Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap.

People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.

So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.

> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’

> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.

So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?

[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-dat...

[2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-cente...

Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.

You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.

There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s

Are these things usually convincing? The general pattern is that people take a position on something and then find one paper with a DOI identifier that backs the position. The Elephant and The Rider and so on. Trying to provide someone with evidence of the falsehood of their claims rarely makes them reconsider and often makes them dig their heels in while they search for a new paper with a DOI identifier.

We're in an unprecedented time in the information age when people can rapidly achieve basic competency at many things using Wikipedia, Google, and LLMs critically. If information availability and search were the constraint, one would expect us to reach greater alignment with facts.

The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality. In practice, I think the social psychologists are right. For the most part, we form the model of reality and then we seek information that supports it. So if you increase the total amount of information what you do is increase the ability for someone to select out that which supports their model.

That's not to say I don't appreciate these things. It's just that I don't think facts move public opinion very much.

The interesting thing that more information and better search provides is that it accelerates the divide between truth-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily falsifying information) and confirmation-seekers (who will attempt to find primarily supporting information). In general, one can imagine that the former will be more successful at modeling the world ex humanity at least. But if others believe something is true, often a direct approach at their facts is not the best approach to get the outcome.

I actually don’t get how this can be a real thing that people are worried about. Is there some astroturfing behind this? Maybe an attempt to make environmentalists and AI skeptics look stupid?

The bigger concern though, is the power requirements. Which are set to double or triple the energy use of the entire Province (analogous to a State in the US).

https://ucalgary.ca/sustainability/mobilizing-alberta/climat...

e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.

So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.

There is ample evidence around the world of data centers causing extreme water crises [1].

Not a water expert but I find the focus on evaporation very confusing. Draining ground water and aquifers causes environmental degradation in itself and waste water from data centers can’t just be fed back into the water cycle?

1) https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-08-17/ais-backyar...

The result is that now I think water usage should be taken into account when siting data centers. Great Lakes and eastern seaboard fine, maybe not as much in California or Arizona.

> my breathing in making the blog post above might well have evaporated more water than occurred (incrementally) from all four AI estimates.

Clearly his continued breathing is not as much of an "economically effective use of water" as AI. If clean water ever becomes a scarce resource in California, thankfully he's already done the ChatGPT queries needed to justify cutting back on 68-year-old Emeritus Distinguished Professors.

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

Discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45946966

[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-mem...

Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.

What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.

  > 6. Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below.

The prompter should have redone this image a couple of times until they had all three actually draining the lake.

U.S. power generation is the largest industrial user of water, withdrawing approximately 47.7 trillion gallons in 2021, mostly for cooling thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, natural gas).

1. Tallying the total water consumption impact, embodied water (construction), operational water (cooling), indirect water (electricity generation), supply chain water, etc.

2. Mapping current water intensity onto AI growth forecasts through 2030+

And if you look at those things in combination, there are reasons to be alarmed.

Who are these people who think AI will end civilization? Ya'll know it's just autocomplete and deepfakes, right? Maybe they need to read a book about the industrial revolution? It changed the world entirely, but it didn't end it.

Gotta love statistics.

You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:

> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-...

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjamesmcgrath_i-ran-8-int...

Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...

The scale of electricity use in data centers is much more likely to cause disruption and the shifting of costs onto residential customers to pay for a new infrastructure and generating capacity.

And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.

“His 68-year-old hardware with 50,000-year-old architecture is enjoying and struggling with the promise, threats, and turbulence of the AI revolution.”

AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.

Both sides have dishonest reporting

Very insightful bullet points, ordered lists and grok tables! Articles like this are certainly a net benefit to society

Cities are…people. Literally the most important use of water.

So far, AI seems to just put people out of work and enrich a small group of oligarchs who own the technology.

If tech companies want people to change their view away from my above statements above maybe they should spend less time moving to the far right and being hostile to regular people.

We already see that the public perceptions of AI is collapsing: https://www.highereddive.com/news/gen-z-ai-gallup-poll-negat...

Peter Thiel is out there building a military AI surveillance state and basically all the tech billionaires are turning MAGA and anti-democracy.

I don’t really care how much water AI uses, I’m not going to sit back and make excuses for billionaire assholes and their revenue toys. I don’t benefit from AI being embraced by society outside of stuff like cancer research (which was happening before LLMs took over the mainstream).

In reality, the most likely outcome is that I’ll be harmed by AI. I will be replaced by software and the billionaires who replaced me won’t exactly create a utopia, will they?

>Using the broader initial AI water use estimate of 32,000 acre-ft/year to 290,000 acre-ft/year

Note : 1 acre-foot is approximately equal to 325,851 gallons.

AI : That estimate converts to approximately 10.4 billion to 94.5 billion gallons per year.

Ya 10 billion gallons of water (low estimate) is totally nothing. Thx for this informative blog post.

28.6 million gallons per day.

If we're trying to deny the usage "tier," I'd argue we're being intentionally obtuse at worst and foolish at best.

Sidebar, I'm very curious to see where AI goes. Definitely not on the hype train. More curious than anything. This article was a breath of fresh air.

But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters.

Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?