I don't think water argument is real tbh
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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This has been done to death; that's not how water consumption works in a datacenter and most of the water quotes you hear are about construction not operations. Yes there are outliers and cases of running off tap but those are exceedingly rare and usually taken out of context. The water use just flat out isn't an issue, or at the very least isn't a substantial one.
Electrical power, heat, and noise pollution, on the other hand,...
The water use just flat out isn’t an issue
It's an enormous issue when you're on the hook for inflated municipal water bills.
But I'll concede "you posted an image, so you're responsible for $100B in sunk costs" is just scapegoating.
The resources are wasted whether or not a given individual makes an AI Slop flyer for their local Swingles spouse swap meet up.
Electrical power, heat, and noise pollution, on the other hand,…
Also all big issues.
But it's kinda crazy to tell people who have seen their water bills jump $50+/mo the day after construction breaks ground that "Um, aktuly, water isn't an issue".
Anyone complaining about AI water usage that doesn't also complain about golf courses and water-intense crops grown in deserts is, to me, not actually upset about water usage. They just hate AI and have latched on to the only thing that can justify their hatred without being abstract or complex.
When a single almond uses more water than over 500 AI prompts, maybe we should be focusing on other things.
Yeah, it upsets me when I see people posting completely batshit reasonings to make a point that is totally reasonable in the first place. It dilutes the argument against hyperscale datacenters and AI.
I did the math a while back because my workplace was talking about using more AI, and I'd need to run about 50,000 queries to copilot to use the same amount of electricity that it took to drive my car to work. If everyone using AI got one extra work from home day, it would more than offset their AI usage for an entire year.
Me: prompts a frontier LLM one time to do 30 minutes of my work in 45 seconds
Randos on the internet: "omg you're killing the planet"
Me, who once left a Minecraft technic modpack game running in the background while I had a 2hr goon session, consuming orders of magnitude more power for nothing productive:
Yeah, there are lots of reasons to hate AI, and resource consumption is absolutely one of them; but people seem to miss the forest for the trees when it comes to exactly what parts are problematic
Shiiiiiiit
I've got this chonker running a couple of game servers, I can hear it humming away through a wall right now. If I scrapped this machine and switched over to AWS or Azure, it would save so much electricity.
Like fuck I'm gonna do that though, cloud machines are expensive.
This is only a good argument if we also hate on other technically not necessary things that use a lot of water. Otherwise, we're being hypocrites who only ever require personal responsibility if it doesn't affect us.
By the way, what's the environmental impact of your cheese burger? About a bajillion times higher. But that requires you to change.
Oh, you've also read the "BTW meat industry uses more water, please use genAI for vegan agitprop" article...
I think it's an extremely flawed idea to say "you have to speak out against all things when applying a rule, to ever speak out against one thing when applying that rule". It's one thing to expect logical consistency, it's another thing to realize a tweet is only so long and we can't talk about every injustice or stupidity everytime we talk about any one of those things.
I agree people should eat less beef but like... You do know you need to eat. A cheeseburger has arguably infinite more value than an AI generated "art" piece. Comparing food to Ghibli-fied profile pics is not exactly apples to apples.
Yes, I agree people critique things most easily when it doesn't require them to change. I'm just saying 1) you can absolutely critique the system from within the system 2) you do not have to critique all issues when critiquing one issue 3) food should not be a comparison point for wasteful excesses because food, although it can be wasteful, is necessary.
Saying animal agriculture is needed for food is like saying private jets are needed because people need to commute
The crazy thing is I didn't say that. I swear some online commenters have a personal issue they'd like to show horn into every conversation.
If you can agree with:
- food is more necessary than AI generated pictures
Then you agree with my point.
I agree with your entirely separate and previously undiscussed point that animal agriculture is not necessary for our societal food needs to be met. Or at least I'm pretty sure I agree with that statement, I guess idk the difference between 0% and any needs for there to still be 10% or something. But still.
Fuckin focus mate, it's not about getting the high ground at any cost. It's about trying to have a discussion with a person you can't see or hear and yet is still a person somewhere in the world.
Well... it's like saying commercial jets are needed to commute.
Animal agriculture isn't some ultra-luxury reserved for the 1% of the 1%
The private jets and yachts need to be stopped first if people are actually serious here but it seems like everyone fucking forgot tay tay requires multiple jets for no reason the moment ai datacenters popped up.
I’d say one poor person prompting a stupid image is no where close to as bad as these fucking vehicles the rich use. If people are serious, go after them first. Prove you mean it.
This isn't a one or the other situation. People can and often are against both AI image generation and private jets/yachts. You're inventing a person that dislikes one but likes the other.
This is a shitposting community, not a political discourse community. This shitpost is about AI usage, not private jets/yachts. You are expressing residual anger in a place that did not earn this anger, on a subject no one was talking about in this thread (at least), and is not logical or useful to (at least) me.
Yachts and private jets are bad. I'd go so far as to say most cruises are bad. The super rich are evil, not just bad, but actively harmful individuals that we should as a society agree to ban. I'd be the first person to say tax every euro over 20 million in wealth and tax 95% of every euro over 10 million, and 90% over 5. I don't want anyone in the world to have more than 20 million in wealth.
I also find it acceptable for people to be upset about AI images. These are not mutually exclusive desires, I didn't forget about jets, I didn't forget about cows, I didn't forget about corn (in the US), I'm just not expressing my full spectrum of beliefs on a shitposting thread.
The private jets and yachts need to be stopped first
It's not an either/or problem.
The same people with the mega-yacht are the ones building the data centers.
We haven't found a way to stop them in either case
+1. The least we can argue is, well, you consume food and get calories that you need to survive as you said.
What does AI solve exactly? Putting some very limited usage of it in scientific fields aside, what do we really gain by using AI?
I'm old enough to experience the "evolution" of the internet, even 20 years ago, we had issues with bots, automated emails/scams making everybody's life unnecessarily difficult. Then came captcha, then cloudflare dominated the scene and is slowly becoming a monopoly, and surfing on the web is a hurdle in these days. Solve this, move this puzzle there so we can confirm you're not a bot, give us your phone number (that has no legal base, just a corporate policy) so we can IDENTIFY you and that you're not a robot. Then came 2FA causing people getting locked out of their accounts, then any mainstream company decided to get rid of their customer service agents because money and replace them with AI... The list just goes on.
Genuinely, why do we need AI in our fridges, wash machines, in everything? We just don't. It causes more issues than it helps.
How did they go from 16oz per prompt to 163 000 000 000 gallons of water?
1 prompt = 16 fl oz = 0.125 gallon^[1]^
1 year = 163 000 000 000 gallons^[1]^
163 000 000 000 (gallons) / 0.125 (gallons/prompt) = 1 304 000 000 000 prompts
Number of customer = 900 000 000^[2]^
1 304 000 000 000 (prompts) / 900 000 000 (customers) = 1449 prompt per customer (rounded up from 1448.888888..).
If all customers did 1 prompt/s it would take 24 minutes 9 second to reach 1 304 000 000 000 prompts (9 hours if they did it once per minute). That is by no means unfeasible but the number feels very arbitrary.
1: From the image
2: https://www.getpanto.ai/blog/openai-statistics
I mean even disregarding the environmental cost, it’s rapidly accelerating our decline from the “Information Age” where knowledge about anything can be found in an instant to the “Disinformation Age” in which it’s impossible to tell what is fact from fiction because information is overflowing everywhere but most of it is bullshit.
Ended up ruining my soup the other week because I got the recipe from someone using AI. Can't even follow 2023+ video recipes anymore because the creator might have used AI to plan a video with an inedible recipe.
Shit like this makes me trust humans less because so many are willing to lie.
I've been having a hard time finding videos with any human on certain subjects lately. I'll see a video with a ton of views and a few seconds in a realize the voice is too perfect and vacuous sounding, and that the entire thing is an AI. I'm not even sure if the comments are humans either.
With video or written media I've started looking for imperfection as a metric for quality. It feels so good to watch a YouTube channel that is a normal dude with a shitty camera talking about something interesting.
Just exclude anything posted after 2023 and you'll get solely human slop. Unfortunately, that's my only strat
It can't be trusted with foods, medicine dosages, or basically anything with a hazard rating.
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I fucked up a concrete mix last month because I was in a hurry and trusted the Google ai summary instead of my own intuition. Lesson learned, hopefully
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I don't understand the point the post is trying to make.
Accelerating climate change due to increased water vapour in the atmosphere I guess? The post seems to imply that the water disappears but it's not like fracking where the water is no longer retrievable or contaminated afterwards. The pollution to the water from data centres would be heat pollution (also bad, but again, that doesn't seem to be what the post is talking about).
It's simply no longer available to the plants, animals, and humans that would have consumed it otherwise. It's missing downstream.
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I mean, I know how long my showers are
Most of those numbers shouldn't be hard to validate, but a reliable source for the 16oz number (how much a single AI prompt uses) would be appreciated. A search turns up a lot of sites I've never heard of (or are unreliable), so I don't know how reliable they are.
16ml is probably the correct number
Its nonsense.
a) 16oz is 0.5 liters. To evaporate 0.5 litres from 20c to 101c you need 361 Wh of energy. An nvidia B300, top out at 1400W. In order for a single prompt to use 361Wh on a B300, the prompt needs to take 15 minutes to run. Thats clearly not happening.
b) Even when water is used to cool GPUs, it isn't destroyed. Its heated, and then cooled down again. The water just moves heat around the system, it doesnt get destroyed
Okay, while I do suspect the 16oz number is pulled from someone's ass (or just very old, many efficiency improvements ago), there are a couple of things to consider:
a) A single B300 won't even run frontier models. It only has 288 GB of HBM. The DGX B300 server has 2.1 TB, which I suspect is not enough either (running Qwen 3.8 Max lossless (BF16) requires 4.9 TB just to load the model). But these are run in clusters anyway and any single user's prompt only uses a tiny percentage of the compute from tons of servers. OpenAI and Anthropic are going for size with their models so the most expensive ones probably need even more than Qwen.
b) While the GPUs themselves are directly cooled by closed loops, the water inside those closed loops is often cooled by evaporative coolers, or even AC and evaporative cooling in tandem (that allows the evaporation to happen outside the datacenter itself). That's because evaporative cooling is the most energy efficient form of cooling.
There are companies offering very complex heat systems that take advantage of multiple forms of cooling because they're making 100+ kW racks these days and talking of 500-1000 kW racks in the future. Ridiculous numbers, honestly.
This is from some company's website that offers cooling solutions: Notice the outside "cooling tower" - those can be dry or wet. In a hot and dry climate, you'd want wet. It'll cool really well. In a colder and more humid climate, dry might work better. They also optionally let you heat the aquifer apparently, which is bound to cause issues for everyone living nearby over time.
The b300 figure is to give a sense of scale, its clearly more on the order of milliliters per query than half a liter.
Evaporating water into the atmostsphere is really just recirculating it, it hasn't spoiled the water or destroyed it.
The problem with the 16oz number is that its so clearly wrong that is discredits any other valid arguments. If complaints about ai resource usage want to be taken seriously, forget the water "usage" and worry about the gas/coal/diesel generators pumping carbon directly into the atmosphere. Because that is far more concerning that water getting cycled through the water cycle.
You're talking about closed water cooling systems, which are ethical and more expensive.
Now can you guess how many data centers use those?
Ethical would be if you dumped the heat into space and only used solar power.
Ethical would be if you dumped the Tech Bros into space and switched to solar power.
Make them fly there on one of their own rockets, for the irony.
Techbro powered data centers you mean?
It's all tech bro data centers
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