Data center used 30 million gallons of water without initially paying

Can AI save us from the AI industry’s endless thirst for water? Outlook not so good.

See full article...

 

[tgx]

Why are they not using closed loop systems?

 

[Mechjaz]

Related story:
https://news.azpm.org/p/azpmnews/20...perly-used-tucson-water-city-has-shut-it-off/
Credit for story link to this post.

Some will say these are relatively small amounts of water relative to aggregate consumption, but the trend is on the up. Data centers in water restricted areas like Arizona (or the Middle East) seem poorly thought out and then asking other residents to conserve water? Wut?

Don't worry, they'll be much easier to cool in space!

...right guys?

I'm going to set down my cynical/sarcastic hat for a second and switch to weariness.

I miss being excited by and about technology. I miss God Boxes, graphics cards you could buy, exciting new applications of things that were useful or had the potential to be. It seems like for the last near-decade, it's shifted into naked value extraction from suckers and the environment, which is all rest of us poor bastards sharing a planet with the suckers. (The decade before that is hardly innocent - it was realizing that there was gobs of data and thus value to be extracted from everyone, period, and nasty DRM. And those useless 3D and curved TVs. But at least you could usually buy a damn graphics card and RAM).

Blockchain, NFTs, AI, Peter Molyneux still getting press, TVs that get upset when they can't phone ad servers - tech feels sick to me. I wish it comes back to something that's truly optimistic, which does not remotely mean "a chatbot that could be useful one day after draining a state's worth of water to improve token generation 3% on coding tasks." I mean something realistically optimistic, something good for us.

I wish, but right now, I do not hope. Not when you can steal the earth itself for pennies in the right pockets.

 

[frau koujiro]

Edit to add: for some idea of the local flavor, Fayetteville is where Hosea Williams had a brick thrown at his head during a civil rights march. In the 1980s, not the 1960s.

Little correction here: Hosea Williams (and 74 others) marched in Forsyth County (specifically Cumming, the county seat) in 1987, when their protest march was attacked by KKK members and other white supremacists. Fayette County still voted for the fascist party for most of these elections, but their racism is more subtle than Forsyth, which had/has a reputation of being a sundown county and had one Black resident in the 1980 census (due to a pogrom in 1912 driving everyone else out).

 

[Soothsayer786]

Precisely why I am dead set against a proposed data center in my town that Ars recently did an article on. Well mainly my concern is the energy usage, but clearly the water usage is a problem as well. And I have zero expectation that these companies will operate in good faith. They will do whatever they can to get away with paying their fair share, and then when they get caught... nothing happens. Slap on the wrist at best.

 

[TaxiZaphod]

"Rules for thee, but not for me."

 

[tigerhawkvok]

I kinda wish point of references would be mentioned when talking about this stuff. 30 million gallons of water is about the amount of water in 45 olympic size pools.

Anything but metric, eh?

That's roughly a cube of water 50 meters on a side.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=(30e6+us+gallons+to+m^3)^1/3

 

[Kilkenny]

Meanwhile, being the biggest thief seems to be the best insurance of all. Once they start starving the water table by capturing even more of it... Time to buy cactus futures in Georgia.

It's a version of that old saw: "If you owe the bank a few hundred thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a few billion dollars, the bank has a problem."

 

[Jimmy_James]

In drought-plagued Arizona, a nonprofit advocacy group called Ceres estimated that data centers around Phoenix “already use approximately 385 million gallons of water per year for direct cooling need,” Consumer Reports noted. Once all that region’s data centers come online, “that amount will skyrocket to 3.7 billion gallons per year,” Ceres forecasted.

Silly me for just assuming no one would build data centers in areas like Phoenix. Setting all the other concerns aside... that just doesn't seem like the right fit.

 

[adespoton]

Residents complaining about water pressure relied on wells, the county has said, while QTS does not draw water from wells or groundwater.

I'm curious: where did they get their water from? Because wherever it was, I'm pretty sure that water is tasked with keeping the local water table topped up. Unless they aren't getting it locally, in which case, Fayette County wouldn't be the supplier.

 

[DrewW]

Where's that commenter that so helpfully told me data centers use less water than I do?

A high pressure shower head uses about three gallons a minute. So if you’ve spent the past twenty years in the shower you have used as much water as a portion of constructing a data center.

 

[numerobis]

Silly me for just assuming no one would build data centers in areas like Phoenix. Setting all the other concerns aside... that just doesn't seem like the right fit.

Why not? It's a major population centre. Gotta have the servers close or else the latency on the porn is too slow.

 

[SportivoA]

To note the reason for things like residential water reduction requests and irrigation bans (via NOAA CPC):

That's also a LOT of area across the rest of the country that additional drought-related concerns about new, major water consumers.

 

[Ckhristoepfher]

Why not just require the data centers to use a closed loop cooling system? There's one being built near me in western Canada, and they were required to do that there.

HVAC engineer here: Single-pass evaporative cooling uses a fraction (like, a tenth) of the electrical power closed-loop dry coils do. It's impressively effective. (did a comparative analysis a couple months ago on a much smaller scale)

The problem is as the article briefly alluded to: power plants use single-pass evaporative cooling.... a LOT. Do you want to cool the power plant or the data center?

The math is a lot closer than you think and depends on the renewables mix in power generation, local weather (even at night), the cost of water, etc.

Hassle me if you want a better writeup here / in the forums about the tradeoffs, but remember that nothing in this life is simple.
The best solution I have seen is to, as a country, not care about the ability to generate convincing facsimiles of stuff without effort or skill - GLHF. Try that without a community of support and economics will show up at your door to break your knees, then shove you in a robotaxi to take you back to work.

 

[chekk]

Don't worry, they'll be much easier to cool in space!

...right guys?

I'm going to set down my cynical/sarcastic hat for a second and switch to weariness.

I miss being excited by and about technology. I miss God Boxes, graphics cards you could buy, exciting new applications of things that were useful or had the potential to be. It seems like for the last near-decade, it's shifted into naked value extraction from suckers and the environment, which is all rest of us poor bastards sharing a planet with the suckers. (The decade before that is hardly innocent - it was realizing that there was gobs of data and thus value to be extracted from everyone, period, and nasty DRM. And those useless 3D and curved TVs. But at least you could usually buy a damn graphics card and RAM).

Blockchain, NFTs, AI, Peter Molyneux still getting press, TVs that get upset when they can't phone ad servers - tech feels sick to me. I wish it comes back to something that's truly optimistic, which does not remotely mean "a chatbot that could be useful one day after draining a state's worth of water to improve token generation 3% on coding tasks." I mean something realistically optimistic, something good for us.

I wish, but right now, I do not hope. Not when you can steal the earth itself for pennies in the right pockets.

I was just thinking yesterday that I missed being excited by tech. Sigh. Then I remembered that the same arguments trotted out during the dotcom era are the same as now for AI, just with bigger numbers and even more hype. So the increasing enshittification is real, the rest is having enough decades under your belt to see the patterns repeat, just slightly differently.
When I ask myself "was I really that naive back then," I'm forced to admit the answer is "you betcha".

 

[Maestro4k]

The fact that they weren't even fined for this "because that's customer service" is an absolute joke and shows that the people involved are either corrupt or grossly incompetent. Voters are going to have to solve these problems by mass removal of every official involved until they get the message.

Compare the lack of fines or penalties to QTS to my experience in 2024 when I had the water line develop a leak in the basement before it went into the plumbing. I had water loss insurance and that covered the per gallon charges due to the leak, but I had to pay taxes on the full amount, coming out to hundreds of dollars. (The leak was worse than I realized, resulting in bills in the $2k to $3k range, since the leak happened across the end of August's and beginning of September's bills.)

I got penalized more for that leak than QTS did for using way, way more water than was lost to my leak.

 

[VelvetRemedy]

Lotta fear mongering going on here. This situation has almost nothing to do with water consumption at AI data centers. The water used here was used for construction and could happen on literally any construction project. It was used for things like mking concrete, suppressing dust, etc. They specifically intend to use a closed loop system to cool their servers.

So it's okay for the robot cult to steal water if it's for use in construction?

 

[VelvetRemedy]

HVAC engineer here: Single-pass evaporative cooling uses a fraction (like, a tenth) of the electrical power closed-loop dry coils do. It's impressively effective. (did a comparative analysis a couple months ago on a much smaller scale)

The problem is as the article briefly alluded to: power plants use single-pass evaporative cooling.... a LOT. Do you want to cool the power plant or the data center?

The math is a lot closer than you think and depends on the renewables mix in power generation, local weather (even at night), the cost of water, etc.

Hassle me if you want a better writeup here / in the forums about the tradeoffs, but remember that nothing in this life is simple.
The best solution I have seen is to, as a country, not care about the ability to generate convincing facsimiles of stuff without effort or skill - GLHF. Try that without a community of support and economics will show up at your door to break your knees, then shove you in a robotaxi to take you back to work.

A full writeup would be very much appreciated. The cultists are big on "lol they're all closed systems and don't actually lose any water," I've noticed, and I'd like to see a proper response to that.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Compare the lack of fines or penalties to QTS to my experience in 2024 when I had the water line develop a leak in the basement before it went into the plumbing. I had water loss insurance and that covered the per gallon charges due to the leak, but I had to pay taxes on the full amount, coming out to hundreds of dollars. (The leak was worse than I realized, resulting in bills in the $2k to $3k range, since the leak happened across the end of August's and beginning of September's bills.)

I got penalized more for that leak than QTS did for using way, way more water than was lost to my leak.

Sounds like you should sue to recover the damages since they're selective about enforcement.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

A full writeup would be very much appreciated. The cultists are big on "lol they're all closed systems and don't actually lose any water," I've noticed, and I'd like to see a proper response to that.

I just watched a video today going into a bit of depth about how "water usage" can mean different things in different contexts when it comes to AI data centers. It's not a definitive breakdown but it's worth a listen IMHO.

 

[ubercurmudgeon]

Are we sure that Quality Technology Services isn't a subsidiary of World Enterprises Corporation?

 

[IrishMonkee]

“They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” Tigert said. “It’s called customer service.”

Bitch please! The fucking people who lived there long before some fucking data center showed up are you largest customers. Pure greed! These fuckers only sees $$$ and kick the residents to the curb to defend and please their "largest customer".

QTS eventually paid about $150,000 for the water, but there were no consequences for exceeding peak limits established by the county during the data center planning process. Frustrating residents, the county declined to fine QTS. Fayette County’s water system director, Vanessa Tigert, told Politico that the decision was partly because the county blamed itself and didn’t want to offend QTS.

Seriously if a person did that, tell me, would they get off with a tickle and reach-around that Quality Technology Services got. Fuck no! They'd get fined and thrown in jail even if the county fucked up.

 

[shodanbo]

As does this:

I'd be REALLY interested in how a data center under construction will use MORE water than one that's actively requiring cooling to operate.

Gonna bet the water district board members all have nice, fat, off-shore, off the record accounts they can tap anytime.

As does this:

I'd be REALLY interested in how a data center under construction will use MORE water than one that's actively requiring cooling to operate.

Gonna bet the water district board members all have nice, fat, off-shore, off the record accounts they can tap anytime.

The data center (when operating) is supposed to be recyling water. Which means the water will go through several rounds of absorbing heat in the data center and then radiating that heat away before the water is returned back into the public water system.

This is smart in terms of water conservation, and probably also saves money. This does means that the water has to be treated so that mold and bacteria don't accumulate in the water itself over the time the water stays in the facility. And when the water is returned into the system any toxic chemicals from this treatment must be removed and properly discarded so that they don't leach back into a system that itself is not prepared to deal with them.

When the facility is under construction it will need access to a water supply for construction activities (mixing concrete for instance) where that water cannot be recycled.

 

[sixstringedthing]

"We have to keep our largest customer happy" is a fucking pathetic example of government just laying down and licking the corporate boot.

The county had the highest of upper hands in any negotiation here. Construction at the site cannot be completed without access to a water supply. The data center cannot operate without access to a water supply. An illegal industrial-level water connection was discovered, and usage limits wildly exceeded during a drought period in which homeowners were being told to conserve water. If a single individual illegally connected their new residential build to the municipal water supply and used it to fill their swimming pool they would absolutely get the book thrown at them, possibly even looking at jail time. QTS should have been fined to the moon and back. What are they gonna do, just abandon their partially completed data center site that's full of extremely sunk costs and happily start building a new one in the next county over? Even if the local water authority bears some responsibility for not noticing the issue sooner, that doesn't mean they had to just roll over and bark like a dog.

Some people definitely got paid to make this "little permitting issue" just disappear. If I was a resident of that county I'd be absolutely losing my shit over this.

 

[needSomeCoffee]

Google data centers literally changing the environment of The Dalles Oregon. The Dalles is pretty dry, but is located in the Columbia gorge where the 550 million gallons per year of water vapor created by BigG often gets trapped (see pic in link below), and... changes things. Love this quote: “I’ve lived here for 30-plus years and this is the first year I’ve ever put anything on my roof to try and kill the moss. So there’s definitely a lot of moisture in the area that didn’t used to be there."

Story link (try Reader Mode):
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-...disrupting-aviation-along-columbia-river.html

 

[MagStone]

Little correction here: Hosea Williams (and 74 others) marched in Forsyth County (specifically Cumming, the county seat) in 1987, when their protest march was attacked by KKK members and other white supremacists. Fayette County still voted for the fascist party for most of these elections, but their racism is more subtle than Forsyth, which had/has a reputation of being a sundown county and had one Black resident in the 1980 census (due to a pogrom in 1912 driving everyone else out).

Thanks for correction! I was going by memory from watching the news (in 1987! this was one of the stories that stuck in my head)

 

[ItchyPoo]

People really need to stop taking showers and flushing their toilets so ai can take their jobs.

 

[jimmy.j.r]

To put into perspective that’s about 240 homes usage for a year. (Assuming family of 4 with a lower than midpoint average usage)

(I think article said it was spread over 15 months)

hey man! don't put context in to this! 30 million is big number!

 

[jimmy.j.r]

Alternatively, the planned Rivian manufacturing plant for Georgia would use 60 data centers worth of water (4million gallons per DAY): https://www.eenews.net/articles/georgia-ev-plant-backed-by-the-climate-law-sparks-water-war/

yeah but... that's not a data center so... that's okay!!!!

 

[DrewW]

Headline is incredibly misleading; that water usage was for the actual construction of the data center, not its operation.

I would love to see you operate an unbuilt data center. It seems like they all have to be built to operate.

 

[Alephhh]

I'm pro AI to a level, but comparing an AI data center to a power plant is laughable. A power plant creates a resource. An AI data center is only tied to a theoretical. There isn't a formula for how many data centers are required to develop AGI. There are too many companies vying for the same resources to work only on the assumption something is possible when AI currently serves no fundamental purpose. Claude is very useful, but anthropic doesn't automatically win the war because it won every battle.

Claude isn't fundamental in a way that gives it a reason to exist if Google can catch up. Apple and Microsoft would be nothing without effectively stealing from Xerox. Sam Altman took a google concept, Anthropic splintered from OpenAI due to ethical claims (Altman is insane). But Google isn't Xerox. Claude is useful, Google is patient, openAI has a bomb strapped to it's chest. We all lose something for a theoretical technology.

 

[Wandering Monk]

I didn’t see it in the article or the comments, so I found the water utilities records, and it looks like the whole system provides about 50 million gallons per month. The Politico article says that QTS consumed the water over 9-15 months. So QTS was consuming 3-6% of the entire system’s water for around a year without paying for it!

Sources (last page of each doc):
https://fayettecountyga.gov/Documen....03.18 WC Agenda Packet.pdf?t=202604061020500

https://fayettecountyga.gov/Documen....01.14 WC_Agenda.Packet.pdf?t=202601131412340

 

[Dark Jaguar]

There is a thread explaining the many ways we use AI. Its genuinely useful and helpful. I used it recently to extract a bunch of data from a PDF file that had some sort of copy protection preventing me from copying/pasting the data
https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threads/are-you-using-genai-at-work-if-so-how.1509214/

That's your example?

That could be done with basic screen OCR, ooor with a 3rd party PDF editor. Heck, it could have been a bit of javascript that could have been disabled. In any case, that much computing power didn't need to be used to accomplish that. Of all the examples, that was a rather weak one. You may as well have said you used it to detect when you clap your hands twice to turn on the lights.

 

[Lilu]

No way they had the nerve to say this is a "customer service" situation when they disenfranchised and had no care in the world for a huge swath of customers and operated at their expense to help out one individual customer.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

“They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” Tigert said. “It’s called customer service.”

No, it's called "complicity in screwing all of your other customers."