Big Tech's thirst for water is sparking a global resistance

Posted by billybuckwheat 20 hours ago

Comments

Comment by jandrewrogers 18 hours ago

> "The majority [of water] is used for big agro industries, such as soya, rice, and wood pulping. Now we have Google planning to use enormous quantities of water.”

This is like calling a rubber raft "enormous" after comparing it to an aircraft carrier. Agriculture consumes astronomically more water, often wastefully, for far less valuable purposes. I can't take these objections seriously.

This is just the latest weird moral panic.

Comment by jsLavaGoat 18 hours ago

I have a hard time complaining about agriculture, which makes food, when everyone is mad about how much food costs, and suggesting we increase the cost of their inputs, even though in some places they are wildly subsidized like the southern sq valley.

10% of California's electricity goes to pumping water around. Or that was the figure not too long ago. And it's being pumped all over, not just to ag.

The reality is, the most wasteful users of water are residential, where a lot is used to ornamental things like lawns.

There's a lot to worry about with AI, but data centers? Now? No one cared when they were being built out for AWS to host 7 gazillion Wordpress pages.

Comment by Carrok 17 hours ago

> The reality is, the most wasteful users of water are residential, where a lot is used to ornamental things like lawns.

This is very easy to search. Here's an example: https://waterknowledge.colostate.edu/water-management-admini...

Agriculture is 86% for Colorado. All other sources combined pale in comparison.

And agriculture does not simply "make food". They are often growing feed for animals, so they're making food inputs, which will require still further water to become food for humans.

They also often practice flood irrigation, arguably the least efficient method of watering plants.

Finally, due to "use it or lose it" systems, they have to continue using their water or they won't have access to it next season, so they sometimes literally just dump it on the ground where there aren't any plants to keep their quota up so they don't have access to less water next year.

Yes we need food, but there are a lot of ways in which we can grow just as much or more food without using quite so much water.

Comment by strbean 17 hours ago

A lot of agricultural water use is wildly inefficient, and a lot of that inefficiency is attributable to subsidization of water prices.

Comment by chneu 15 hours ago

Most of the waste is because water rights are "use it or lose it" which encourages farmers(and ranchers who grow grass in arid environments to feed to cattle) to literally dump water on the ground so they can keep their water rights.

Comment by expectsomuch 18 hours ago

My hunch is that when it comes to the public's perception of how water is used, it's easy to think water = food. We all instinctively know that plants need water to grow and can't live without it. And we can't live without food.

Data? Not as essential.

However, for those of us who pay attention, we know there is an extreme amount of wastefulness when it comes to how water gets used for agriculture, that is completely unnecessary. (Think growing alfalfa in Arizona, or spray irrigation in hot climates, or or or - the examples are sadly endless.

Hopefully this becomes a good opportunity for us to better pay attention and regulate how water is used in many different instances.

Comment by jsLavaGoat 18 hours ago

You will never start over and rationalize water like that for ag. And it's an easy and popular target for lots of people who are disconnected to it. Residential use is where the waste is.

Comment by profdevloper 18 hours ago

Both can be true, but if you subject water pricing to market forces the problem can help correct itself. That won't happen for ag pricing (strong lobby) but would get rid of the relatively minuscule residential wastefulness.

Comment by shimman 17 hours ago

Why should society let market forces decide how we treat a resource necessary for human life? I would rather trust a democratic society more than I'd ever trust any of these anti-humans that currently lead big tech. These people have shown the open disdain they have towards humanity, we are under no obligation to give them whatever they want if they just pay for it. Money is not the issue for them, they do not like being told no.

Society should, and is, openly reject such disdain and contempt toward humanity.

Comment by no-name-here 12 hours ago

That's incredibly solvable: subsidize every household with a baseline of essential water, and charge above-market rates for everything else. Set the higher tier's price to fund an annual dividend for every citizen to offset the average food cost difference. Waste would go way down, and practices would shift to water-efficient practices.

Comment by rickydroll 1 hour ago

I believe this makes a lot of sense. Hopefully we also have a smart meter one could use to get quick feedback on water use, so homeowners can see how changing their behavior reduces water use in the same way that a smart meter for electricity gives us the same feedback for reducing energy use.

Even without the economic incentive, I've turned off the lawn irrigation installed by previous owners, use soaker or drip irrigation in my berry and vegetable gardens, and water ornamental plants only when they're really in distress during our summertime droughts. It's amazing how soil can go from moist and wonderful in the spring to desiccated powder in a summer drought.

Coming soon, we'll be replacing the front yards with creeping thyme and maybe wild strawberries. I do need to see if wild strawberries, though, are a groundhog buffet. I hate those little fuckers.

Comment by profdevloper 17 hours ago

I'm specifically talking about local elected governments managing a municipal resource that needs to respond to market supply and demand realities over the course of time where availability of said resource fluctuates. These municipalities are run by democratically elected representatives that should be acting in the best interests of their constituents -- and if not they can be replaced.

Comment by chneu 15 hours ago

A couple of farms use more water than all residential in California.

The waste is NOT residential.

Comment by jvanderbot 18 hours ago

Almost. In a zero-sum world, where "Big" and "Tech" only combine into "evil", any use of a resource by big tech is intolerable. You can't get there from water use statistics, you have to assume zero sum, and you have to assume improper use.

Comment by threecheese 16 hours ago

You aren't wrong, but this AI thing which we're trying to give people:

1. is something that many intensely don't want, and many with valid reasons; 2. will inarguably consume some of a resource which we all need, which is already becoming more scarce globally; 3. is in many cases contributing negatively to actual or perceived quality of life via DC noise and pollution; 4. threatens the livelihood of millions in the near term, even if it will improve outcomes over time; 5. is inextricably tied to and will substantially benefit a wealthy cohort, who is already seen as exerting undue control over populations governments ; 6. present potential systemic societal risk, yet is moving forward at breakneck speed; 7. has apparent total US government support, despite complaints about all the above, in a political environment which is frankly frightening, and where that government is exercising little restraint against - and collecting more sensitive data than ever about - citizens who protest against policy.

None of us should be surprised about this reaction.

Comment by 16 hours ago

Comment by meander_water 17 hours ago

> for far less valuable purposes

You think AI is more valuable than food? Finding this really hard to compute

Comment by jandrewrogers 16 hours ago

The amount of water being discussed is utterly inconsequential to the food supply. 10s of trillions of liters of water are wasted growing subsidized corn alcohol in the US alone. Natural resources can be used for more than one thing without creating any issues.

By your reasoning everyone should stop bathing so that we don't starve to death.

Comment by meander_water 10 hours ago

Well if you read the article

> According to its own projections, the data center Google wanted to build in Cerrillos was poised to use 169 liters of water every single second. In just one day, the data center would consume as much water as all 80,000 residents of Cerrillos use for drinking in a year. To make matters worse, it wanted to draw that water from an underground aquifer that had been under a decree that restricted how much water could be removed since 2005.

Comment by lioeters 17 hours ago

> moral panic

I can't take these objections seriously.

Comment by dburkland 18 hours ago

Amen.

Comment by Analemma_ 18 hours ago

> I can't take these objections seriously.

Well, once there are enough of these objections, you are forced to take them seriously whether you "can" or not, because they have the power to stop the party into which so much capital and valuations are tied up.

Or to put it another way, I can't take vaccine objectors seriously, but now there are enough of them that I don't have any choice. For better or worse, that's how democracy works.

Comment by bbor 17 hours ago

This is just another sense of "take X seriously" :). In this context we're assessing the truth of political arguments, not assessing whether those arguments relate to consequential political events.

Comment by Analemma_ 17 hours ago

The thing is, in a democracy (actually in any form of government, but especially a democracy) I don't think you can cleanly separate those two things. When a sufficiently-large segment of the public decides X is a problem, then X is a problem, period. Even if X is objectively, truthfully, not a problem. And you can sit back and be satisfied that you have proven X is not a problem, but who cares? Your proof does not by itself affect the material state of the world one bit, where X will continue to be a problem.

Comment by bradknowles 11 hours ago

So, for my part, I’m not so concerned about the water inputs that are consumed by datacenters. The most water efficient traditional power generation systems we have are combined cycle natural gas turbines, and they consume about 5-10x as much water to produce a megawatt of power than the data center would use to cool itself from using that megawatt of power, even if they used the worst “one and done” through cooling system.

Check the HARC report on this.

No, my major concern is about what happens to the waste? Does it just get dumped into the sewers? What else might that poison? Where do those sewers get their water treated, and where does that water go downstream? Because my “treated” water output back into the rivers and aquifers is your downstream water input for humans to drink, golf courses to water their grass, etc….

And what happens when there is a toxic spill? Does that go into creeks and rivers on the surface? Where do those creeks and rivers go? Where do they let out, in relation to the closest water intakes?

Does the toxic spill go into the karst geography below the land? Into the aquifers? What all is exactly down there, and how many decades or centuries might they be poisoned? I mean, you may be able to clean up a surface creek or river, but you can’t clean up the karst geography below the surface, or the aquifers.

You could easily poison an entire city with a single spill of toxic waste from a datacenter, and continue to poison that city for years and decades to come.

Comment by woah 18 hours ago

Is this guy reviewing his own book?

Comment by shimman 17 hours ago

No, it's not a review it is an excerpt taken from the book. If you scroll down the site has a bunch of excerpts from other authors about other subjects too.

Comment by bbor 17 hours ago

Oh my GOD -- great catch! Maybe the most Paris Marx thing I've ever heard of. You literally just made my day.

I do wonder how these radical skeptics --Paris Marx, Ed Zitron, Emily Bender, Alex Hanna, Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, etc.-- will be viewed by posterity, assuming such a thing exists. When the first catastrophe(s) strike, will they just fade into obscurity, or catch some of the blame?

...on second thought, the most likely answer is that they'll just seamlessly slide into a different brand of "Anti-AI"-ism, neither acknowledging nor facing redicule for the fact that they'd have to completely abandon their core arguments to do so. If I die of a molotov thrown in 2029 from someone in this crowd after spending years begging them to look up, I'm gonna be so miffed.

Comment by driverdan 17 hours ago

Anyone angry about DC water use should be much more angry about golf courses. They use far more water and often overuse pesticides that can run off and leach into ground water.

Comment by profdevloper 18 hours ago

> Tapping into public drinking water is both easier and cheaper than paying the cost of treatment themselves. That means data centers end up competing with communities over their potable water supply.

My city has tiered pricing for water consumption based on gallons consumed per-household. Instead of the vague pearl clutching here, why can't municipalities provide preferred pricing to residential customers and have the data center consumers subsidize ongoing water treatment and infrastructure build out to support the extra capacity. Seems like a win-win.

Comment by floren 18 hours ago

Hmm, what if we donate to the politicians and do it the other way around instead?

Comment by barney54 18 hours ago

This is as weak article. For example, it says, "A hyperscale data center can suck up between 1 and 5 million gallons of water a day..." but does not cite a source. It also says, "Data centers end up competing with communities over their potable water supply." Not really. Data centers have to buy potable water, so unless the water providers are selling water too cheaply, what's the problem?

Comment by simonbw 16 hours ago

A large consumer coming in, driving up demand for water, and being willing to pay for it would be like the textbook example of competing over the water supply.

> "Unless the water providers are selling water too cheaply, what's the problem?"

Do you really not understand how coming in and making a bunch of people's water more expensive isn't popular with those people? You think the problem was that they had it too good with their cheap water and this is fixing that problem?

Comment by erelong 16 hours ago

Sometimes I wonder how many resources things like AI actually save rather than consume (I don't see that reported on as much)

Comment by drbojingle 18 hours ago

mmmhmm. Like cities in the desert and green lawns at the golf course, right?

Comment by westurner 18 hours ago

Then use thermofluid instead of water, which is corrosive.

Then go to carbon-based computing to waste less heat.

Comment by lenerdenator 18 hours ago

I think that tech companies are often insanely greedy when it comes to building these data centers. They're asking for tax breaks they don't need and putting strain on local electrical grids that they expect other people to pay for, all while bringing little in the way of permanent employment increases to the areas where they're built. It's wrong.

That being said, water isn't like electricity, land, or a given year's tax revenues. It exists in a cycle and can be reused. It can be piped in from a potable water source, and you could probably develop a cooling loop that would return it back to the civic supply in potable form.

Other than somebody not wanting to because "b-b-b-b-but what about the shareholders!?", why not build that loop, put its components into mass production, and let economies of scale start cutting the cost while having less impact upon local water districts?

Comment by barney54 18 hours ago

Why do you assume there is any real impact on local water districts? The evidence isn't strong there is much of an impact.

Comment by lenerdenator 18 hours ago

> Data centers cannot just use any kind of water either; it has to be clean enough to ensure the equipment and pipes are not damaged. Tapping into public drinking water is both easier and cheaper than paying the cost of treatment themselves. That means data centers end up competing with communities over their potable water supply.

Makes sense.

Comment by profdevloper 18 hours ago

So provide tiered pricing for these larger consumers that would offset the additional pressure on existing infrastructure. If the infrastructure doesn't exist -- allow these datacenter companies to invest and build out the infrastructure that would also benefit other customers in that water district.

Comment by TFNA 18 hours ago

When industry is negotiating with local government to open a facility, often one of the stipulations is that the facility will pay no more than local residents for access to utilities (in fact, the industry may even demand a lower, privileged rate). If the local government did what you suggested, the industry would just go elsewhere. Modern industries are overall not very interested in paying more in order to build out infrastructure to benefit the community beyond their own site.

Comment by lenerdenator 1 hour ago

And therein lies the problem. We need to break the industry of this mindset.

Comment by shimman 17 hours ago

What is the issue here? Local populations don't want to use their communities to satiate the greed of a multi trillion dollar corporation.

They can afford to pay whatever the rates, they just want the public to give them more corporate welfare so they can get greedier while inflicting a surveillance state upon the masses.

Comment by TFNA 16 hours ago

The issue is that even if one community puts up resistance, the corporation will eventually find some other local government that plays ball. In the end, someone or another still gets screwed.

Comment by krylonmae 18 hours ago

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