alt Hacker NewsAI uses less water than the public thinks
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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.
While a couple months back an article[1] discussed how Google was keeping the water requirements a secret from locals who wanted transparency, claiming it was proprietary knowledge.
So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.
> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’
> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.
So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-dat...
[2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-cente...
You can go millions of prompts before you use up as much water as it took to make a single beef burger.
You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.
There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.
> So much of our public discourse on water and other subjects is choked by chatter, untamed by reasoned evidence, data, and quantification. Today, with AI, we have little excuse for not attempting and using honest estimates to inform our discussions and tame our fears and hopes.
Are these things usually convincing? The general pattern is that people take a position on something and then find one paper with a DOI identifier that backs the position. The Elephant and The Rider and so on. Trying to provide someone with evidence of the falsehood of their claims rarely makes them reconsider and often makes them dig their heels in while they search for a new paper with a DOI identifier.
We're in an unprecedented time in the information age when people can rapidly achieve basic competency at many things using Wikipedia, Google, and LLMs critically. If information availability and search were the constraint, one would expect us to reach greater alignment with facts.
The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality. In practice, I think the social psychologists are right. For the most part, we form the model of reality and then we seek information that supports it. So if you increase the total amount of information what you do is increase the ability for someone to select out that which supports their model.
That's not to say I don't appreciate these things. It's just that I don't think facts move public opinion very much.
The interesting thing that more information and better search provides is that it accelerates the divide between truth-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily falsifying information) and confirmation-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily supporting information). In general, one can imagine that the former will be more successful at modeling the world ex humanity at least. But if others believe something is true, often a direct approach at their facts is not the best approach to get the outcome.
This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0]
Usually when people compare data center water usage to golf course water usage I feel a lot better about the whole thing.
I don’t really get the water concerns in datacenter cooling. Even if a lot of water was used for cooling with every prompt (which he argues against here, but, even if)… water “used up” by cooling just comes out a little hotter, right? Maybe evaporated. Then it’ll come back in the form of rain. This isn’t an industrial chemistry process that leaves some toxic waste in the water. Or an agricultural one that puts water in plants and then ships it off to some other region. It just becomes another path through the water cycle.
I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?
This image really helped me put it into perspective. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2032858292184117748
The data coming from the University of Calgary about the data centres they're building in Alberta, Canada seems to indicate that they're using evaporative cooling, which is very expensive water wise.
The bigger concern though, is the power requirements. Which are set to double or triple the energy use of the entire Province (analogous to a State in the US).
https://ucalgary.ca/sustainability/mobilizing-alberta/climat...
I "like" how in their graphic agriculture and cities are both putting water into the lake, and only data centers are removing water from the lake.
The prompter should have redone this image a couple of times until they had all three actually draining the lake.
Did anyone find it weird that the author uses AI itself to perform the calculations? Seems like a very poor quality piece
A lot of confusion around AI water usage might stem from whether it's an open-loop or a closed-loop cooling system.
e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.
So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
As my friends in Agriculture like to point out, most of the water isn't used at all, it goes right on down the river to the ocean. Ag is second, but less than 50%.
One good way to save water is to use treated wastewater for cooling. xAI is building this kind of system in Memphis.[0] It'll connect to a nearby wastewater treatment plant and they'll need to build an additional treatment plant before the water can be used for cooling. It's a closed-loop system inside the data center, where they use clean water, and it connects to open-loop evaporative cooling towers with heat exchangers.
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-mem...
This is an AI generated article, with AI generated images, claiming that AI isn't a resource problem.
I’ve seen a tremendous amount of content about AI water usage, mostly from pro AI sources. The most common type is comparing AI to particularly water intensive agriculture.
The result is that now I think water usage should be taken into account when siting data centers. Great Lakes and eastern seaboard fine, maybe not as much in California or Arizona.
The bigger concern is more around the pollution of the gas turbines. Populations around the DC are going to see higher rates of Asthma, Respiratory diseases, Heart problems, and certain cancers.
If data center water use is such a concern, why not require that data centers invest in closed-loop cooling systems? By closed-loop, I'm talking about re-condensing evaporated water and allowing the water to cool. Cooling the water would be more expensive in hotter environments, but still achievable. These data centers seem to have wild amounts of money for investment, why not just mandate conservation requirements?
A much more comprehensive article on this subject is here:
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
Discussed here:
Ok how about golf courses? This AI is evil look at the water use, is obvious propaganda. It makes no sense to call out data center water use when something that’s purely an optional recreational use consumes 25 times the amount.
I often get side tracked into commenting on regular social media like Instagram and I'm somehow surprised over and over how poor critical thinking skills in the greater population. The zeitgeist of US politics is "this doesn't directly benefit me so this must be bad". According to the Instagram demographic, ALL industrial uses of water and electricity are bad because they "compete" with household use. The massive Agricultural industrial complex is actually OK because I like meat, almonds, etc. AI is bad because it doesn't make my job easier.
Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.
What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.
> Their water use is mostly for cooling needs from the heat produced from their electricity use.
You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:
> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-...
From what I understand water usage critics are:
1. Tallying the total water consumption impact, embodied water (construction), operational water (cooling), indirect water (electricity generation), supply chain water, etc.
2. Mapping current water intensity onto AI growth forecasts through 2030+
And if you look at those things in combination, there are reasons to be alarmed.
> But AI will bring more important concerns, such as the end of human civilization
Who are these people who think AI will end civilization? Ya'll know it's just autocomplete and deepfakes, right? Maybe they need to read a book about the industrial revolution? It changed the world entirely, but it didn't end it.
What about all the water used to generate electricity? You know human still boils water for electricity.
If AI used as much water as the public "think"(lets say as much as the hysteria suggests the public thinks) then governments would have raised rates on them and they would have reduced usage...
I ran 8 internal audits against my agent stack end-to-end, to figure out if I was destroying the planet. Turns out it uses 12x less energy over a 10minute snapshot when compared to youtube, instagram, facebook ect.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-int...
Most people don't know AI uses water.
Greater than $0 in cost of living increases for people living near these things is too much.
Look over here! Not over there at grid infrastructure and generating capacity, or noise and pollution from on-site generators.
The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.
The Empire of AI book seriously did permanent damage on this talking point.
What does the public actually think?
Asking chatbots for estimates of water usage and then taking their average is a great way to alienate your audience. It's embarrassing, as well.
i believe it was like amount of water gold uses in the USA alone is 10x more than water used by AI globally
I've always found it quite sad and cringeworthy when people talk about AI's water usage. The first thought that comes to my head is whether its even worth trying to talk the person out of their delusion, or just accept that they are lost and can't be helped.
I think people are giving the AI-water-use claims too much credibility. The idea that AI datacenters are heavy water users is trivial to refute, and was trivial to refute when it was first introduced. It should be written about in the same tone as one writes about ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Whether it is or isn't happens to be beside the point. It's water being removed from the system en masse for a non-essential function, i.e. other than sustaining life, while driving up the cost of other utilities.
If we're trying to deny the usage "tier," I'd argue we're being intentionally obtuse at worst and foolish at best.
I appreciate the data driven approach. The article is spot on, it's really hard to distinguish all the discourse with the reality. Things most people grew up with in the 70s had years of propaganda convincing the public they were a net positive to society.
Sidebar, I'm very curious to see where AI goes. Definitely not on the hype train. More curious than anything. This article was a breath of fresh air.
c/o Jay Lund, Vice Director, Center for Watershed Engineering Distinguished Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
What they don’t mention is that the water is being polluted by the datacenters. It’s not as simple as “water go into datacenter, water come out of datacenter”
Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
I really love how he ends his bio:
“His 68-year-old hardware with 50,000-year-old architecture is enjoying and struggling with the promise, threats, and turbulence of the AI revolution.”
This article conflates agricultural use, which is not treated and is drawn directly from groundwater, rainfall, and rivers, with urban use, which is treated and much more expensive. I find it baffling that the person who put their name on this article would fail to make this critical distinction, given their credentials.
> Jay Lund is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geography at the University of California – Davis. He is also a Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
As a more complete title...
AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.
Both sides have dishonest reporting
Fantastic news!
Very insightful bullet points, ordered lists and grok tables! Articles like this are certainly a net benefit to society
This whole meme never made sense. Data centres are cooled with AC. Where the fuck is water supposed to be going?
So tired of these articles. Yes, it’s possible for them to use very little water. But naive comparisons to non-potable agricultural or other irrigation use or comparisons that don’t take into account growth rates of specific uses or local bottlenecks are useless.
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> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions.
Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap.
People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.