Be very careful about considering this a "grassroots campaign" against "evil foreign megacorps".

This is lobbying effort directed at policy makers and the public.

As others have pointed out: There is an very simple solution to "solve" water waste/allocation: Just put a price on it.

BUT one big interest group, namely agriculture/farmers, absolutely don't want that, because they historically could pretty much use water for free (and/or underpaid massively)-- any rational discussion about water use/price/allocation is undesirable to them, because it is likely to make the situation worse for them comparatively.

This is also why the whole discussion centers round emotional arguments against allowing industrial water use at all, instead of arguing that small/local farmers should get a better price on it.

> As the sector grows, consumption is expected to reach 90 million cubic meters by 2030, according to the water sector lobby Water Europe.

People who are trying to organize opposition to particular uses for water have a habit of citing the raw numbers without putting them in context, which works because there's so much water that the numbers are eye-wateringly large.

It's hard to find concrete stats on total water usage (as opposed to percentage changes), but one report I found that helps to put this number in context is this [0]:

> In addition, it takes 17,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of chocolate. According to statistics from 2019, Europe produced 3.7 million tonnes of chocolate, which equates to an eyewatering 63,625,200,000 litres of water.

Since a liter is 1/1000 of a cubic meter, we're looking at 63 million cubic meters for European chocolate alone, which places chocolate in the same ballpark as Europe's data centers.

Obviously data centers can and should work to conserve water (no misting in dry regions would help), but on the surface ~40% more water for data centers than for chocolate doesn't seem like that bad of a balance.

[0] https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/07/09/our-water-footprin...

Can someone help me understand how cooling data centers "uses" water? The water presumably isn't destroyed it's just put back hotter than before right? I don't imagine it comes out as steam like a nuclear plant but I suppose it could.

Articles basically pander to the anti-AI crowd now -- knowing this group will run and share stories like this on all the socials -- and it just isn't useful.

Firstly, they're talking about data centres, not "AI". AI is just the boogeyman now and 100% of usage suddenly is imagined to be ChatGPT exchanges. In reality it is mostly servicing sites like this, ad networks, backing up your iCloud photos, running your bank, etc.

Secondly, price and regulate a resource appropriately and this wouldn't happen. The only data centres that run evaporative cooling do so because it's the least expensive option, and because it's allowed. In every normal place they run a closed circuit and the water usage is basically a rounding error.

Further, articles like this never give a context. 94 million m2 (the 2030 forecast for every data centres across Europe combined, not just "AI") sounds super large. Unfathomably large. Paris uses double this. Of course Paris is a massive city, but then think of every other large city across Europe, every farm, etc. It ends up being a small slice, for something that is very important in people's lives.

Per the article, all current European data centers used 62 million cubic meters of water for 2024. That is 3.4% of only Spain's existing desalination capacity (≈1.8 billion m³/yr).

Seems like this is solvable:

1. Keep rolling out the closed-loop cooling improvements now appearing in new DC designs.

2. Add more desal capacity where it’s cheap (sunny coastlines + renewables) to cover the residual demand.

Sources: - https://aedyr.com/plantas-desaladoras-agua-salobre-espana/

The charade of AI is that companies are running to replace people with fake intelligence, so in the future you'll have low quality services run by machines that have zero empathy and all the profit will be transferred to a monopoly.

I hope this cheap populism doesn't win out. As someone who actually lives in Spain I want there to be good jobs for my children in the future.

Without tech companies and data centres we will just be a theme park for tourists with the poorly paid, precarious hospitality jobs that go along with that.

Also happening in Mexico

https://www.context.news/ai/thirsty-data-centres-spring-up-i...

"In 2024, Europe’s data center industry consumed about 62 million cubic meters of water, which is equivalent to about 24,000 Olympic swimming pools."

In other words, about two cubic meters per second, a small shallow stream.

Change coolants and coolant processes. Improve our tech. Energy did upgrade water use - tech can too.

> the company [microsoft] plans to be water positive by 2030 which means that they “put more water into the local basins where we operate than we withdraw”

> AWS has the same target, while Google has pledged to “replenish 120 percent of the freshwater volume we consume, on average, across our offices and data centers by 2030.”

How is that supposed to work?

The cynic in me can’t help thinking of an high-energy or production-externalities-imported system, but I’d be glad to ear about a sustainable local water creation.

These AI water articles are all terrible. Data centers could use no water but more power. The evaporative cooling is to save energy. In fact it would still save energy to desalinate water and use that for evaporative cooling. But none of that really matters since data centers don't use much water in comparison to farms and other industries.

I wonder if there might be an opportunity here to use evaporative cooling to boil off water from unpotable sources like seawater as a way to clean and desalinate it instead of using up our cleaner water supplies.

Who owns this publication and who paid these two authors to write it? What's their angle?

If only there were some method for allocating scarce resources (such as water), by which everyone could indicate their perception of the relative value and some sort of equilibrium could be found.

I feel like this water-AI datacenter idea is the worst kind of whataboutism luddite thinking.

To begin with:

- it's almost certain that there is an over capacity of compute being built, and some kind of bubble.

- money is being wasted being thrown after non-viable ideas

*but*

This is a technology that will fundamentally change the way humans think and do things. There will be plenty of amazing new discoveries that will benefit all of humanity that will come out of all of this. -probably the most purely virtuous will be bio-medical related (alphafold etc.)

Yes, the capitalistic waste of resources is a shame, but any comment saying that the money should/can be used in a more cooperative/communal way are completely disconnected from reality.

The relatively high-waste wheel of capital has been spun up and because moore's law seems to generally apply- if not to model training and inference itself, at least to the underlying hardware, we're going to get efficient systems eventually.

I'm on the left and the environmental AI angle is one of the most regressive and short sighted takes from these people. I put it in the same bucket as anti-immigration left-green policies. Our new political world order is putting greens on the side of conservative, regressive authoritarianism and I don't like it.

From that viewpoint it makes sense why young (optimistic, idealistic) people would want to vote republican.

News article likely edited and proofed with AI

Farms or Tech? What is better?

Its obvious from an economic standpoint, so I looked up from a security standpoint what crops Spain produces and it seems to be non-essentials. So its purely for export purposes.

Tech will win if all is rational, but people have a soft heart for the status quo. Those poor farmers, what a sad story. I imagine they can probably rally the population against their own interests with the correct moral coating and maybe create a faux crisis of raising the prices of food by hoarding for a few months.