this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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If you think farms are for food wait till you find out what 40% of US corn is used for.
(it's biofuel for cars)
and just wait till you find out what 60% of the remaining corn is used for
(it's animal feed)
edit: and just wait till you find out how much water is used to artificially irrigate that corn
(something like 40 times as much as AI is estimated to use)
Almond farming in the US uses a significant amount of water too. Like yes, it's for food, but the Almond farming in California uses more water than the cities of LA and SF combined.
Still less H2O intensive than meat production.
According to the numbers I found above, almond is pretty comparable to meat production in terms of water intensity. The only thing saving it is that there is a lot less almond production than meat production.
I would also add Alfalfa and Nestle (bottled 2$ water to the list. Really though “technology connections” says if you took the corn for ethanol and replaced it with solar you could power all the electric cars. (I could be misremembering)
I'm pretty sure he said that if you replaced all of the land currently growing corn for ethanol and put solar panels there you would make more electricity than the entire us grid uses.
Absolutely. Outclasses data centers by a few orders of magnitude though... So far. Likely not for long.
relevant Hank Green video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
Basically my (and from what I remember, his) point is, stop thinking water use is the problem with AI datacenters. Even power use isn't the problem. We have all the technology and solutions necessary to build all this compute responsibly and sustainably, it's more than doable, it wouldn't even be particularly difficult.
The problem is hyperscaling and the lack of regulation (or straight up ignored regulation) that enables it, and the greedy people and corrupt politicians that want it to happen and let it happen. This is yet another thing that basically no other country in the world has real problems with besides the US of A, because in no other country is the shit your datacenters are doing legal. By barking up the wrong tree you are delaying the realisation that the problem is in your system and nowhere else.
Yup. Water cooling is a closed circuit (unless you shit money or have a near unlimited supply, like with a river nearby). We've been water-cooling all kinds of shit in data centers and production plants forever. In fact, direct water cooling is more efficient than traditional AC, because you don't need to blow a bunch of air around, you just apply cold water to the hot parts, and cool the water back down afterwards. Sensitive stuff uses deionised water anyway, but I don't know if they care enough for DCs. That is kind of expensive to produce and maintain, you really try to avoid larger leaks and spills.
There are plenty of issues with the datacenters, from the bullshit on-site gas turbines to noise pollution to using up the world's RAM supply to the whole replacing humans with "AI" issue. But all of those could be solved with proper regulation.
USA companies are trying to export their brand of lawlessness to other countries. Just ignore the regulations, pay a fine, if they can't kill it in court, and carry on.
Is that water stat at the end right? jfc
Yup, American agricultures water usage ist notoriously inefficient, simply opening a valve and letting the water run down a slope to irrigate the area vs watering the plants. Also, the water pipes in the USA lose a lot more to leaks than Data centers could ever use.