I wonder how much water plastic extrusion factories go through, compared to data centers.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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We could have drowned so many billionaires (and one trillionaire) in this water, instead of wasting it...
Just for sake of saying, worldwide, golf courses use between 2.5 billion and 5 billion gallons of water PER DAY.
Can we get rid of amazon and golf courses?
Golf courses get the extra sweet sauce of maybe an average of about 10 to 30 metric tons of pesticide a day, and then there is the fertilizer...
Golf courses are also a massive waste of space
For anyone who doesn't immediately have a clear idea of what 2.5 billion redneck units of water is, it's about 10 million m^3 or 6 Roman colosseums of water. About 1 lake.
My understanding is that a data center can be open loop or closed loop. Closed loop is like a water cooling pc with a radiator and you have to cool the water down to ambient temps. Open loop (or semi open loop) is more common which involves dumping hot water into the local sewer system or local waterways.
More data centers than you expect just dump the water rather than cool it down and reuse it.
AFAIK most datacenters use evaporative cooling so water simply evaporate and system has to be filled up again, other systems that are dumping water have issue with all kind of additives like anti corrosion, residual etc and water shouldn't be just dumped but go through wastewater treatment
Yeah and I have little confidence the proper treatment will happen always.
Well it doesn't because obviously it cost money, just recently there was a scandal with Musk collosus datacenter where they straight dumping toxic wastewater into neighborhood, because well, water treatment centre they've planned is too expensive
www.thecooldown.com/green-business/xai-water-recycling-facility-memphis-indefinitely-paused/
https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-environmental-regulations
It seems like all of Musk's companies have a habit of illegal dumping.
Or polluting black neighborhoods.
How can you be so cruel and ask for waste water treatment? That poor guy barely gets by. He isn't even a trillionaire yet!
Oh lord, the expenses! 😭
Depends on how you define a data center, but you mean the large single purpose data centers that have been hastily built investor bait over the last 5-8 years, then yes, most of those use the evaporative cooling towers that concentrate waste products either already in the water, or added to prevent corrosion because they cheaped out on the plumbing, and then dumps that back into the local water source.
Fair. You are probably correct about dumping into waterways. But I know that a substantial amount of warm water is dumped into local wastewater processing.
Is that supposed to be a positive? Those local plants have capacity, and they are meant to serve the needs of the community who finances said plants through their taxes.
It's not ok to just dump billions of additional gallons (for no real benefit) into those existing systems.
They should be required to build and maintain their own treatment plants, at the very least.
Yeah as far as I was able to find out even closed loop systems have to be regularly bleed out to control mineral buildup. People argue about closed loop systems as it's some kind of perpetum moblie you fill it up and it lasts forever which is not true, that's why they don't use coolants either because none of that lasts forever, they're just saving a lot of money by being able to dump toxic wastewater without immediate ecological disaster
There are a lot of questions in this comments section about how data centers use water and how they are cooled.
At least some of this information is available at resources like these:
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1
https://eng.ox.ac.uk/case-studies/the-true-cost-of-water-guzzling-data-centres
It appears they that are using both fresh/potable water and grey water where available and that not all of a data centers water consumption is to do with cooling of servers. There's also electricity generation and extraneous water usage on site.
Amazon's AWS is at least no small portion of the internets infrastructure (30% of web infrastructure world wide). So I was cautious about whether this total was for all of their data centers or just for ones that run AI.
I've read three articles so far reporting on this and none of them make it clear Amazon is reporting their total water usage for all their data centers world wide (I suspect it's this one), or if they specify the water usage of AI data centers.
How much water was used by forests in regular transpiration?
Can't wait for the water wars in less than 30 years :DD
People with far more knowledge about this: when a data center "uses" water, what happens to it? Does the act of cooling servers with water "use up" the water or can it be cycled back into the water system? And if it is theoretically possible for it to be cycled back into the system as opposed to being dumped like sewer water, why isn't it?
Because that costs money. It's really that simple.
In many states with functioning infrastructure, a property like this that's using that much water, would be required to build and maintain their own treatment plant to cover it.
But we've got regulatory capture, so... Good luck with that one.
They use evaporative cooling systems. The water absorbs the heat, turns into water vapor, and is vented into the air. In theory I assume it could be collected, but that would require a lot more post processing to cool it back down or compress it to get back to liquid for.
Most high rises have cooling systems. They run ambient temp water to all of the floors, and tenant hvac units cool their server rooms by pumping heat into that water.
It then goes through the loop and gets cooled back down to ambient with large radiator systems outside.
It’s closed loop.
There’s no reason this can’t be applied to datacenters.
The reason is cost
The problem isn't about the cooling systems "using" the water in the sense that the water "dissapears" from the water cycle per-se. The problem is that when a Data Center is built, the water that the population of that zone used, is mostly diverted from them to the data center, where it is evaporated and thus the population have access to less and less water.
Evaporated is ‘used’. It’s arguably more ‘used’ than it is when it goes down the sewer to local wastewater treatment, as that water is often put back into groundwater through infiltration fields. Depleting aquifers is the main concern of data center water usage.
evaporation is also part of the water cycle
I would also like to know the answer to this.
I have a water-cooled PC and I only add water to it about once a year when the reservoir is around 2/3 full. My loop is water-tight, not air-tight, so water is slowly lost to evaporation.
I would think enterprise loops would be air-tight but perhaps the cost of implementing that is less than paying for water to be added
I believe it evaporates
The average for farm land is around 500,000 gallons per acre per year. Using the same amount of water as 5,000 acres of farmland to run >25% of the nation’s cloud resources isn’t enormous. Not that they couldn’t do better.
Imagine trying to compare AI to food production.
Do you really need someone to explain why they're different, and why one might be worth it while the other isn't?
Yeah, I've stopped pointing out how relatively insignificant the water use is on Lemmy. That fact isn't met fondly here, usually.
While Google and Meta provide water usage data for individual facilities, Amazon did not disclose site-specific information.
More than a little skeptical of Amazon's data, as without facility by facility numbers, it's impossible to get any sort of sanity check on how accurate their numbers are.
I forget who owns this, but they're in weird places too. This is at the Seattle Westin. I know presidents have stayed there, but now sure if they still do when they're in town.
https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-centers/americas/seattle/sea10