Cooling with water depends on its evaporation. Evaporative cooling is most efficient in low humidity conditions. Ironically, those conditions are best in the desert where water is scarce. I know. I live in the desert. We live with evaporative cooling- aka “swamp coolers”. They do work - to a point. Almost everyone who has one wants to convert to refrigerated air. Refrigerated air can get much cooler.
ChatGPT and Grok both confirm (this morning, in response to your question) 660 gallons as the total use to produce a hamburger. ChatGPT helpfully adds that if you're only talking about tapwater used at the point of end production, that number drops to 26 gallons. That, of course, greatly understates reality, in much the same way that the Green New Scam folks understate the environmental impact of an EV by focusing only on emissions from the end product. But 26 gallons is still a radically greater number than zero, and only serves to prove the point. The data center scare actually is propaganda, dependent on the public's complete lack of understanding of how much water we use for even minor things.
An excellent and insightful piece on AI Data Centers and Water that I highly recommend that every American read by Alexander Muse! I would like to thank Dr. Martin for publishing it! All this claptrap about AI data centers sucking up all our water from the far-left and China is pure nonsense! Data centers will NOT be drinking rivers dry or any of that nonsense! Alexander Muse proved that to be untrue thirty years ago. He did it on a budget with technology that wasn’t even new back then. In the late 1990s, Mr. Muse built Internet data centers in New York City, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Dallas, and Miami. Not a single one of them consumed a single drop of water to keep its servers cool. Not one gallon! He and his team used air and glycol circulating in a sealed loop. The resulting warmth carried the heat out to the rooftop and handed it off to the sky. The cooling bill for these centers was zero. There are all these fear mongering headlines out there about AI Data Centers sucking up all the water in the ground or drinking your rivers dry.
A data center is a heat machine let’s get that straight first. Servers take in electricity and convert nearly all of it into heat that heat has got to go somewhere. Cooling is simply the removal of heat. You can use water or air to do this, they are very much interchangeable. Water is not fuel that the machine burns, so therefore folks need have no fear of wasting it. Water consumption is merely a design choice not an unavoidable cost of computation. It is a knob and the operator chooses where he or she will send it. Microsoft’s own engineers measure this with a metric called a Water Usage Effectiveness and the industry’s stated ideal for that number is 0.0. They too don’t want water to be wasted or needless used up if it’s not necessary. This is easily achievable by any facility that uses heat through air rather than evaporation.
Zero isn’t a fantasy on a whiteboard either. It’s what Mr. Muse ran while Bill Clinton was still in office. Why do companies choose to use water? They use water because simply put, evaporation is more efficient than electricity. If you use water to carry the heat away you spend less time running fans and chillers. If you build your center in a place where water is cheap and plentiful and electricity is expensive, you use water. It cuts down your power bill and greatly reduces the strain on your grid. But if you build in say a desert where water is scarce, you turn the knob to use electricity and you pay a little more for electricity instead.
With this situation the Thomas Sowell quote “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” definitely applies. Also, the price of choosing air and going completely waterless turns out to be quite small. A waterless buildings total power ran only 6.4% to 10.2% higher across the year. You will also be interested to know that Microsoft mandated zero-water cooling for every new data center it builds in August 2024. The energy cost for eliminating water is nominal. Furthermore, they drive down their own water metric from 0.49 to 0.30 in three while doing it. They did a test run of this design in the hardest place they possible could have, Phoenix, Arizona. The results of this experiment should have proven that water cooling is mandatory. Instead it proved they were optional. This imagined crisis had an off switch and the largest operator on Earth is flipping it across its entire fleet. Now let’s examine the claim that these data centers are guzzling all our water. This can only work if activists and the Chinese hide the numbers from you. They hide the most important part of the number and the only relevant part that being the denominator. Americans altogether use a total of 322 million gallons of water a day. The entire data center industry accounts for a measly 0.015% of national water use, fifteenth thousands of one percent.
Furthermore, American grass drinks well-over a hundred times what computers do. Our nation’s golf courses drink up 531 billion gallons of water in a single year. They use thirty times the amount of water that every data center combined uses directly. California’s almond orchards drink up around 4.2 billion gallons a day, dozens of times what the average data center does. Five gallons of water routed through a data center generates $132 of economic output. No, asking AI one question does not cause it to drink one 500ml liter bottle of water. This is total nonsense! Open AI’s own figures show they take up about 0.000085 gallons per query. Meanwhile, a single hamburger at McDonalds or Ruby Tuesday’s takes hundreds of gallons of water to produce. Why is there so much panic about this on both sides of the political spectrum given these facts? Well, ask yourself who stands of benefit from a crippled American technology sector? Why the People’s Republic of China of course! As an environmentalist, I have no fear that AI data centers will negatively impact the environment. I see them doing only good for our society while living in harmony with nature. This is not a battle that I believe environmental activists should be fighting. Instead, let’s find more pragmatic, more fact based methods to help protect and preserve Mother Earth and to fight Climate Change.
The reaction against data centers comes from several fronts. Distrust of government oversight and control being high on the list. People watching local politicians subsidize wealthy companies, particularly when they bring little of value to citizens. Strain on water and electric capacity in many communities is real. Reaction to governments forcing unreliable power on them at significantly higher costs to the rate payer.
The public isn’t always right but telling them not to worry isn’t going to cut it.
I disagree. If we don't tell them why the dishonest arguments they're being fed are in fact both wrong and dishonest, we have no possibility of changing their mind. This is not a "don't worry" article. This is a "here are the reasons what you're being told is a lie" article.
And sure, people are right to distrust government. But they should distrust the Chinese government more than they should distrust the President they voted for three times. They also shouldn't be reflexively luddite, as is the case among a growing number of conservatives now.
I don’t disagree with your premise. But I think the deeper issues are going to have to be addressed effectively before the audience is open to discussing relative water usage and Chinese influence. Water usage in the aggregate isn’t going to be effective. Water shortages are local issues and are specific to a community. I spent 30 years in economic development and Ive seen the wins and the losses. Industries located where local services were inadequate. Local leadership using deceptive practices to get a win on their resume and move on to the next community. Lots of solid professionals and good wins as well. Opposition generally came from the party not currently in power no matter the issues. Local colleges were often the worst at stirring up the mob.
Many of the rural citizens being told they are getting a data center will see absolutely no benefit from it. No local jobs beyond so low level labor. No permanent jobs. The good jobs will go to imports, domestic or otherwise, because the locals don’t have the skills.
It is the job of local leadership to address concerns well before the project is rammed through. Done well, from a history of trust, the results can be very good. Done poorly, it looks like the politicians are on the take.
Those are all excellent points. But I think the broader issue is that we have for some time now been seeing a rise in reflexive opposition to any new technology or manifestation thereof. The people reflexively opposed invariably USE the hated technology -- they're on social media right now, utilizing iPhones and computers to access and publish through sites based in data centers -- to oppose the existence of data centers. But they oppose it nevertheless, frequently justifying reflexive arguments with spurious data so as to appear (perhaps even to themselves) to have a "reason" beyond mere dislike.
The truth is, and you probably understand this better than most, that logic would require we deindustrialize. Is there an industry that ISN'T "dirtier" than data centers? Is there a power plant that doesn't "pollute" more? All these things can be claimed to cause some harm that would justify their elimination. This isn't public policy: it's a suicide pact.
AI isn't going away. I know in my own business it has increased productivity fivefold: we would never go back, even if we could. We're certainly not alone, and those who are with us include the militaries of the world, who need the edge AI provides and, facing competitors who use it too, cannot survive (literally) without it.
So if some regulation is needed, fine. I'm not sure why it would be, but I'm sure someone can think of a reason. But this luddite nonsense is just unilateral disarmament, literal and figurative. And we should combat the mindset that encourages and fosters that.
Ain't that the truth.
Cooling with water depends on its evaporation. Evaporative cooling is most efficient in low humidity conditions. Ironically, those conditions are best in the desert where water is scarce. I know. I live in the desert. We live with evaporative cooling- aka “swamp coolers”. They do work - to a point. Almost everyone who has one wants to convert to refrigerated air. Refrigerated air can get much cooler.
absolutely right. same story here. in the 90's i built the largest data centers in Mexico zero water.
however you were doing fine until you bought this propaganda: "A single hamburger takes hundreds of gallons to produce.«
ChatGPT and Grok both confirm (this morning, in response to your question) 660 gallons as the total use to produce a hamburger. ChatGPT helpfully adds that if you're only talking about tapwater used at the point of end production, that number drops to 26 gallons. That, of course, greatly understates reality, in much the same way that the Green New Scam folks understate the environmental impact of an EV by focusing only on emissions from the end product. But 26 gallons is still a radically greater number than zero, and only serves to prove the point. The data center scare actually is propaganda, dependent on the public's complete lack of understanding of how much water we use for even minor things.
An excellent and insightful piece on AI Data Centers and Water that I highly recommend that every American read by Alexander Muse! I would like to thank Dr. Martin for publishing it! All this claptrap about AI data centers sucking up all our water from the far-left and China is pure nonsense! Data centers will NOT be drinking rivers dry or any of that nonsense! Alexander Muse proved that to be untrue thirty years ago. He did it on a budget with technology that wasn’t even new back then. In the late 1990s, Mr. Muse built Internet data centers in New York City, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Dallas, and Miami. Not a single one of them consumed a single drop of water to keep its servers cool. Not one gallon! He and his team used air and glycol circulating in a sealed loop. The resulting warmth carried the heat out to the rooftop and handed it off to the sky. The cooling bill for these centers was zero. There are all these fear mongering headlines out there about AI Data Centers sucking up all the water in the ground or drinking your rivers dry.
A data center is a heat machine let’s get that straight first. Servers take in electricity and convert nearly all of it into heat that heat has got to go somewhere. Cooling is simply the removal of heat. You can use water or air to do this, they are very much interchangeable. Water is not fuel that the machine burns, so therefore folks need have no fear of wasting it. Water consumption is merely a design choice not an unavoidable cost of computation. It is a knob and the operator chooses where he or she will send it. Microsoft’s own engineers measure this with a metric called a Water Usage Effectiveness and the industry’s stated ideal for that number is 0.0. They too don’t want water to be wasted or needless used up if it’s not necessary. This is easily achievable by any facility that uses heat through air rather than evaporation.
Zero isn’t a fantasy on a whiteboard either. It’s what Mr. Muse ran while Bill Clinton was still in office. Why do companies choose to use water? They use water because simply put, evaporation is more efficient than electricity. If you use water to carry the heat away you spend less time running fans and chillers. If you build your center in a place where water is cheap and plentiful and electricity is expensive, you use water. It cuts down your power bill and greatly reduces the strain on your grid. But if you build in say a desert where water is scarce, you turn the knob to use electricity and you pay a little more for electricity instead.
With this situation the Thomas Sowell quote “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” definitely applies. Also, the price of choosing air and going completely waterless turns out to be quite small. A waterless buildings total power ran only 6.4% to 10.2% higher across the year. You will also be interested to know that Microsoft mandated zero-water cooling for every new data center it builds in August 2024. The energy cost for eliminating water is nominal. Furthermore, they drive down their own water metric from 0.49 to 0.30 in three while doing it. They did a test run of this design in the hardest place they possible could have, Phoenix, Arizona. The results of this experiment should have proven that water cooling is mandatory. Instead it proved they were optional. This imagined crisis had an off switch and the largest operator on Earth is flipping it across its entire fleet. Now let’s examine the claim that these data centers are guzzling all our water. This can only work if activists and the Chinese hide the numbers from you. They hide the most important part of the number and the only relevant part that being the denominator. Americans altogether use a total of 322 million gallons of water a day. The entire data center industry accounts for a measly 0.015% of national water use, fifteenth thousands of one percent.
Furthermore, American grass drinks well-over a hundred times what computers do. Our nation’s golf courses drink up 531 billion gallons of water in a single year. They use thirty times the amount of water that every data center combined uses directly. California’s almond orchards drink up around 4.2 billion gallons a day, dozens of times what the average data center does. Five gallons of water routed through a data center generates $132 of economic output. No, asking AI one question does not cause it to drink one 500ml liter bottle of water. This is total nonsense! Open AI’s own figures show they take up about 0.000085 gallons per query. Meanwhile, a single hamburger at McDonalds or Ruby Tuesday’s takes hundreds of gallons of water to produce. Why is there so much panic about this on both sides of the political spectrum given these facts? Well, ask yourself who stands of benefit from a crippled American technology sector? Why the People’s Republic of China of course! As an environmentalist, I have no fear that AI data centers will negatively impact the environment. I see them doing only good for our society while living in harmony with nature. This is not a battle that I believe environmental activists should be fighting. Instead, let’s find more pragmatic, more fact based methods to help protect and preserve Mother Earth and to fight Climate Change.
The reaction against data centers comes from several fronts. Distrust of government oversight and control being high on the list. People watching local politicians subsidize wealthy companies, particularly when they bring little of value to citizens. Strain on water and electric capacity in many communities is real. Reaction to governments forcing unreliable power on them at significantly higher costs to the rate payer.
The public isn’t always right but telling them not to worry isn’t going to cut it.
I disagree. If we don't tell them why the dishonest arguments they're being fed are in fact both wrong and dishonest, we have no possibility of changing their mind. This is not a "don't worry" article. This is a "here are the reasons what you're being told is a lie" article.
And sure, people are right to distrust government. But they should distrust the Chinese government more than they should distrust the President they voted for three times. They also shouldn't be reflexively luddite, as is the case among a growing number of conservatives now.
I don’t disagree with your premise. But I think the deeper issues are going to have to be addressed effectively before the audience is open to discussing relative water usage and Chinese influence. Water usage in the aggregate isn’t going to be effective. Water shortages are local issues and are specific to a community. I spent 30 years in economic development and Ive seen the wins and the losses. Industries located where local services were inadequate. Local leadership using deceptive practices to get a win on their resume and move on to the next community. Lots of solid professionals and good wins as well. Opposition generally came from the party not currently in power no matter the issues. Local colleges were often the worst at stirring up the mob.
Many of the rural citizens being told they are getting a data center will see absolutely no benefit from it. No local jobs beyond so low level labor. No permanent jobs. The good jobs will go to imports, domestic or otherwise, because the locals don’t have the skills.
It is the job of local leadership to address concerns well before the project is rammed through. Done well, from a history of trust, the results can be very good. Done poorly, it looks like the politicians are on the take.
Those are all excellent points. But I think the broader issue is that we have for some time now been seeing a rise in reflexive opposition to any new technology or manifestation thereof. The people reflexively opposed invariably USE the hated technology -- they're on social media right now, utilizing iPhones and computers to access and publish through sites based in data centers -- to oppose the existence of data centers. But they oppose it nevertheless, frequently justifying reflexive arguments with spurious data so as to appear (perhaps even to themselves) to have a "reason" beyond mere dislike.
The truth is, and you probably understand this better than most, that logic would require we deindustrialize. Is there an industry that ISN'T "dirtier" than data centers? Is there a power plant that doesn't "pollute" more? All these things can be claimed to cause some harm that would justify their elimination. This isn't public policy: it's a suicide pact.
AI isn't going away. I know in my own business it has increased productivity fivefold: we would never go back, even if we could. We're certainly not alone, and those who are with us include the militaries of the world, who need the edge AI provides and, facing competitors who use it too, cannot survive (literally) without it.
So if some regulation is needed, fine. I'm not sure why it would be, but I'm sure someone can think of a reason. But this luddite nonsense is just unilateral disarmament, literal and figurative. And we should combat the mindset that encourages and fosters that.
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament redux.
Couldn't have said it better myself. And like CND, those protesting are not one bit interested in the other team disarming, only us.