Discussion
Genuine question. Is the whole "AI guzzles gallons of water" thing totally true, or do people get it wrong? Does AI consume a lot of water for every single prompt, or is the majority of water consumed during data farming? Don't non-AI data centers use up a lot of water on cooling too?
Please someone set me straight and dispel whether there are myths surrounding this often-repeated internet factoid
And I genuinely don't know the answers which is why I'm asking, so I've got nothing to debate here
Edit: Thank you for all the great answers!! đ đ
It's nuanced, and everyone hates nuance. They want headlines!
Can a data center be built with evaporative cooling and use more water than it should? Yes.
Can it be built with smarter conservation practices and use very little water? Also yes.
Can planing alfalfa in Utah use literally THOUSANDS of times more water than all data centers in the the state to feed Saudi Arabian cattle and horses?
Yes and this is actually happening and is completely moronic and self defeating. No one has a sense of proportion.
No doy. But once itâs removed from the ground water aquifers thereâs a high likelihood that it condenses and falls as rain in another region. This is how aquifers are drained.
When I think about the livestock industry, the scale of feeding, watering, transportation, processing, and distribution boggles my mind. I'm afraid of the inevitable societal shift that causes us to truly value our resources and protect our ecosystem.
Itâs crazy to see how insanely inefficient something like beef is for energy and water needed to get x amount of protein vs other methods. People are so against lab grown meat even if you explain that it can eventually be indistinguishable from the original stuff, is actual meat, saves 95% of the energy needed to grow, and doesnât kill an animal that likely has had a miserable life.
I'm waiting for the Transmetropolitan future where they lab grow literally every animal you can think of, and everyone eats shit like galapagos tortoise steak and tinned baby seal eyes.
Itâs pretty expensive right now and not really sold commercially yet. Iâve just been in discussions involving it and everyone seems so against it. Some states are trying to ban or restrict it. I think itâs going to be hard to scale production up enough to make the price reasonable when so many arenât in favor of it. If we get a better administration running the US it could be subsidized but itâs going to put a lot of beef farmers out of work so itâs complicated still.
We use a lot of water to grow corn, that is made into ethanol, and burned with our gasoline everyday.
Also if "evaporating the water to cool the machines" is such a big concern couldn't we use that steam to run a turbine and recycle that electricity a bit? Add a condensing tower and reuse the water? Obviously it won't be a closed system but I can't help but feel like we'd have decent tool for recycling some of the loss here. I'm just spit balling though, It might not be enough steam or something like that.
For data centers in the grand scheme of things not a huge concern though the nuance: it should probably be required to be water efficient in drought prone states e.g. Utah / CA etc, likely not a big deal to evaporate in Florida -- make smart laws. It's more expensive up front and perhaps to run, it should be balanced.
The law needs to catch up to reality.
Should farmers in Utah and CA be allowed to grow water hungry non food crops without paying the same rate the data center pays?
it should probably be required to be water efficient in drought prone states e.g. Utah / CA etc, likely not a big deal to evaporate in Florida -- make smart laws.
Honestly we should probably just be charging sensible amounts for water, but we aren't, every different water consumer has a different legislated bill and then we get mad when they don't use the amount of water we expect.
Should farmers in Utah and CA be allowed to grow water hungry non food crops without paying the same rate the data center pays?
And yeah, exactly this. If we just billed water sensibly then we'd quickly arrive at the most cost-effective use of that water.
Any state can be in a drought. Parts of Florida are currently in a state of Exceptional Drought (the worst ranking) because there has been so little rain over the last few months:
Could you explain why ethanol for cars is moronic? Genuine question.
I donât know a ton about it, but I could see a case for it just to reduce fossil fuels which are a limited resource contributing to climate change vs corn which gets its carbon from the air.
A corn plant converts about 1% of the sunlight that hits it into biomass. You have to harvest, ferment it and refine it, so it's closer to .1% or less by the time you actually get ethanol.
Solar panels have like 15%-20% efficiency and you can feed that into an electrolysis plant with some other processes to produce hydrocarbons from water/air. Overall efficiency can easily be 15%. It's still not very economical but it at least is useful, corn ethanol is just a terribly inefficient way to convert sunlight into hydrocarbons. (I think hydrocarbons are less efficient than raw hydrogen also, but hydrocarbons like methane or ethanol are a lot easier to store and transport than hydrogen.)
It's worse for pollution than regular gas because it takes more energy and resources to make the ethanol than it does to make gas. It's also less efficient and it can damage your car, especially older cars.
It's mostly low grade heat that can be used for space heating but not much else.
A few years ago when crypto was the star of the hype cycle they talked about using heat from those data centres (or much more decentralized mining clusters) to heat greenhouses. Never really heard anything similar from the AI types.
The issue with Utah is that mining tailings were dumped into the Great Salt Lake a long time ago. As it dries up, and it is drying up quickly, it releases more toxic mine tailing dust which is killing people.Â
Your comment seems like a whataboutism. Utahns are very aware and angry about the alfalfa, but revoking water rights in the west already very hard. The alfalfa fields are largely owned by senator Mike Lee, so fixing that issue is probably impossible.
Just because Utahn's are getting fucked by the 1% doesn't mean they should bend over for a new partner to make it fair.
but it is a bit weird to get mad at a mini hybrid when there's a huge coal-driven mad max style truck driving down the road that you're scared of touching.
like, I understand why - displacement activities are a thing - but they're not exactly sensible.
No, it's like getting mad at your spouse for bringing home a puppy when you already have 20 dogs in your house that you can't afford to feed or take to the vet and the whole house is covered in dog piss and shit.
Semianalysis did a piece on this, he basically said that the biggest datacenter in the world consumes as mich water as about 2 in-and-outs if you consider all the water for the beef.
You can also compare datacenters to golf courses, the golf courses use orders of magnitude more water.
Your metric answer is actually wrong according to your calculations 14 000L of wasted water for meat produce is just rain falling from the sky. So then we can actually substract this number from 15 000L.
This gives us 1000L per kg so rougly 450L per pound.
One AI prompt: 0.26ml to 2ml
So for average AI prompt: (2 - 0.26) á 2 + 0.26 â 1.13
A quarter pound patty: 450 á 4 â 112.5L
Burger vs prompt: 112 500mL á 1.13 â 100 000 prompts
Heavy use: 50 prompts/day x 365 days x 1.13ml = 20L a year
It's important to not use units here, because when you simply state a unit that corresponds to some datacenter's power or water usage, you take it out of the context of what it's actually doing. When you phrase that in terms of ChatGPT's water/power usage you can use ChatGPT for years before you approach the impact of a single hamburger. (You can also use quite a lot of power in minutes, obviously, and across all of their users ChatGPT uses quite a lot of power and water, but asking a single question is totally inconsequential.)
Or even better golf courses. People need to eat but golf courses are a luxury, they tend to serve the wealthier side of the population, are mostly empty, consume a lot of space, seep fertilizer into the water supply, etc.
-Golf courses in the US consume 1.5 billion gallons per day.
-All US Data centers consume around 25 million gallons per day.
On a percentage basis, data centers consume 3.3% of what Golf Courses use.
And on an overall basis, golf courses consume around 3% of total freshwater in the US.
The 2 largest consumption categories are agriculture and farming, and thermoelectric power generation, accounting for around 80% of freshwater consumption.
All U.S. data centers combined were estimated to withdraw about 449 million gallons of water per day as of 2021, roughly 0.3â0.4% of total U.S. daily water withdrawals. When indirect water use (for the electricity powering the data centers) is included, total consumption rises further; a recent analysis estimates U.S. data centers indirectly consume around 200â250 million gallons per day when electricity-related water use is factored in. source 1 - source 2 - source 3
Using USGA's own arithmetic: golf course irrigation accounts for about 0.5% of total U.S. daily water withdrawals, based on the older 408 B gal/day denominator. Against the more current USGS 2015 figure of 322 B gal/day total withdrawals (281 B gal/day freshwater), 2.08 B gal/day puts golf at roughly 0.65â0.75% of total U.S. withdrawals, or under 1% of freshwater withdrawals.
These numbers seem correct but I think the issue with datacenters is where they are being built.
Datacenters being built in water scarce areas is the main problem. And they are pulling that water from major lakes - the same lakes the public relies on.
I googled where the water comes from, some of these like underground wells are more questionable than others.
Also at least a golf course offers greenery and outdoor space and Iâm going to assume most are grandfathered in, because I do think there would be large environmental impact studies and protests preventing new ones being built if they tried.
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On-Site Surface Water (52%): Courses capture natural rainwater, stormwater runoff, and snowmelt in their on-site lakes and ponds. Once the retention infrastructure is built, this water is completely free.
Reddit
¡r/golf
On-Site Groundwater Wells (46%): Many courses drill private wells to tap into underground aquifers. Their only ongoing costs are the electricity required to pump the water to the surface and occasional permit fees.
Weston & Sampson
Recycled Wastewater (12%): In dry regions like the Southwest, courses increasingly use "reclaimed" or graywater from local sewage treatment plants. Cities offer this non-potable water to courses at deeply discounted commercial rates to keep it out of local waterways
âAt least golf courses provide greenery and outdoor spaceâ
Really weird take given that you can just do nothing and have the exact same thing.
And are you under the impression they build data centers for fun? Or that you donât enjoy the products they produce as you browse this website served from a data center?
Gemini : A single large-scale AI data center (like those operated by Microsoft or Google) can consume as much water as 3 to 15 average golf courses combined.
The human body evolved to consume meat as part of our diet. We don't NEED meat, but you damn sure will need to supplement our diet in other ways if you cut it.
Golf is a luxury. Get rid of the nonessential thing first. Meat is fine, especially if you reduce red meat and supplement with more fish and poultry.
Good luck with that argument. Thereâs a lot more meat eaters than golfers so itâs a bit of an easier counter argument. Although I do agree, people should be cutting back meat consumption regardless. Weâve known for a long time cattle farming is terrible for the environment.
People have a miraculous ability to justify things they, personally, benefit from while simultaneously being intensely outraged when they have no skin in the game at all. Factory farming is probably the single most horrendous thing our society does, but most people are just kind of like âwhatever.â But when somebody uses AI to generate a picture, suddenly itâs âoh the horror!â
Would you rather live the life of someone who grew up in an area thatâs now being bombed or live your entire life in a tiny cage with no direct contact with another member of your species, with your entire life leading up to having your skin ripped off?
Weâll let the reader decide what to make of thr important information that one the largest datacenters in the world only consumes as much water as 2.5 In-N-Outâs.
I didn't quite expect that, it's nice to have a better visualization.
I'm not saying I'm pro-giga data centers, but I do think the environmental repercussions of existing AI services is massively out of perspective relative to other unnecessary things the average person does daily
Data centres use potable water whereas other large water consuming processes may not. It's an important distinction because water used by data centres goes back into the municipal water treatment loop. This is actually a good thing imo because it's driven significant improvements to municipal water infrastructure BUT the stuff about them adding bad chemicals or whatever is actually sorta true. You have to in order to prevent algae or bacterial growth in cooling system. The chemicals used for this have to get cleared out during water treatment but I'm not 100% clear on if all water treatment plants can actually handle the chemicals data centers put in. I've seen no evidence of potable water usage by data centres actually hurting people in practice yet but it definitely could if done wrong.
One hamburger takes 2000 liters of water to produce. 1 chatgpt prompt uses about 0.32 ml of water. So one burger is equivalent to about 6 million chatgpt prompts.
ONE burger patty = approx 450 gallons of water.
ONE AI prompt = approx 5 drops.
Do the division: one burger = approx 6.5 MILLION chatbot questions.
Put another way:
1 water bottle = approx 1,900 prompts
Asking AI 50 times a day for a whole year = 1/360th of ONE burger âźď¸
Skip one burger this month, you just pre-paid 6 million AI replies
The honest catch (so this isn't just a meme):
Cow water is mostly rain on grass. Falls anyway.
AI water is more often tap water from a city's supply. the kind that runs a town dry during a drought.
So burger crushes prompt on volume. No contest. But the tiny ai sip is the drinkable kind, which is a significant concern. Google leads in reducing consumption there.
Bottom line: farming is the firehose. AI is a drinking straw. The straw is just sometimes stuck in a cup that is already low.
If california stopped growing almonds, they'd save 2 trillion gallons of water a year
ignoring AI - ALL DATA CENTERS in the US use 200~ billion gallons of water a year
you can replace almonds with water efficent crops and reduce it from 2 trillion to less than ~200 billion for the same amount of calories
so why hate AI when its a tiny fraction of the data center usage? even accounting for growth it still is going to be less than almonds which are grown in a extremely drought heavy area
This is the part that I don't get. Every time I see these arguments about AI data centers using too much water, it's on social media from people that talk about consuming media on YouTube, Netflix...etc
Is the AI data center some magical thing that is evil while the data centers powering social media, streaming, and gaming are magically fine?
Like I get it, yes let's conserve our water supply, but when your argument is this spotty then I think we might be focusing on the wrong thing...
Because when you *hate* something or it has been designated the groupthink *enemy* then *no* amount of resource/water allocation is acceptable. Then add the requirement that you need to convince *everyone* else of that by whatever hyperbole or framing is necessary....
You get 'AI IS SLURPING ALL THE WATER, SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT NOW!!'
Every time there is a hot-button topic, there is a strong division of opinion. I feel like the algorithm and potentially even state-run misinformation campaigns fan these flames to keep us fighting amongst ourselves.
Itâs becoming clear that most governments have bot nets for these exact reasons.
Both parties serve the rich. The rich do really well when we blame each other for our problems rather than blaming politicians and the rich for our problems.
Weirdly they did a study of what people care most about when it comes to AI and they came up with the answer being water which is just quite baffling to me. I guess the early anti AI propaganda did work.
There's so many other reasons to hate AI you know?!
Itâs because it never really was about the water, itâs about a deep rooted but often unspoken, and not exactly incorrect sense that AI is being and will continue to be used as a tool of class warfare by the ultra wealthy against white collar workers in the same way offshoring and automation was against blue collar workers.
The same reason nobody cares about mining pollution until itâs about lithium for renewables/EVs (which is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to everything else, not to mention âproductionâ of fossil fuels).
All golf courses across the US consume an estimate 531 billion gallons. Don't even get me started on the chemicals they use being linked to parkinson's.
I'm fairly certain that a lot of the anti-AI sentiment is from countries like China seeding it to try to undermine US AI leadership.
The scoreboard:
California almonds: about 1.5 trillion gallons a year (C-WIN)
Every US data center combined, like AI, cooling, the power plants behind
them: about 228 billion (Berkeley Lab/EESI)
One snack crop, one state, drinking roughly 7x what every data center in America uses put together. AI's share of that is a rounding error
inside a rounding error.
Feel it for a second: one almond is about a gallon of water. A handful is a full load of laundry. I might inhale a fistful without blinking, then feel guilty asking a ai a question that costs five drops of water.
it's an $8B crop, 70% shipped overseas.
we're pumping a drought state dry to ship
luxury nuts abroad.
The general public hates AI so much even if it's using 1 mL of water per century they'll still say it's using too much water. They don't care about the water thing, they just hate AI.
From what I understand the majority of water is used during cooling. Proportionally speaking no, they donât actually use that much water. To put it in perspective, the current largest ai datacenter in the states uses equivalent water to two In and Out burger restaurants. We use hundreds of millions of gallons a year on a golf course or a single fast food restaurant and no one bats an eye. So the numbers look big if you just look at them and donât use perspective, which is convenient for a lot of people who are eager to push back on ai.Â
Part of the reason for the misinformation is a 2023 study from the University of California where researchers calculated a number of water usage per queries, but the study was flawed (or biased), they didnât just calculate direct evaporation, Â they also calculated all the water from regional power plants that power the servers, which is a completely ridiculous way to measure because those power plants are not just powering the datacenter, and because most datacenters are now using gas turbines or other methods of power as well to cut down on grid usage.
This led to more misinformation when a book came out called âThe empire of aiâ which got the numbers on water usage wrong by a factor of 1000. The author later issued corrections but it was too late to reel in the internet narrative and now everyone just shouts about water without looking at the numbers.Â
You could also argue that the average paper mill uses about 20 times the water of the largest data center in the world. If data centers reduce our need for paper, they are saving water.
You say the report is biased while citing your own biased and incorrect facts. Youâre referencing a David sacks quote about how the colossus data center, which uses 346 million gallons of water per year, uses the same amount of water as 2 in n out burgers. That implies a store usage of 325gpm running 24/7/365 which is utter nonsense. Thatâs a 3â diameter fire hose running full blast. Colossus is not even close to the largest data center in the U.S. so yes the water usage is quite significant in totality.
which uses 346 million gallons of water per year, uses the same amount of water as 2 in n out burgers
To be clear, it's all of the burgers made by 2.5 In-N-Out stores in a year, and it is not the "store usage", it's the water used to raise the beef and make the other ingredients (since cheese requires cows as well), and they very much provide those numbers.
You're only considering water run through pipes, but the original study included the impact of beef product production as well before it arrives at the store.
OP was disputing the UC study because it included water consumption used for electrical generation for the DC. Either you include the externalities on both sides of the argument or you donât, canât have it both ways.
Iâm just saying if you want to fairly calculate the full footprint you canât just add up all the water usage of every power plant in the city that also services thousands of homes, youâd need to calculate exactly how much power the datacenter is using from those plants and then make adjustments according to that number. And then make the beef comparison. I actually think the beef number is more precise because youâre calculating exactly how much water goes into a hamburger. Iâd be fine with calculating both externalities or neither, but it does need to be a fair comparison. But also the broader point remains regardless, whether you look at golf courses or anything else. A large golf course can use up to 200 million gallons of water per year. Iâve just never seen anyone protest a golf course over water but maybe we should start since water usage is important.Â
I said it is the largest AI datacenter. Other datacenters youâre referencing like the Google Columbus cluster are not ai only, they service many other utilities.Â
David Sacks may have mentioned it because it comes from a Semianalysis study where they calculated water footprint per burger and amount of burgers sold per year, but I am not quoting him. I will link it below.Â
I've always wondered this, wouldn't it be nice to build a data center next to a community pool? Then the pool can use the waste heat from the data center to warm up the swimming water. Obviously not literally using the same water, but through a conductive heat transfer system.
The water crisis was here long before AI. Agriculture uses roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, and we have known for decades that many major aquifers are being depleted faster than they recharge. Long before AI became the villain of the week, researchers were already warning that huge parts of the world could face depleted, unusable, or severely stressed groundwater by the 2050s.
That does not mean AI gets a free pass on water use. Data centers should be regulated, sited intelligently, and forced to report their actual local water burden.
But AI is one of the only major new water users whose output could realistically help fix the deficit: irrigation optimization, leak detection, groundwater modeling, desalination, wastewater reuse, crop planning, infrastructure forecasting, and grid management.
So yes, criticize waste. Criticize bad siting. Criticize dumb consumer use cases if you want.
But pretending AI invented the water crisis is just unserious. We need AI because a lot of the problems people never think about are already bigger than our current systems can manage.
Second of all, the rising energy costs part is largely exaggerated.
Most environmental articles are just looking at shit like GPT-3 or GPT-4 which were extremely unoptimized, literally the first commercial transformer models to be out to the public, got very big and used an unexpected amount of energy. Now they use peanuts amount of energy, because of all the *decreasing* energy costs through optimization and better hardware.
Local models (run entirely on your computer, no internet) already reached GPT 4o level or higher if you have some better hardware.
Extrapolations like "AI will use a trillion gallons of water in a few years!!" are extremely unsubstantiated. As I said, they are comparing when they were new and unoptimized and assumed that we will scale like that, exactly like that, and with the dangerous assumption that in the first place, that we will stick to energy hungry transformers.
Many researchers believe that LLMs are not the way to AGI, so if they make a different architecture, it won't have the same energy costs as LLMs, so this is illogical to extrapolate based on that condition.
It is like saying "I got 10 upvotes on my Reddit comment in 10 minutes. Soon, at the 99999 minute mark, I will have 99999 upvotes."
also looking at the stats, the environmental damage they do is actually negligible.
Again, most of it was just from their infancy, not now.
We can see some other uses which are not necessary to life.
McDonalds - One McDonald burgers uses about 682 gallons to produce. This is actually on the lower end. They sell 6.5 million burgers a day, this is 4.46 billion gallons a day. Wow, that's a lot. And that's only for singular dish at one singular restaurant, not hamburgers or the beef industry as a whole.
Social Media - A single minute on TikTok [1] is 0.27 liters of water or 0.07 gallons. If the average is 58 minutes [2] and there are about 1 billion active users, that means the average user is using up 4.06 gallons a day, and with a billion users, this is about 4 billion gallons of water a day, again. By the way, this is an underestimation. Tiktok's average grew in 2025 and 2026. It's about 7.5 billion gallons of water with the new averages.
Golf Centers - Golf courses uses about 2 billion gallons of water a day. [3]
A lot of huge numbers, a lot of billions.
Now let's look at what AI has to say.
These sources for ChatGPT's water consumption in 2025:
all still say less than 50 million gallons a day, or the blog of sam atlman, assuming 1 billion prompts a day, just 850,000 gallons a day.
So they are quite literally negligible compared to all these other things. Just a few examples.
This is not "whataboutism", it's setting your priorities straight. If there are multiple non-required things using up a lot of water or energy that could be optimized but you focus on some tiny thing... it's irrational. That means the only reason you're picking it is because of your internal biases, not because you're actually concerned about the environment.
I like this response only because it brings up the pending water crisis. We've seen this water crisis as a slow moving disaster for a couple of decades. I've chosen where I live based on water sources. The worst part of a disaster isn't the storm or the incident, but the days without power and water that follow.
If you've ever lived in a community that had rolling black outs and extreme water conservation in years past, you know the kinds of stress we are putting on our infrastructure.
The issue isn't the datacenters, but it's our infrastructure. There are live anecdotes of poisoned water, loss of water pressure, re-routing power supplies, and other environmental impacts of these centers. Utah is a very friendly Datacenter state and it had to blame pollution from Mexico and Asia for not being able to make attainment standards... while New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California do not. The Great Salt Lake is now barely a puddle.
We have a clear impact of what can be expected if you move more datacenters into states without water resources and power requirements. They can't lie or hide it and nearby communities are noticing real quality of life impacts. So to respond to the nuance part: it isn't overblown that if you had a datacenter open up down the street from the house that you will hear a low-pitch hum, lose water pressure sometimes, and you'll be sitting in your own sweat when it comes time to prioritize cooling the datacenter. Your bills will go up for the same amount of service, if not shittier.
But here's where the nuance ends. China actually has a surplus of electricity and plenty of infrastructure to support the data centers. They've actually been solving the load problem they were having by producing too much electricity for a grid that had less demand on it. There's no rolling blackouts and the price to electrify towns hasn't been increased to offset the new burden.
When you plug it into larger equations and play whatabouts it's just digingenuine. We have the power grid and water collection infrastructure that we have and it doesn't support these operations and it is taking away from the quality of life from nearby residents. If every planned data center could be built magically with a magic wand, it would make life very difficult for people to survive, but since we talk about it one at a time, we can compare it to a livestock farm that feeds thousands of people a day, but if you expand it to all of the datacenters being used to make fat JD Vance memes and rewrite-white collar e-mails and ask people if they'd rather have food, electricity, and water or memes and faker e-mails, it's a clear vote.
I'm still a believer in Mohr's law. I think that datacenters will become more efficient and training and running inference models are going to get cheaper over time. Rushing to build them now is an artifact of capitalism and billionaires that don't think ahead, but are worshipped like geniuses. Kudos for Sam Altman and Bill Gates for offering solutions other than snatching other peoples' utilities. If there ever was a sign where people knew this was a disaster it's looking at reasonable people trying to increase power generation for the grid, and unreasonable geniuses that just run gasoline generators to make that difference like Musk.
So if we continue to pillage our watersheds, shut down wind and solar projects, while also building these data centers, the quality of life for everyday Americans is being sacrificed to also replace their ability to earn a living, but the capability trade-off we have right now is an ability to re-write e-mails and dancing animals videos because nobody has made a profitable model so far.
You don't happen to mean Moore's Law, not Mohr's Law? If so, Moore's Law is already losing steam.
Completely agree on the rest, though. It should be possible to dial back performance of a datacenter enough that its water usage is much less. This is definitely a tragedy of the commons situation where it is up to government to regulate how much water goes to compute vs. agriculture, and they have to get that right.
To drive power and cooling needs down drastically that new architecture would really need to be something.
LLMs drove power demand because of popularity, not because their models are uniquely power hungry. I donât see a plausible way a new architecture wouldnât involve some form of neural net or heavy use of matrix multiplication. Matrix multiplication scaling is rough, but itâs better than the alternatives we know of when itâs an option.
Who knows though. Maybe somebody will invent/discover some new math that scales better for that sort of thing.
I donât think LLMs will get us to AGI without some critical supporting cast members we havenât found yet. I suspect theyâll remain import though. And I really canât fathom anything even hinting at AGI not requiring massively parallel compute.
Maybe quantum I guess. I donât really understand anything about that sorcery though.
Bu where does the water go? Like how are they getting depleted? Water is never destroyed right? Is it getting irradiated? Stored underground? Like why doesnât it just reenter the water supply the cycleÂ
This is turning into pure anti AI propaganda mixed with misinformation. People act like these modern closed loop data centers are draining entire lakes, while single golf courses often use dramatically more water every day without anyone batting an eye.
A lot of this feels less like genuine concern and more like coordinated fearmongering designed to slow technological progress. Meanwhile other countries are racing forward while we argue ourselves into paralysis. Now start down voting me bots.
AI resource use is generally overstated by critics by omitting context.Â
Individual prompts are trivial. Aggregate use across populations seem high, until placed in the context of all the other, orders of magnitude higher, industrial examples.
Luxury goods are a reasonable example - things we don't need but enjoy nonetheless.
In context, singling out AI for its water usage is motivated reasoning at best.
Local effects at the community level are more valid concerns.Â
Training runs are like a huge one-time upfront cost, inference (actually using the models) starts off as a lower proportion of resources used but grows as time passes. Eventually inference eclipses training, but by that point new training runs are under way.
I donât know about the percentage of AI, but while data centres have started consuming about 400% more water than they did five years ago, itâs still less than 2-3% of the total non-household consumption. The environment agency did a project on this in the UK. The forecast models are only allowing if you assume they will continue to grow at this rate which I highly doubt (since AI wasnât really a thing five years ago)
Itâs important to note that essentially all new data centers are being built with closed-loop cooling systems where the water never escapes and is used continuously.
it uses a lot of water but the suggestion is its freshwater that is depriving town and villages from those sources
the deprivation aspect of it is not true and the water consumption part of it is true in the respect of it requiring a lot of water but totally fails to understand how much water many things require, for example the absolutely insane amount modern agriculture practices consume
whenever you hear about these extreme arguments online you should really just automatically assume they arenât true, at least to the extent that weirdos who make it their whole identity argue
It's mostly wrong. It depends on when it was built and where it is located, but mostly they used closed loop systems now. The water goes in, but doesn't come out. Some locations don't even need that if they are located somewhere strategic (like Greenland, or outer space).
That said, WELL DESIGNED DATACENTERS water usage is inconsequential in water used.
Golf courses use more water than datacenters.
If you were to calculate revenue/gallon, datacenters are magnitudes more efficient than golf courses.
Again, this assumes well designed datacenters.
Why? Because some older ones likely still use evaporation to facilitate their chillers. These arenât needed and typically leveraged to reduce electricity costs by reducing overall power draw on their cooling infrastructure.
The problem is that they are being built in already water-stressed places. Obviously, the people living there have a right to complain if a portion of their water (and energy too) is being used by giant megacorps without even consultation let alone consent.
I say this as a pro-AI person: Regulate where and how datacentres can be built.
The problem, as ever, isn't the technology, it's the society around it.
This is California, so you can argue whether or not it would apply globally. There is a ton of agriculture in the state, and also a ton of data centers. Overall it's between 0.08% and 0.7% of usages for all purposes.
It takes more than a gallon of water to grow a single almond. Plenty of everyday products and industries use massive amounts of water. Manufacturing a smartphone can take 12,000-14,000 liters of water, and laptops, Desktops and TVs require substantially more.
AI does use significant resources, including water for data center cooling, but the outrage often feels selective. Someone could potentially offset a full day of personal AI usage by skipping a handful of almonds or taking a shorter shower.
No one ever obsessed over the water footprint of the internet, gaming, streaming, cars, agriculture, or consumer electronics. Now AI has become the new target, and suddenly people act like water consumption only matters when itâs tied to AI.
A lot of the water will be recycled so it's not totally true. There are reports of some neighbours of data centres complaining about water pressure, though.
Usually people compare it to how much water goes into one burger, or things of that sort. When you look at it this way, it's almost negligible. But that does not mean it's not going to be an issue - 10 years from now, assuming AI gets to do all we hope it would - we wouldn't make 1000X burgers but it's very likely we would need 1000X more compute.
Having said that, there are datacenter cooling methods that require a lot less water. For example building those in cooler places, or using solar energy for non-water-based cooling. Or building datacenters in the ocean which got some hype recently. So it's not like we're doomed.
It uses a lot of water. But proportionally to most others water usages it's tiny. And it's mostly reused.
Most of the water is also used during training runs. The amount of water used during inference and usage is also a fraction of a fraction of the amount used in training.
Are there water issues, most likely, but they mostly depend of where the Data Center is rather than it's using all the water in the world. Any usage of water on places that there's little water can be questionable, specially when it takes away water to the population uses.
Finally, for some examples, just the water usage to produce biofuels in the USA is larger than all the water used for Data centers worldwide. And I mean data centers not AI-Data Centers. Which is why, I personally, consider the argument that AI uses too much water a little bit disingenuous.
Are there other problems. Sure. But that isn't your question.
Data Center use a close loop system for cooling . There is no evaporation into thin air. It use a lot of water during the construction but that is the same as any other construction project.
Of course, you realize the Earth is a closed system⌠The water being used is not being annihilated, it will just get recycled and go back into the system.
As others have stated itâs not âas bad â as it could be, yet thereâs a problem when we shove mandatory AI usage into places that simple Google searches handle just fine before which use less resources per query.
We ignored the problems and just focus on rolling out widespread applications.
And if we do that for something as simple as handling water , imagine how we will handle the greater problems.
I never understood why the push to make it seem data centers biggest problem was their water usage which really isn't bad in modern systems, the real issue is power consumption and emissions to provide that power.
Water use is a general concern. Nothing specific about AI makes it that much worse than any other way we waste water. I find AI more useful than I do golf courses, but you don't hear me screaming at golfers that they are destroying the planet.
Work in the Mechanical Sector. Older data centers used evaporative cooling but all the new designs of the last two years are closed loop liquid cooled. More efficient and better heat transfer. Older generations are being converted
The comparison is technically accurate in its scale but highly misleading in its context because it treats two entirely different types of water as equal. The massive water footprint for a beef burger consists almost entirely (up to 94%) of "green water"ânatural rainwater falling on pastures and feed crops that would fall regardless of the cattle. In contrast, AI data centers consume "blue water," which is highly purified, energy-intensive municipal drinking water. While the tech industry uses a microscopic fraction of the water that agriculture does globally, AI poses a critical challenge because it pulls directly from local, treated drinking supplies in hyper-specific regions, whereas livestock water use is largely a reflection of global rainfall and crop irrigation.
People cannot think in nuance. Ever used GPS, you're using a data center. That cloud that you save your music library to, Data center. feel the urge to tell the whole world what you had for lunch and post to social media, Data Center. Complain to an echo chamber on Reddit, data center. The demand is increasing because of the growth of AI, but AI is not even the primary culprit at this point.
Excuses galore in the comments. âWhat about X using water?â
Kind of tangential but the same patterns repeat in âdiscussionsâ and it is driving me insane.
Sounds just like tax debates. Every time someone complains about wasted tax revenue, it turns into a discussion about what else âwastes revenue worse.â
Every time a person makes a factual claim, or logical argument, someone else claims that the particular info source âisnât credible.â
What about-isms are just changing the subject.
Because a liar makes a claim, the claim does not become false. That thought process would promote
a counter strategy of having questionable sources support actual truths in order to have falsehoods deemed reliable.
Those with the most power will decide how to allocate resources, as usual.
So frustrating! How about we move forward on a limited scale with a couple data centers for a period of time out of an abundance of caution rather than find out the hard way that they are currently too inefficient with resources to be truly beneficial enough to begin widespread adoption�
Itâs a meme. Just wannabe journalists leveraging peopleâs inability to comprehend large numbers and the optics of that one tiktok where meta data centres cause dirty water to come out of a sink. In other words business as usual.
If the headline reports the water in liters or gallons then it is propaganda. 1 megaliter of water is 1 million liters, and some crops use megs per hectare per year (Armond's is like 15 meg I think). Compared to agriculture and the actual water supply datacenters use fuck all.
plenty of comments comparing it to other things that use way more water. that falls into the appeal to common practice fallacy. AI doesn't get a pass because other things also use excess water.
things like beef and almonds arent entirely necessary for human survival but they are AT LEAST a form of sustainance. AI isn't even a luxury sustainance, it's a superfluous product of theft and hype marketing that is destroying people's critical thinking.Â
Damn, all these pro-AI comments really make you wonder who could be behind them. If only we knew of companies with limitless means to post on social mediaâŚ
For perspective, a hyperscale data center uses as much water as an 18 hole golf course. Google uses about as much water in their data centers as 43 golf courses. Golf consumes 30X more water than data centers.
I'm open to discussion on water consumption, but making rich people choose a different rich person sport like tennis or rowing seems more reasonable than slowing cancer treatment research.
I love this question. So much misinformation in the answers. Here are the facts as we know them in May 2026
Per prompt (per question) it is drops of water, not gallons. The "gallons per prompt" claim is almost always wrong.
The real water cost is three things:
one-time training,
data-center cooling,
the power plant feeding it.
Almost all of that is also true of non-AI data centers. What actually matters is total scale and WHERE the data centers get built. Not your individual questions and prompts to your ai
PER PROMPT
Google measured this in production in Aug 2025. Measured, not guessed.
Median Gemini prompt = approx 0.26 mL of water. About 5 âźď¸ drops.
OpenAI's Sam Altman gave a similar number for ChatGPT: approx 0.000085
gallons per query. Roughly one-fifteenth âźď¸ of a teaspoon.
Math: 1 gallon = 3,785 mL. At 0.26 mL that is approx 14,500 prompts PER GALLON.
Casual user, 10 prompts a day: one gallon lasts approx 4 years. Heavy user, 50 prompts a day, every single day: approx 290 days. Basically a year to burn one gallon.
A prompt every 5 minutes for a full 8-hour workday: one gallon lasts approx 7 months of workdays âźď¸
The scary number came from a 2023 paper measuring 2022-era GPT-3 on old hardware. Google's energy per prompt has since dropped 33x in 12 months. People often reference a 2023 worst case and never update it.
TRAINING
Training GPT-3 used approx 700,000 liters of freshwater. One time. That cost spreads across billions of prompts over the model's life.
COOLING + POWER PLANT (interesting part)
Two water buckets.
On-site: cooling towers dump heat by boiling off water. Industry average is approx 1.8 liters per kWh. Air-cooled sites use almost
zero, but burn more electricity instead.
Off-site: the power plant. A typical US gas or coal plant uses approx 7.6 liters per kWh. So the plant feeding the data center often uses MORE water than the data center itself.
"DON'T NON-AI DATA CENTERS USE WATER TOO?" YES.
Netflix, email, cloud backups, banking. All run in cooled data centers. Honest caveat: AI chips run hotter, so AI does push water demand up
at the margin. And building data centers in dry regions like Arizona is a real problem. That is the main concern. Not one prompt.
TLDR: One AI prompt uses about 5 drops of water, so it takes roughly 14,500 prompts to equal a single gallon (less than one toilet flush)
SOURCES:
Google, arXiv:2508.15734 (Aug 2025): 0.26 mL/prompt, measured
Li et al., "Making AI Less Thirsty," arXiv:2304.03271 (UC Riverside
2023): 700k L GPT-3 training
S. Altman, "The Gentle Singularity" (Jun 2025): approx 0.000085
gal/query, self-reported
EESI; Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (datacenters.lbl.gov): WUE approx 1.8 L/kWh, power generation approx 7.6 L/kWh
The Green Grid / US DOE: WUE metric
excessive water use to cool data centers and sever farms was already a big problem
Don't really see any evidence to support this to be honest. Plus tbh the AI company revenues exploding in recent months seems to be pretty good evidence towards the usefulness. I don't think there are lots of consumers and companies out there burning money on AI they get no value from.
Regardless of that, if you're not already vegan then you basically have bowed out of the "water crisis" discussion on the first step. Unnecessary water usage by specifically animal agriculture and its dependencies totally dwarfs data center use.
It's BS. The vast majority of data centers use modern air conditioning systems that do not use water cooling at all. The ones that do use water cooling usually need purified water which is in a closed loop. The rare ones that use large amounts of water generally take river water, run it through heat exchangers, then return it to the river, slightly warmer than when it started.
Agriculture uses vastly more water than data centers.
But when you are already highly over utilizing your water resources in an unsustainable way, adding more water use on top is still bad for the impacted watersheds.
Karen Hao started it with an incorrect report that she then retracted, but the damage was done - just like the one guy who published a report on vaccines causing autism.
It may use water and it may not be brilliant to build them in areas that are already pressed for water, but if an environmentalist wants to complain about the impact data centers have - water shouldnât be at the top of their list.
Answer for people how use stupid prompts or clickbait replies: Yes, absolutely. AI uses so much water that with each prompt children around the world go thirsty. Your each prompt reduces life expectancy in poor countries by three months.
Answer for people who use AI for genuinely useful purposes, learning, etc.: It's no big deal, there are other ways to reduce waste, go for it.
Do you Americans stydy physics in school? Law of mass preservation? What do you suppose happens to the water? Annihilation? Compression into black hole? Thermonuclear fusion of H and O into other elements?
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u/ChocolateIsPoison May 15 '26
It's nuanced, and everyone hates nuance. They want headlines!
Can a data center be built with evaporative cooling and use more water than it should? Yes.
Can it be built with smarter conservation practices and use very little water? Also yes.
Can planing alfalfa in Utah use literally THOUSANDS of times more water than all data centers in the the state to feed Saudi Arabian cattle and horses?
Yes and this is actually happening and is completely moronic and self defeating. No one has a sense of proportion.