Ok I have a solution. Don't build the data centres then, I'm ok with not having data centres in the country or anywhere else really, but I'll settle for them not being here.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Or you can cool them using raw seawater since year around it's cold AF and is well below the minimum temp needed. It's just cheaper and less permits to use drinking water in evaporative coolers... And that's besides the point too, since do we really need more AI datacenters when there isn't a silver bullet use case? It's been 5 years and there's still no killer app for AI, just vague hand waving at certain jobs (which also quietly rehire their staff months later for some odd reason)
Sure there is. Just take it from the people and charge the ridiculous prices for what they do use. Voila, plenty of datacenter water.
Which means the Residents will have to RATION their Water Usage going Forward!
-Britain's Government!
There's already hosepipe bans
Only in some areas, no restrictions where I live fortunately. Just dumped a couple hundred litres on some food I am growing.
Well we are in the midst of a massive drought.
We always seem to be in the middle of a drought and yet the water companies never seem to be in any rush to fix burst pipes. Odd that
One cup of tea in the morning and one in the evening should be enough.
Thing is tea will be the last thing they ration, putting ANY limit, even as rediculously high as 20 a day, would cause riots in the street.
You can buy all the tea you want. Just the water is rationed.
Is… Is that ridiculously high?
When I was a web developer I definitely drank about that much a day. Whenever anybody was bored with what they were doing they would just go make a kettle as an excuse to bunk off for a bit.
It's above average, but I wouldn't call it ridiculous. It's just over a cup an hour.
If someone hit 50 cups I would be worried. At that point it's better to move to a bigger mug, rather than more cups.
We get our whenever the bell goes to tell us to get our tea.
Good. So no data centres.
This is Britain we're talking about. The UK notoriously makes awful decisions all the time. They'll go ahead.
What are you talking about, plebe? No more showers for you!
Surveillance centres are how I'm going to refer to them from now on I think, doesn't even make any sense otherwise.
It's also important people understand it's the same as "the cloud".
That's how the rollout started: "why pay for a hard drive when you can have it anywhere"?
Too many people fell for that, so the corps bought up all the hard drives, now storage is more expensive than when "the cloud" rolled out
They're using startup accounting against us, they'll buy up all the storage/compute power so consumers have no option but to go thru them.
The only way to win is wide scale boycotts till their investors give up. Don't use anything you don't own to store data.
Setting the table for water wars
Sounds like the peasants will have to keep a stiff upper lip then, wot!
Billionaires do not care about the plebs' demands for water. They never did.
Plebs don’t need luxuries.
Or even essentials.
The capitalist class'll charge for air as soon as they can.
The thing is the 1% think that they can do that. But if they did everyone would just die and then they would have no money. It's like the idiotic bunker plans to survive the end of the world, what's their long-term strategy, they're going to survive the environmental collapse they themselves caused and then what they're going to do, live in the bunkers for the rest of eternity?
Unironically yes, I think that's their plan.
Micro fiefdoms for themselves and their immediate descendents and fuck the rest. A power structure and loyal caste to be their knights/enforcers.
There's a good reason why many lefty thinking heads are calling this techno-feudalism, and comparing TESCREL ideas to medieval ideologies.
Just add more hose pipe bans and blame the tax payer for the low river levels
And so sets the first domino leading to the water wars of our future.
How could there not be enough water one wonders?
I sold glycol and grey water data centers 20 yrs ago. Can someone eli5 why water is the crux of the consumption?
Better solutions have always and will always exist, but they cost more to implement.
Piping grey water to a data center either means placing it somewhere with an appropriate pipe with appropriate filtration performed, or building a new pipe/filtration. Drinking water in comparison is easily accessible anywhere. They don’t care about the impact or even the per unit cost, they just want to build on the cheap and take advantage of local infrastructure, and they figure in this ai boom the actual running costs are irrelevant because ai companies will pay for anything that works, efficiency be damned
Because it is cheap and government pay for infrastructure and maintenance. If these company would have to pay for the public goods they use none would be profitable.
Isn't grey water cheaper?
The problem is they are heavily subsidised currently so they don't actually care about using the cheaper more environmentally friendly solution. The easiest solution is to just hook the mains water supply into the cooling pumps and have the output go down a drain. The fact that it costs 100 bajillion quid a minute, they don't care about because they don't pay that.
I don't know the deals they made. I dunno k if the Greg water network is every where.
Jfc how hard is it to pass a law requiring a closed loop system? Ban evaporation and you're good.
Big data centres can't dissipate the amount of heat they generate without evaporating water, so a ban like that would effectively be a ban on that kind of data centre. Obviously, the companies lobbying for data centres to get built wouldn't be happy about that.
Surely they could, just need a bigger heat exchanger. Or even place them near the sea and use that as a heat exchanger. Evaporative cooling also isn't going to work as well in the UK where humidity is high.
But IIRC a lot of this water use stuff is kinda sketchy calculations. Building them takes a lot of water due to all the concrete but it is a one off cost and just as bad as building any other large building.
You can theoretically just use a bigger heat exchanger, but it goes from being about the size of the roof the data centre's going to have anyway to way bigger than the data centre, so with UK land prices, it's not remotely financially viable. It's a similar story with dumping heat into the sea. Anywhere close enough to the sea to feasibly dump heat that's also flat enough to build a data centre and has a significant electricity supply is already going to be full of valuable housing or existing industry, so it's not going to be cheap. We're not like America where there's loads of unused land just outside of towns.
I see no problem here.
Can't they just use rust proof pipes and sea water?
That would cost too much money for the poor companies.
Don't worry, if they need more water they can always force another community outta their homes to make a reservoir outta their valleys.