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Did your datacenter consume 9GW?

I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.

The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.

Along those lines just a reminder folks, China is installing about 1GW equivalent of Solar power per day [1]. Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries [2]. These are not zero-regulation, socialist wastelands.

All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?

[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...

[2]:https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer

> But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.

I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.

> I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.

It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.

It is worth remembering that it heavily depends on cooling system involved.

Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude

But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north

it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.

Ok and? This wouldn’t be an issue if google et al would just share the numbers instead of hiding behind NDAs and whatever else.

Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.

The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.

I live in a country of 5 million people and we lose 40 times that a year to leaks.

“Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion… reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption”.

I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.

Please elucidate if I'm wrong, but, isn't the problem the distribution of the water and not the amount? If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.

I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.

Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.

What I now wonder is why the hell they're trying to hide it then. If the numbers are strongly on your side, why hide them?!

Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.

It is very cute and convenient that you're equating old datacenters with the ones that are being built now. They don't have the same density, do they?

Just because both are called datacenters, they must be the same. Funny.

Similar argument is being tried to quench the outrage against Flock/Axon. We always had cameras. Yeah, right.

Get out of here. Either you have a simple mind or you are commenting in bad faith.

Why is Masley "problematic" and what's he been wrong about?

Ok but if you are permitted for some obscene number you could at any point draw that down no?

Seems like it'd depend a lot on e.g. carbon impact of the marginal watt v.s. environmental impact of the marginal gallon? Might depend on the individual site.

This is entirely dependent on where you are geographically in terms of rainfall and weather. Both water and energy are abundant. The trick is getting them where you need them. So the where is what matters.

I think the bigger issue with water usage ( if it's actually an issue ) is when the system is not able to handle the additional demand ( drying up wells, etc. ) Especially during the summer where water supply is already strained in some areas.

Yes water goes eventually back into circulation but that does not help in the place where the system is already at it's limit

True if you're using a closed-loop system. But if you're using evaporative cooling (which is the main cause for concern) then the place where the water 'comes back into the environment' may be quite far away (at least in a useful sense).

I would love to see a real breakdown of aquifer water usage.

IMO the water thing is a distraction. It gets people quibbling over water instead of asking bigger questions about the data center.

Your use of "into the environment" is too broad.

If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.

For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.

Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.

The water for the datacenter comes from the same place residents, farmers, etc get their water. If there is already not a lot of water, the datacenter can cause running out of water. Sending used water downstream doesn't magically reappear upstream.

That's wishful thinking, I know, but would love a breakdown of those metrics into what actually goes into AI inference, training versus just TikTok / YouTube streaming, or just a Google search...To have some perspective. My hypothesis that prolonged video streaming might contribute similarly to AI usage? (But CDN etc might make that tricky to calculate...)

It's not terrible at all. It's dwarfed by common municipal demands, let alone industry or agriculture. It's an amount of water that's basically not worth talking about.

Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us?

It varies pretty greatly, but our golf course uses untreated water from a relatively dirty river that is not used for drinking. It looks like Google is using ground water from the aquifer. These are significantly different beasts.

Concern about water use is the distraction they caused in the media so we'd too busy thinking about fake issues to think about the real issues.

Historically large data centers used evaporative cooling. So the water disappeared in sense that it's no longer available in a useful form in it's original locations. That's changing with growing use of closed-loop systems.

A lot of people think it does, surprisingly. People memed too hard about "querying ChatGPT drains lakes" and anyone who contested it was deemed a booster, so it stuck.

no it doesn't but it doesn't go back to where it was taken from either. So it does affect local aquifers.