Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?
Edit: Links provided in the comments…
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=1264
- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_cooling_towers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
Notable comments:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/23672269
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25288634
- https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25294655
Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.
To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.
Corn ethanol being stupid doesn’t make AI less stupid.
There’s plenty of stupidity out there. That logic would make everything useless.
By that logic, no one outside the US would care about voting, since they already reached peak stupidity, so voting for a better president in Argentina will not get rid of trump.
It is useful if you’re trying to figure out what to focus on. In this case, the concern is wasteful water usage. If you point to a larger area of wasteful water consumption, it would make more sense to target that first.
Except we are already focusing on AI data centers. By bringing up corn you’re just unfocusing. Which is the opposite of what you want.
Yes, both are bad, and we should get rid of both. But both things can be done at the same time. You don’t need to steal the focus from another issue to try to redirect it.
Instead of “why are we caring about data centers? Corn is worse!”. Try “while we are fighting data centers, we should also look at corn, they’re bad too”.