take it away fron the area.
Do this enough times in one country and it creates a heat dome of hot humid air made of their drinking water, combine that with global rising temperatures and any human or animal body in the area becomes physically incapable of shedding any heat because the outside temperature and humidity prevents their sweat from evaporating.
Future historians will just reiterate the same shit that has preceeded any man-made catastrophe. A relatively small group of men sought neverending power with bottomless greed at the expense of resources and everyone else.
This is a really good video on the subject. I mean as long as I copied the URL correctly.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&pp=ygURRGF0YSBjZW50ZXIgd2F0ZXI%3D
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
Get rid of the ampersand (&) and everything after it. The rest is there to track you.
It evaporates. They could cool it back down and reuse it, but that would increase costs even more and corporations like money.
Also, “but it remains part of the water cycle” is irrelevant. Of fucking course it does; we’re not talking about nuclear fusion here! But what matters isn’t how much water exists, it’s how much usable water exists and when it evaporates it stops being usable.
Isn’t the same true for nuclear power plants?
yes but we get value from power plants - power.
LLMs just suck up more power.
Yes, or anything with evaporative cooling towers. (Coal-fired plants have them too, because they’re associated with the steam turbine part, not the nuclear part.)
However, it should be wasting a lot less water (relative to the benefit) since the whole point is to extract as much energy from the steam as possible before it exits the turbine. Power plants have the “excuse” that if they tried to cool the steam any further they’d have to spend power to do it, which would reduce overall efficiency and thus be self-defeating.
The 264 billion gallons absorb enough energy from the data center to evaporate. They turn into a gaseous form and rise into the sky where they become clouds. The clouds will eventually precipitate and turn into rain, but it might take months and months, and it probably won’t happen in dry areas with low rainfall. It might even happen over the ocean, turning the clouds into undrinkable salty seawater.
It might even happen over the ocean, turning the clouds into undrinkable salty seawater.
Well, I mean, doesn’t water evaporate from the ocean constantly and then also become rain?
To be clear it’s still a huge problem due to redistribution issues especially in drought stricken areas, but I feel like the ocean is actually like the main source of freshwater precipitation globally, right?
Sure, but we don’t usually use rain for drinking. It first has to pass through the ground and be pumped up.
The problem is that data centers are basically skipping the one step where humans have access to the water.
I think they’re using potable drinking water too. So we pay for it to be treated before data centers use it.
Why.
Edit: yes I know, the reason is that it costs more money
If you want to have water evaporated, you want it to not contain too much gunk otherwise your “evaporation pot” will get muddy real quick (not defending ai, just giving their rational)
Water has to be balanced before being pumped through the facility, or it will corrode or calcify the piping. DCs use municipal water so they don’t have to cover the cost of balancing themselves.
I don’t think the amount of evaporation from the ocean increases based on how much water is in the ocean at a proportional rate.
Probably not, but we’re in luck! As data centers accelerate climate change we’ll get more evaporation as the average ocean temperature continues to climb
Not to mention the oceans cover 2/3 the surface of Earth, so any precipitation only has a 1/3 chance of being on land. And then of course as others have mentioned that doesn’t mean it will rain in an accessible area or where it is most needed.
You want a hurricane? That’s how you get hurricanes
plus whatever anti-corosives and other [[accumulating] forever[?]] chemicals added that remain
I always assumed that distilled water (water turned to vapour, and re-condensed) is purified in the process.
The issue is that even when data centers don’t evaporate the water completely, their waste water has a much higher concentration of contaminants (because a bunch of the water evaporated out, concentrating everything that doesn’t evaporate). This makes it undrinkable.
That depends on how it’s recondensed. For distilled water you need a sterile collector.
Fine, I’ll do it.
I’m a bit uneducated on this, so maybe its a dumb question… But couldn’t saltwater be used for cooling as well? We have desalination plants, I’m sure there has gotta be a way to use the water for cooling and eliminate the freshwater problem completely, right? I’m assuming it is just that they don’t want to spend more money?
Salt water is really hard on plumbing. At best it could be used as a secondary cooling loop.
Desalination takes a lot of energy. In order to use seawater without rusting the pipes, they’d need to make even more CO2.
I’m assuming it is just that they don’t want to spend more money?
It’s always this.
Saltwater is corrosive so it would cost more to maintain.
Desalinization is a very costly process, so you would do it only if there are really no other alternatives. If if you can’t get cheaper in other ways
It evaporates in cooling. A closed loop system would avoid this, but it’s more expensive, so we destroy ourselves instead.
so we destroy ourselves instead.
I think you mean we let a small, selfish minority destroy it for everyone else
All US households consume 1 trillion gallons water a year flushing toilets. That’s 4x more water consumption than datacenters.
Please elaborate what’s being destroyed for everyone.
tell you what, you stop shitting first and we’ll all see how that goes.
dude… indoor plumbing is fucking amazing.
are you really telling me you shit out in a hole in the ground?
see, plumbing has a genuine utility and has probably saved more lives than you can imagine.
that data centers are nearing the consumption of 1/4th of all us households indoor plumbing should be the stat that gives you pause, because we have yet to identify what the fuck it’s all for, while sucking 1.5 trillion dollars out of the economy while driving up prices for power, water, cpu, gpu, ram, memory based storage, disc based storage, fucking everything, while it walks people through committing mass murder AND undressing CHILDREN.
And you’re chuffed because ai, only, lol, sucks up one quarter of the amount of water used by all OF THE FUCKING TOILETS IN THE FUCKING COUNTRY, for fucking WHAT?
We got along just fuckin fine without ai data centers. and I dislike calling it ai; these massive resources are being sucked up by LLM development - training, inference, and execution - usually someone asking for a summary of a fucking email. it’s not alphafold, they aren’t going to save anything. they’re mashing the gas pedal into the climate crisis.
THINK FOR A MOMENT: HOW IS ALL THE WATER THAT AI IS ALREADY FUCKING USING JUSTIFYING ANY OF THESE PROBLEMS?
are you really telling me you shit out in a hole in the ground?
no but if water was my concern i might have done just that.
see, plumbing has a genuine utility and has probably saved more lives than you can imagine.
no shit.
but AI also has a genuine utility. and i’m not talking specialized algorithms that figure out protein folding or detect cancer. i mean regular chatbots.
personally i benefit enormously from it. i coded and shipped more in the past year than in last 10 years. at work i write more code in a day than i used to in a week. it helped me diagnose an autoimmune disease that require treatment that shitty doctors in my backwater country failed to do. it explains things i don’t understand. it helps me overcome my prejudice and help me be a better person. it provides me a second opinion when i need it. – that’s just a short list of shit ai helps me with. and i’m not using even 10% of it. there’s text-to-speach, there’s speach-to-text, there’s image generation, video generation, audio generation – these have enourmous amount of use cases, and helps enormous amount of people. think an indie dev that can solo an entire game in weeks/months that was previously simply impossible. think producers that can ship entire series for pennies. think all those dreamers that dreamed but lacked ability to actually produce.
honestly i don’t understand how you don’t see value in ai.
that data centers are nearing the consumption of 1/4th
that’s just 1% or even less of total US water consumption. agriculture sucks up 30% if i’m not mistaken. but okay agriculture is food. we really need food. but watering lawns. do we need our lawns green and pretty that bad to waste 1.5 trillion gallons of water on it? and that’s wasted, not total consumed. total consumed - multiply by 2.
driving up prices for cpu, gpu, ram, memory based storage, disc based storage
i can agree with that.
while it walks people through committing mass murder AND undressing CHILDREN
well ai is a tool. some tools are used by bad people to do bad things. but for every “this dude used ai to do bad stuff” article there’s a “this dude used ai to create a cancer vaccine for his dying dog” article
usually someone asking for a summary of a fucking email
do you know how useful that is? i mean maybe not for you, but for someone who have to handle hundreds of mails daily? but really that’s one real narrow real silly use case. more serious use cases: improved ai discovering new math, physics, chemistry, ai automating research - including usage of alphafold and all other scientific tools - to discover new drugs, new materials; ai optimizing business processes. and that’s not some ‘high-on-hope’ shit like it was just 2 years ago. it’s real. it’s happening right fucking now.
THINK FOR A MOMENT: HOW IS ALL THE WATER THAT AI IS ALREADY FUCKING USING JUSTIFYING ANY OF THESE PROBLEMS?
think for a moment: why are you wasting your time and effort and mental energy to fight technology? like what for? what do you want to achieve? i mean i understand what you want to achieve. but is it a realistic outcome? like how do you see this fight turning out for you? like tomorrow doland trump addresses the nation: “TODAY I’M STOPPING AI. NO MORE AI.” and xi goes like “特朗普停止了人工智能。我们也必须停止。”, and all businesses that are ears dip in ai shit all go like “yeah we ain’t need no ai, let’s undo all our automation workflows and rehire all those people we deleted”. you do you of course but i really, really hate wasting my effort on something that is very unlikely to happen.
i wanna get a bit personal - why are you doing this? “stop ai” isn’t a goal. what do you want to achieve by stopping ai? like what improvements in your day-to-day life do you see if it’s stopped? your relationships? work? do these improvements justify personal tragedies of millions of people who depend on ai?
and last question: have you actually used ai enough to confidently say it’s useless?
fuck that was a long write. and will be a long read. hope you’ll read it 😅
you obviously didn’t read my response or didn’t comprehend:
honestly i don’t understand how you don’t see value in ai.
probably had an LLM summarize it.
furthermore, the rest of your reply is drivel. like:
i coded and shipped more in the past year than in last 10 years.
your slopcode output has grown enormously! so much better thany the copypasta from stack, whoop-de-fuckin-doo.
no one cares.
ai helped you diagnose a disease your ‘shitty’ doctors
I don’t believe you. Straight up.
Or perhaps your docs are trying to tell you something.
re: the dog thing - FROM THE FUCKING ARTICLE, YOU TOOLBAG: Promising, but not a cure - It should be noted that this is a single dog, not a controlled study, and mast cell tumours can behave unpredictably. We cannot be sure how much of Rosie’s improvement is due to the vaccine, how long it will last, or whether the same approach would help other dogs, let alone humans.
The AI did not “cure cancer” by itself.
you’re the one who brought the subject of plumbing up, as if the US is shitting too much or our infrastructure should be reimagined to make shitting more efficient. Instead I fucking schooled you on why plumbing is nice and the AI use is ridiculous, and you simply ignore the hard parts lol.
Dude, you’re a cheerleader for LLMs. For fucks sake, go rent a personality, please, find a friend that you don’t have to calculate the token cost for, because I’m not it.
I’m anti-ai because it’s LLM garbage built on theft. You’re not bothered by the theft, illustrating how weak of character you and your LLM slurpin homies are.
1.5 TRILLION IN THE HOLE, FOR WHAT?
For your speculation that maybe it’ll pay off, jfc, if it was gonna happen it already would have happened you silly stupid fuckwit.
I want to get a bit personal: why do you need AI to justify your sad existence?
don’t bother to reply, I’m blocking you.
Depending on where the figure is sourced, the water usage may include the electricity generation, in which case you might be using tons of water with a closed loop (data center) cooling system, because the power plant uses an open loop system. Open loop is wasteful, but if the climate is dry, it’s more effective because you get to reject the latent heat of vaporization of water, which is a shitload of energy. (That’s the technical term forgive my jargon.)
That’s insane. I simply assumed they were closed loop systems because it makes sense. When I worked with HVAC systems, that’s all they ever were.
Wow.
Open loop is basically “use evaporative cooling to reduce electricity use”. For example, you could spray water on your home AC condenser to boost efficiency, although home units obviously aren’t intended to be constantly wet. Cooling towers are designed to be constantly wet and their radiator structures are very different, but the concept is the same.
All because a few trillion-dollar companies want lower electricity bills. Fuck, humans can be such greedy assholes.
I’ve always wondered why they don’t divert the water that condenses onto the cold evaporator coil to the hot condenser coil to cool it. I think some window units do it. I guess it would cause dust to accumulate faster or something.
Put a straw in your hand.
Get a mouthful of ice cold water
Blow it through the straw out the other side.
Feel it cool your hand? See how its dispersed out to god knows the fuck where? Never returning in any significant volume to replenish the cup it was drawn from
Thats basically whats going on.
Billions of gallons of drinkable water, wasted because data centers didnt want to pay the extra cost for a closed loop cooling system. putting enormous strain on water systems that are already at or beyond their breaking points and are not able to replenish at even a fraction of the rate that they are being drained from.
It’s not an extra cent for a closed loop cooling system and your straw analogy is closer to closed loop in how it works. They use open loop because vaporising water takes a lot more energy than heating water. You get a lot of more cooled. The alternative is to run a ton more AC at lower efficiency since the hot side of the AC won’t be cooled fast enough.
They’re doing it to use less electricity since electricity is expensive. In a way, it’s a good thing. Until you factor in droughts
even closed loop can only recycle the same water so many times
Industrial closed loops rarely use water. and will last a very long time. besides, lets be generous and just assume its running nothing but water water and some anticorosive additives. it will run on that water for a very long time, and changing out that water once a year is still trillions of gallons less than what would be consumed otherwise.
It’s like your car’s radiator. They flush their systems occasionally, but it’s really not much… at least not locally. Who knows what’s going on at the power plant where the electricity is being generated? Arid states should be strictly requiring closed loop systems of data centers and electricity producers alike.
https://www.joburgetc.com/news/ai-data-centers-fresh-water-usage-cooling-recycled/
TLDR: They use evaporative cooling, so the clean drinking water is taken from the water supply and distributed to the air. Yes, the rain cycle works and the water isn’t destroyed, but the water molecules are distributed places that are no longer readily available. Drinking water supplies like aquifers, reservoirs, etc. are depleted, but weather patterns do not necessarily replenish them, particularly weather patterns distorted by climate change.
You’re right about the rain and evaporation in general. It’s the rate of evaporation and source of water that is in question.
This is a simple answer and there’s a lot of factors but generally, it’s the rate of usage.
Farms in California are facing drought - the water cycle hasn’t stopped, but the water source in the mountains is drying up as climate change impacts are felt - so they extract groundwater (which is not replaced at the rate of extraction). This groundwater evaporates or leaves inside the vegetables they grow and falls as rain but not where it was extracted from.
A datacentre in Wisconsin pulls water from a Great Lake, is used for cooling, the water evaporates, and rains somewhere else. The Great Lake shrinks. It’s the same effect.
Plus, the water may be treated (contaminated) by the datacentre. It may be using treated drinking water.
Copying from another thread on this, but the focus on water use over electricity and emissions of datacenters does not make sense. It’s just helping datacenter by focusing on the wrong environmental issue because they are not a major contributor to water use.
Agriculture, and animal agriculture specifically, are the super dominant water users. Even in water scarce places like the Colorado river
Animal agriculture also pollutes ground water, and at a far higher rate and frequency. They create toxic algae blooms are from the runoff which means high nitrate levels in the local water level. Cancer rates are elevated nearby animal farms
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935126006286
Meanwhile electrical usage is delaying fossil fuel plant closure, leading to new ones, leading to backup generator use, etc. Datacenters are projected to go from 5% of electricity use to 15%. I keep seeing 5x the number of posts on the water usage than emissions. It’s letting datacenters get away with their super high emissions with so much less attention to it
Yeah but Agriculture produces stuff we actually need instead of automating people’s jobs and child porn
Though not all agriculture is equal. We don’t need to be eating nearly so much meat, dairy, and so on though. Per capita consumption has gone through the roof in previous decades. If we are concerned about water, we should also be also reducing our consumption. For a number of other reasons too
You are right but I find it quite hard to raise arguments against cattle raising when the animals existing allow for a better outcome than if they didn’t.
An objective example: I’ve recently read a paper on how two landrace breeds, one of sheep and one of cows, are more effective at preventing wild fires than conventional cleaning efforts through the use of machinery to manage vegetation. The animals selectively eat vegetation that is usually source of ignition or facilitates fast spread of fire, reach areas where machines can not go and do not destroy the landscape. Apparently there are good indicators that the grazing may even lead to soil improvement and more biodiversity.
Regardless, there are people trying to remove these animals from the landscape. I don’t agree. Better to have animals roaming around, living their lives, than burning fuel to try and make a poor work at cleaning what otherwise are abandoned tracts of land and then have wild fires destroying everything in they path, often caused by malicious human hand.
The better approach for those cases is to let the wild grazers back into the land. Cattle and other modern farm animals don’t graze like wild life did
Cows and bison differ in all behaviors — including how they stand, move and graze. Cattle spend almost double the time grazing — 45-49 percent — in comparison to bison — who spend just over a quarter of their time doing so (26-28 percent).
[…]
The types of plants bison and cattle prefer to graze on are also remarkably different. Unlike cattle, who prefer to graze steadily on flowering herbs like clover, milkweed and sunflower, free-roaming bison cover a much larger area, grazing on different varieties of grass, such as perennial grasses, but leaving certain areas of the prairie untouched.
https://sentientmedia.org/cattle-ranching-terrible-for-biodiversity/
Moreover in the net, having cattle on those is usually a net negative to the ecosystem
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
There are no wild grazers here. Closest to it are wild boars and a few introduced deers. I’m in Portugal. Old country. We had a large number of landraces, adapted to specific locations, mostly bred for free range grazing and foraging but the commercial breeds nearly wiped them out.
If we assume that’s true, this still leaves the emission side of things which are quite high for cattle. Cattle are some of the heaviest emitters because of how they digest. Are we at least in agreement that the production level and thus consumption level should come down?
We do.
I still remember meat being treated as a speciality dish, not a daily presence. And the animals were allowed to grow slowly. Herds were smaller. The most affordable meats were normally rabbit, chicken and pidgeon, all animals most people raised at home.
Industrial farming is a monstrosity.
Worth noting that generating electricity is typically the second leading user of water behind agriculture. A 5 -> 15 percent bump will consume a lot more water unless new generation doesn’t spin a turbine with steam, just not at the data center itself.
That’s much more of a fair argument than the cooling loop water that I haven’t heard articulated. Keeping the old fossil fuel plants alive does keep that water use there. That being said, the majority of the new grid capacity is solar and wind which are the two types of power generation that don’t need to really use steam. Was about 88% solar + wind in 2025 capacity additions in the US and 91% from solar + wind + battery in Q1 2026
esptein class destroying the world and gas lighting that it is regular humans that cause world destruction while its themselves. always is always was
Some of this is that there is only so much to consume at a time. It’s a problem for a while with farms in California and why there is rationing.
A very simplified example.
Say there is a high ground point. All of the rain falls there. It runs down a stream to the ocean, where it eventually evaporates and goes back to the high point where it rains again.
Basic cycle.
Say it rains 1000 gallons per day. Which is probably ridiculously low, but, again, simplified example.
Along the flow to the ocean route, 10 people build farms, each farm needs 100 gallons of water for their crops each day.
So it rains, the water flows, each farmer pulls their 100 gallons, nothing reaches the ocean anymore but it all still evaporates and goes back to the high point where it rains.
If an 11th farmer comes along, now things get broken, because the new 11th farmer also needs 100 gallons, but it only rains 1000 gallons a day. The farmers make it work, maybe they import a bit of water each or they make due with 90 gallons instead of 100.
Now let’s take a new data center. They build right next to the top, and consume 900 gallons of water per day. The 11 farmers downstream, are now turbo fucked, along with the food they produce.
This also does not get into potential contamination, which should be filtered out as it evaporates because the contaminates don’t evaporate, nor does it get into possible misleading claims about how “the data center does not use that much water” while omitting the power generators next door that are technically a third party company that technically are not “part of” the data center, that actually consume the water.
Of course the scale in this analogy is a bit wrong. The farmers would be using 2 orders of magnitude more than the data centers and most of it being for crops to feed to cows, not crops that humans eat. And at the end is a guy trying to get drinking water out of his faucet which isn’t happening due to the farmers and the data centers
