Showcasing the brazen and nouveau in English communication.
Haha, "future historians" is a good one.
Future archeologists, maybe.
"future"
That archaeologist:
It's their turn
Them or the polydactyl kitties.
Historians will know it wasn't about anything the general public uses AI for
I think explaining all the Lord of The Ring stuff is going to be another weirder piece. Can we jointly add overuse of Bottle Water & Golf Courses to this pushback of useless water excesses?
According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025. That amounts to roughly 264 billion gallons for the year , or the annual water usage of 1.8 million Americans. AI data centers are currently consuming 550 million gallons of water per day. That's roughly the same rate of water consumption as the entirety of the world's bottled water industry .
Wait until you learn how much water animal agriculture uses
we need to eat
eat a plant
I eat plenty of plants
Hopefully not eating Alfalfa from arid dry climate.
You're replaceable
We lethally dumb.
Easy to explain actually, greed and stupidity. The late capitalist endgame.
I'm as anti-ai as it comes, but this headline kinda flagged my bullshit meter. "Consuming" water is not as simple an equation as consuming things like oil is. The water isn't destroyed in the process, it's just heated. So then it depends on where the water was drawn from, whether the water was evaporated, etc. If they're doing evaporative cooling (which should be banned in my opinion) then it's essentially "consumed", but if it's open loop cooling, sending the heated water back into the body of water it was drawn from, then it's not the same as being "consumed"
The water isn’t destroyed in the process, it’s just heated.
I keep telling this to my local water utility but they keep billing me for drawing water from the municipal supply, regardless.
if it’s open loop cooling, sending the heated water back into the body of water it was drawn from
Dumping superheated water into the reservoir won't have any second order consequences, right?
I keep telling this to my local water utility but they keep billing me for drawing water from the municipal supply, regardless.
You're paying for the filtration and delivery of it. Feel free to stop paying and go collect and clean your own water.
Dumping superheated water into the reservoir won't have any second order consequences, right?
If the water is superheated, something has gone drastically wrong. The effects of that style open loop cooling do exist, and are well understood already from the power generation industry.
go collect and clean your own water.
Read your own article. Wasn't in trouble for collecting rainwater; he got in trouble for damming natural waterways. Massive difference.
Have you tried saying your house is a data center?
I mean, I've got a homelab with a water-cooled CPU. So... a very, very small one, yes.
Can I tell my water utility this to get some kind of discount?
Most of these new hyperscaler centers have been doing evaporative because it's cheaper to install and easier to run so as you said it is effectively gone.
They're also being placed in numerous dry areas, such as Phoenix, Arizona, where the water crisis is so bad that even if 90% of the water makes it back immediately into the local water supply, that added draw is large enough to tip things too far.
The heated water is released back into the waterways and by extensions kills everything living there. This collapses the ecosystem and changes the water chemistry. This can result in contamination, invasive species taking over, etc... Do that on major water ways like the Great Lakes/Saint Lawrence and you fuck with people's drink water supply.
Only closed loop data centers are remotely feasible.
The great lakes are already using lake water for cooling nuclear plants. That's what I was referring to when I said we already know the effects. It definitely effects the local ecosystem, but what that effect is depends on the body of water we are talking about. It's definitely nowhere near as simple as "kills everything living there".
Ideally we would just quit building useless data centers all together, and this cooling question would be a moot point.
Yes, and nuclear power plants are built with the strictest oversight and environmental planning. Data centers are just built in industrial zones with minimal supervision.
Do you think people live close enough to them for the noise to be a problem?