I think much of this may be a reaction to the hype promoted by tech CEOs and media outlets. People are seeing through their lies and exaggerations, and taking positions like "AI/LLMs have no values or uses", then using every argument they hear as a reason why it is bad in a broad sense. For example: Energy and water concerns. That's my best guess about the concern you're braced against.

The comment you're replying to is calling other people AI skeptics.

Your advice has some fine parts to it (and simonw's comment is innocuous in its use of the term), but if we're really going meta, you seem to be engaging in the tribal conflict you're decrying by lecturing an imaginary person rather than the actual context of what you're responding to.

That is why the meta commentary about identity politics made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.

Unfortunately it is not like human society in history had truth as the highest virtue.

Subcultures? Some are at least trying to (i.e. rationalists), though imperfectly and with side-effects.

Edit: See Roko's Basilisk as an example. wherein something like variation on Christian hell is independently reinvented for those not donating enough to bring about the coming superhuman AGI, who will therefore punish you- or the closest simulation it can spin up in VR if you're long gone- for all eternity. The infinite negative EV far outweighing any positive EV of doing more than subsist in poverty. Even managed to work in that it could be a reluctant, but otherwise benevolent super AI such that, while benevolent, it wanted to exist, and to maximize its chances it bound itself to a promise in the future to do these things as an incentive for people to get it to exist.

I mean, Archimedes stands out because he searched for the truth and documented it. I'm sure most people on the planet at that time would have burned you for being a witch, or whatever fabled creature was in vogue at the time.

Right, "It is difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I see this sort of irrationality around AI at my workplace, with the owners constantly droning on about "we must use AI everywhere." They are completely and irrationally paranoid that the business will fail or get outpaced by a competitor if we are not "using AI." Keep in mind this is a small 300 employee, non-tech company with no real local competitors.

Asking for clarification or what they mean by "use AI" they have no answers, just "other companies are going to use AI, and we need to use AI or we will fall behind."

There's no strategy or technical merit here, no pre-defined use case people have in mind. Purely driven by hype. We do in fact use AI. I do, the office workers use it daily, but the reality is it has had no outward/visible effect on profitability, so it doesn't show up on the P&L at the end of the quarter except as an expense, and so the hype and mandate continues. The only thing that matters is appearing to "use AI" until the magic box makes the line go up.

> This is existential. If we aren't early adopters of AI tools we will be left behind and will never catch up.

This company is dominant in the space they operate in. The magnitude of the delusion is profound. Ironically, this crap is actually distracting and affects quality, so it could affect competitiveness--just not how they hope.

Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.

Most municipalities literally do not have enough spare power to service this 1.4 trillion dollar capital rollout as planned on paper. Even if they did, the concurrent inflation of energy costs is about as political as a topic can get.

Economic uncertainty (firings, wage depression) brought on by the promises of AI is about as political as it gets. There's no 'pure world' of 'engineering only' concerns when the primary goals of many of these billionaires is leverage this hype, real and imagined, into reshaping the global economy in their preferred form.

The only people that get to be 'apolitical' are those that have already benefitted the most from the status quo. It's a privilege.

We'd all be better off if more people withheld judgement while actually engaging with the nuances of a political topic instead of pushing for their team. The capacity to do that may be a privilege but it's a privilege worth earning and celebrating.

The rise of populist polemic as the most effective means for driving public behavior is also downstream from 'neutral technical solutions' designed to 'maximize engagement (anger) to maximize profit'. This is not actually a morally neutral choice and we're all dealing with the consequence. Adding AI is fuel for the fire.

Would you rather starve or never lie about those that would starve you?

It might be more accurate to say "drop the partisanship" or "drop the in/out-group generalizations", etc.

I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.

It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.

It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place.

People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the tech" are, generously, either naive or shilling. Why would we only revisit these very important topics, which are the heart of how the tech would alter our society, after it's been fully embraced?

To be clear, there are a lot of people who routinely used airplanes who don't post-covid, but insisted that they had to. Yeah, I think it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting. Most don't fly at all. I don't know what mass-psychosis white collar industries were under to think that was necessary.

I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The fact that planes typically emit CO2 doesn't make their existence and utility some kind of mass hallucination.

This distinction may sound a bit silly, because I assume we all agree that planes literally work. But the point I'm making is as it applies to AI. Like many people, I know from experience that AI isn't vaporware and is extremely useful for many purposes. I'm sure many others haven't had the same experience for various reasons, and factually report their observations in good faith — but that's different from pushing a narrative which one wishes to be true, regardless of how valid the reasons for that wish may be.

You're arguing with an imaginary person. Read what I wrote. I didn't call AI vaporware, I said we shouldn't consider its integration into society purely on technical merits, ignoring the cost, which I think could be big if OpenAI's very public plans are made reality. You're making a strawman.

The mass hallucination is not that plane's are useful, it's that a plane is the only reasonable solution to human communication.

Honestly, you're just further illustrating the complete erosion of nuance that comes when you paint people with concerns about AI as frivolous.

I keep seeing arguments like this. They sound like a bit like a form of nihilsm. Do you really think we shouldn't worry about risks to the environment simply because we're all hypocrites on that front in one way or another? I get the frustration and have been guilty of using this type of argument myself in the past, but refusing to discuss a problem because the people raising the concern are imperfect human beings doesn't seem like a tenable position.

I'm not sure why all the replies under this comment are full of projections of extreme opinions I do not hold and never said I did.

If you want to have a conversation with someone who thinks like this you can probably find one in this very thread, so why do you respond to me?

There exists a class of "ai-skeptic" who proudly proclaim they have never and will never use AI. Examples are not hard to find, though I see them more on reddit/instagram/bluesky than I do on HN.

If that does not describe you then my comment is not about you.

Or worse, things like "Real science and real engineering doesn't rely on tools that behave randomly.".

Why? Would you say the same if the topic was about recreational drugs? Or, to bring it closer to home, if the topic was about social media?

I think you're being disingenuous by making the analogy to religious people refusing to read a certain book. A book is a foundational source of information. OTOH, one can be informed about GenAI without having used GenAI; you can study the math behind the model, the transformer architecture, etc---the foundational sources of information on this topic. If our goal is to "drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits" well I don't see how it can get more purely technical than that.

(Which they might even justify because they've read the transformer paper or whatever. That doesn't help inform you if these things actually have practical applications!)

Then there's us who are mildly disappointed on the agents and how they don't live their promise, and the tech CEOs destroying the economy and our savings. Still using the agents for things that work better, but being burned out for spending days of our time fixing the issues the they created to our code.

You have just trained your brain to be so obsessed with politics you can't but help to see it everywhere.

Zero obligation to satisfy HN audience; tiny proportion of the populace. But for giggles...

Technical merits: there are none. Look at Karpathy's GPT on Github. Just some boring old statistics. These technologies are built on top of mathematical principles in textbooks printed 70-80 years ago.

The sharding and distribution of work across numerous machines is also a well trodden technical field.

There is no net new discovery.

This is 100% a political ploy on the part of tech CEOs who take advantage of the innumerate/non-technical political class that holds power. That class is bought into the idea that massive leverage over resource markets is a win for them, and they won't be alive to pay the price of the environmental destruction.

It's not "energy and water" concerns, it's survival of the species concerns obfuscated by socio-political obligations to keep calm carry on and debate endlessly, as vain circumlocution is the hallmark of the elders whose education was modeled on people being VHS cassettes of spoken tradition, industrial and political roles.

IMO there is little technical merit to most software. Maps, communication. That's all that's really needed. ZIRP era insanity juiced the field and created a bunch of self-aggrandizing coder bros whose technical achievements are copy-paste old ideas into new syntax and semantics, to obfuscate their origins, to get funded, sell books, book speaking engagements. There is no removing any of this from politics as political machinations gave rise to the dumbest era of human engineering effort ever.

The only AI that has merit is robotics. Taking manual labor of people that are otherwise exploited by bougie first worlders in their office jobs. People who have, again with the help of politicians, externalized their biologies real needs on the bodies of poorer illiterates they don't have to see as the first-world successfully subjugated them and moved operations out of our own backyard.

Source: was in the room 30 years ago, providing feedback to leadership how to wind down local manufacturing and move it all over to China. Powerful political forces did not like the idea of Americans having the skills and knowledge to build computers. It ran afoul of their goals to subjugate and manipulate through financial engineering.

Americans have been intentionally screwed out of learning hands on skills with which they would have political leverage over the status quo.

There is no removing politics from this. The situation we are in now was 100% crafted by politics.

I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption.

If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe.

It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view.

I really recommend the book.

That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water.

The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something

The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels

This has almost zero to do with the data centers themselves and instead the politicians we vote in.

Simply put we need more 'clean' power generation any way you go about it. Economic growth and production is based on ones ability to produce power. We've been coasting on increasing efficiency for a long time, but we've been in need of larger sources of power and distribution for decades, data centers or not.

With that said DC's shouldn't be built in west texas where it's dry. East of the Mississippi gets enough rain that you build a reservoir and you'll have more than enough water to feed the DC for decades.

Counting water is genuinely just asinine double counting ridiculousness that makes down stream things look completely insane. Like making a pound of beef look like it consumes 10,000L of water.

In reality of course running your shower for 10 to 15 hours is no where near somehow equivalent to eating beef lasagna for dinner and we would actually have a crisis if people started applying any optimization pressure on these useless metrics.

No, not a container ship, or anything substantial like that, just one container (1).

Yet, it makes people lose their rational minds and start foaming at the mouth about Apple’s “wasteful practices”.

It doesn’t alter the conclusion that much: in the grand scheme of human industrial activity, this is nothing.

I.e.: if AirPods were made by an independent company, that firm would be in the top 50 of the largest corporations in the world!

For example, a comparable sized company would be Coca Cola, which goes through 300,000 tons of aluminium annually for their cans, not to mention oil used for plastic bottles!

[0] - "And what we found is is that up to 43% of data centers, and this is our largest data centers, are located in areas of high or extremely high water stress. And that's really shocking because data centers require huge amount of drinking water to be able to cool their servers."

[0]- Business Insider | Exposing The Dark Side of America's AI Data Center Explosion - https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?t=1201

A reduction in what can be used from the summer snowmelt is a problem, regardless of whether equivalent atoms are redeposited in the winter snowfall.

I do think the whole water issue as pointed out in the book is completely discredited with this call out.

The author Karen Hao acknowledges this:

https://x.com/_KarenHao/status/1990412118584144113

For decades we've been told we shouldn't develop urban centers because of how it development affects local communities, but really it just benefited another class of elites (anonymous foreign investors), and now housing prices are impoverishing younger generations and driving homelessness.

Obviously that's not a perfect comparison to AI, which isn't as necessary, but I think the anti-growth argument isn't a good one. Democracies need to keep growing or authoritarian states will take over who don't care so much about human rights. (Or, authoritarian governments will take over democracies.)

There needs to be a political movement that's both pro-growth and pro-humanity, that is capable of making hard or disruptive decisions that actually benefits the poor. Maybe that's a fantasy, but again, I think we should find ways to grow sustainably.

At some we need to end this AGI" rat race and focus on realizing practical benefits from the models we currently have.

As long as there’s a market, machines are going to continue toto displace labor. That’s not going to stop

Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries, of course, but to a first approximation they are accurate.

Are we? Is anybody? Criticism doesn't need to be directed towards one thing at a time.

Totally agreed that criticism should be directed where it's due. But what this thread is saying is that criticism of GenAI is misdirected. I haven't seen nearly as much consternation over e.g. the food industry as I'm seeing over AI -- an industry that increasingly looks like its utility exceeds its costs.

(If the last part sounds hypothetical, in past comments I've linked a number of reports, including government-affiliated sources, finding noticeable benefits from GenAI adoption.)

I didn't see the OP's point as whataboutism, but rather putting things into perspective. We are debating the water usage of a powerful new technology that a large fraction of the world is finding useful [1], which is a fraction of what other, much more frivolous (golf courses!) or even actively harmful (Nestle!) industries use.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794907 -- Recent thread with very rough numbers which could well be wrong, but the productivity impact is becoming detectable at a national level.

It’s a fundamentally flawed argument

If something looks like a "weird stance", consider trying harder to understand it. It's better for everyone else in the conversation.

Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.

> I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a different story: the farmer said that the local utility was set to hike rates for the third time in three years, with the most recent proposed hike being in the double digits.

The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it. There are plenty of credible reasons to criticize data enters, use those instead!

Water is used in modern datacenters for evaporative cooling, and the reason it's used is to save energy -- it's typically around 10% more energy efficient overall than normal air conditioning. These datacenters often have a PUE of under 1.1, meaning they're over 90% efficient at using power for compute, and evaporative cooling is one of the reasons they're able to achieve such high efficiency.

If governments wanted to, they could mandate that datacenters use air conditioning instead of evaporative cooling, and water usage would drop to near zero (just enough for the restrooms, watering the plants, etc). But nobody would ever seriously suggest doing this because it would be using more of a valuable resource (electricity / CO2 emissions) to save a small amount of a cheap and relatively plentiful resource (water).

Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

"...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..."

"I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption" - https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

"...So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption. If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated..."

> U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021).

Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture.

USGS 2015 report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has irrigation at 118 billion gallons per day - that's 43,070 billion gallons per year.

163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than half a percentage point.

It's very easy to present water numbers in a way that looks bad until you start comparing them thoughtfully.

I think comparing data center water usage to domestic water usage by people living in towns is actually quite misleading. UPDATE: I may be wrong about this, see following comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945

It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that water, but a significant fraction of that activity is effectively essential.

If you're going to minimize people's concern like this, at least compare it to discretionary uses we could ~live without.

The data's about 20 years old, but for example https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2... suggests we were using over 2b gallons a day to water golf courses.

We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions for themselves. I'm not sure why we should take a different approach when making decisions about compute.

If you look at the data for animals, that’s not really true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is that the vast majority of water used for animals is “green water” used for animal feed - that’s rainwater that isn’t captured but goes into the soil. Most of the plants used for animal feed don’t use irrigation agriculture so we’d be saving very little on water consumption if we cut out all animal products [2]. Our water consumption would even get a lot worse because we’d have to replace that protein with tons of irrigated farmland and we’d lose the productivity of essentially all the pastureland that is too marginal to grow anything on (50% of US farmland, 66% globally).

Animal husbandry has been such a successful strategy on a planetary scale because it’s an efficient use of marginal resources no matter how wealthy or industrialized you are. Replacing all those calories with plants that people want to actually eat is going to take more resources, not less, especially when you’re talking about turning pastureland into productive agricultural land.

[1] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

[2] a lot of feed is also distiller’s grains used for ethanol first before feeding them to animals, so we’d wouldn’t even cut out most of that

Since you like their work, the authors of your paper answered that question more generally here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 where they conclude "The water footprint of any animal product is larger than the water footprint of crop products with equivalent nutritional value".

You make some often debunked claims, like we'd have to plant more crops to feed humans directly if we stopped eating meat.

This shouldn't make intuitive sense to you since animals eat feed grown on good cropland (98% of the water footprint of animal ag) that we could eat directly, and we lose 95% of the calories when we route crops through animals.

That paper isn’t actually debunking anything that I’m saying. If the water foot print per calorie is 20x for beef but the feed is grown with 90% of its water from rainfall, that’s not a 20x bigger footprint in a way that practically matters because most of that water is unrecoverable anyway. The water that is recoverable just makes it through the watershed.

Meat is a way to convert land that cant grow things people can or want to eat into things that people will eat. That pastureland and marginal cropland growing animal feed can’t just be converted to grow more economically productive crops like fruit and vegetables without Herculean engineering effort and tons of water and fertilizer. Instead the farming would have to stress other fertile ecosystems like the Southwest which would make the water problems worse, even if their total “footprint” is smaller. The headline that beef uses 20x more water per calorie completely ignores where that water comes from and how useful it actually is to us.

I don’t doubt that we can switch to an all plant diet as a species but people vastly underestimate the ecological and societal cost to do so.

Add a datacenter tax of 3x to water sold to datacenters and use it to improve water infrastructure all around. Water is absolutely a non-issue medium term, and is only a short term issue because we've forgotten how to modestly grow infrastructure in response to rapid changes in demand.

If data center usage meant we didn't have enough water for agriculture I would shout that from the rooftops.

Exploring how it stacks up against an essential use probably won't persuade people who perceive it as wasteful.

If Americans cut their meat consumption by 10%, we would use a lot less water in agriculture and probably also live longer in general

It's a common reasoning error to bundle up many heterogeneous things into a single label ("agriculture!") and then assign value to the label itself.

They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to misleading conclusions on the impact.

The same person who mentioned potable water being an important distinction also cited a report on data center water consumption that did not make the distinction (where the 628M number came from).

> water evaporation from hydroelectric dam reservoirs in their water use calculations

The fact data centers are already having a major impact on the public water supply systems is known, by the decisions some local governments are forced to do, if you care to investigate...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage

"...in some regions where data centers are concentrated—and especially in regions already facing shortages—the strain on local water systems can be significant. Bloomberg News reports that about two-thirds of U.S. data centers built since 2022 are in high water-stress areas.

In Newton County, Georgia, some proposed data centers have reportedly requested more water per day than the entire county uses daily. Officials there now face tough choices: reject new projects, require alternative water-efficient cooling systems, invest in costly infrastructure upgrades, or risk imposing water rationing on residents...."

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...

Does it count water use for cooling only, or does it include use for the infrastructure that keeps it running (power generation, maintenance, staff use, etc.)

Is this water evaporated? Or moved from A to B and raised a few degrees.

Especially since so many anti-crypto people immediately pivoted to anti-AI. That sudden shift in priorities makes it hard to take them seriously.

Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide?

This is nothing but whataboutism.

People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the other bad things happening in the world at the same time.

If you take a strong argument and through in an extra weak point, that just makes the whole argument less persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people think).

You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave factories produce is terrible for the environment."

Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.

Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.

You can easily write a law that looks like this: There is now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for data-centers. It does not apply to residential use, agricultural use, or any other industrial use.

We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My home's power rate through the state owned utility is very different than if I consumed the exact same amount of power, but was an industrial site. I just checked and my water rate at home is also different than if I were running a datacenter. So in all actuality we already discriminate for power and water based on end use. at least where I live. Most places I have lived have different commercial and residential rates.

In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.

But the environment doesn't really care whether the water is being used by a datacenter or something else. My point is just that data centers are actually more efficient users of water compared to many less-controversial users.

And yet, if you believe the environmentalist argument in the first place, the price of beef should go up for the damages it causes. Hence why a lot of people think the people complaining about AI are wearing an environmentalist mask, rather than having an actual care about the environment.

Pigouvian taxes are fine, but should be applied across all sources of damage.

I can live without another datacenter - I get very little utility from "one more" - but I have to eat, generally every day..

Might as well get rid of all the lawns and football fields while we’re at it.

My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss.

And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading.

Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month.

Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections—driven largely by anticipated data center growth"

With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than it did yesterday.

Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual impact on the world, engaging with the facts and understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

It's not even an externality? They just pay market price for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.

Key quote:

> If any region has a lot of freshwater and little potable water, the best way to make potable water more available and cheaper is to introduce a new large buyer, which will give the local utility enough revenue to upgrade and expand their treatment facilities. Saying that my data is misleading because Al "only uses valuable potable water" actually gets the issue backwards: adding demand for more potable water in regions with lots of freshwater makes potable water cheaper and more abundant for everyone else per unit.

1. That just because a region doesn’t have enough potable water to support humans and data centers, it also doesn’t have enough potable water to support the humans alone.

2. That the temporary increase in water prices due to the new demand of the data centers will provide enough revenue to upgrade its facilities

3. Even given enough revenue to upgrade its facilities, that the utility will choose to upgrade its facilities and increase demand

4. That the downsides of a temporary increase in water prices while new facilities are built is acceptable and will not cause suffering

5. Even after new facilities are built, that the cost of those facilities will be low enough and the increase in supply large enough that water prices for humans will be lower than they were originally, even with a large and wealthy new buyer on the market.

It doesn’t feel like a very strong argument to me.

Like, if agriculture uses fresh water and data centers use potable water, the important question is how hard it is to convert fresh water into potable water?

The answer seems to be "not very" so the difference is kind of moot

There's a bunch in there but this bit caught my eye in particular:

> The US public water supply uses ~40 billion gallons per day, all of this is potable. Data centers used 50 million gallons per day onsite in 2023. So their potable water usage was 0.13% of the public water supply.

Years isn't actually a problem. How quickly do you think datacenters are built?

It's entirely feasible to build new water infrastructure and a datacenter in 2 years in many parts of the world.

If I was trying to build new infrastructure in Finland, I would add four years to the project between the planning and the construction stages. Two years for urban planning and public hearings, and another two years for the inevitable lawsuits. Other Western countries should have similar delays.

This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity.

What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years.

Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.

If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)

The contention with AI water use is that something like this is currently happening as local water supplies are being diverted for data-centers.

Excellent, that means we can save massive amounts of water by stopping almond production in the western US.

Example article from a decade ago: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ?

I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples.

Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have cloud AI compute. It's personal, but I'd be more sad that I'd never get to experience the taste of an almond and all the cuisine that comes with it.

You've misread it. It's not compared to AI datacenters, it's every type of datacenter, for all types of computing.

In the future scenario you've laid out it wouldn't be cloud AI compute. You wouldn't be able to use HN or send email or pay with a credit card or play video games or stream video.

AI has no utility.

Almonds make marzipan.

That is, the topic is not one where I have already picked a side that I'd like to win by any means necessary. It's one where I think there are legitimate tradeoffs, and I want the strongest arguments on both sides to be heard so we get the best possible policies in the end.

The article made a really interesting and coherent argument, for example. That's the kind of discourse around the topic I'd like to see.

AI is at least as useful as marzipan.

Of course surface water availability can also be a serious problem.

Tried buying a GPU lately?

Data centers in the USA use less than a fraction of a percent of the water that's used for agriculture.

I'll start worrying about competition with water for food production when that value goes up by a multiple of about 1000.

The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.

For every vegan/vegetarian in the US there are probably 25 people that feed beef products to their pets on a daily basis.

But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.

Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.

I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.

The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.

Also, while I'm vegetarian going on vegan, welfare arguments are obviously not relevant in response to an assertation that Americans aren't going to give up meat, because if animal welfare was relevant then Americans would give up meat.

I don't see any signs that the US is going to give up on AI and data centers, either. (The coming AI winter notwithstanding)

For what it's worth, I've cut back quite a bit on my beef and pork consumption, and now mostly eat chicken. The environmental and ethical arguments finally got to me.

Also a lot less meat in general. A huge part of our agriculture is feed to feed our food. We need some meat, but the current amount is excessive

Of course water used up will eventually evaporate, and produce rainfall in the water cycle, but unfortunately at many places "fossil" water is used up, or more water used in an area then the watershed can sustainably support.

This is a constant source of miscommunication about water usage, and that of agriculture also. It is very different to talk about the water needs to raise a cow in eg. Colorado and in Scotish highlands, but this is usually removed from the picture.

The same context should be considered for datacenters.

I think it's bad though to be against growth, for reasons I've described in another comment.

I also think the energy usage stuff is kind of nonsense. If energy usage is a major part of your operating expenses, you're probably going to locate your data center where energy is cheap, and cheap energy is always renewable. I'm sure you can find data centers that run off coal plants or other thermal power, but thermal power costs in the neighborhood of 100¢ per peak watt, while solar cells cost 12¢ per peak watt, so thermal power won't be competitive for very long.

It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first few plants go live and mass production begins within the next decade. Knock on wood.

But solar energy is.

Helion's strategy is to directly convert the hot plasma's expansion into electrical energy by, basically, pushing against a powerful magnetic field. This is potentially higher efficiency than steam engines (because it's working at a higher temperature) and potentially higher power density and reliability. So it could at least theoretically get to be cheaper than steam engines. But I think it's more likely to be far more expensive for the next several decades.

If Helion delivers Orion on anywhere close to the target timeline, it seems like they'd be primed to kick off mass production and start shipping units all over the country with minimal regulatory hurdles. With sufficiently high productive capacity, it would effectively make all other forms of power generation obsolete at utility scale. Solar would still great for small/decentralized use cases, but there wouldn't be as much reason for a power company to build new solar plants if they had the option to fill the same real estate with a bunch of Helion machines.

That being said, I'm not not optimistic about steam-based fusion power. It would be less revolutionary, but from what I understand would still be a huge advancement. My read is that it would effectively obsolete fission power and plausibly fossil fuel power as well, if not also grid-scale renewables. It would be like having SMRs with higher efficiency and no major proliferation or meltdown concerns that amplify costs. High neutron output and steam conversion add costs and complexity, but if CFS panned out and Helion didn't, I'd hardly turn my nose at that.

I could also see a world where multiple forms of fusion power pan out, and it turns out to be economical for Helion to sell tritium to other vendors like CFS rather than storing it for 12 years until it decays to He3. Maybe we'd even have colocated plants in a certain ratio where Helion provides on-site tritium generation in the exact volume needed for a D-T reactor.

Helion's latest funding round was US$425 million, bringing total funding to over a billion, on a US$5 billion valuation. To give that money back to their investors, assuming a 40% profit margin, they'd need to sell something like 100 copies of Orion at US$30 million each, totaling 5 gigawatts. For the investors to consider them successful, it would need to be more like 2000 copies of Orion, totaling 100 gigawatts.

That's a completely plausible market size (although it's not just "all over the country", because the country they're in only has 1161 GW of generation capacity and is barely building any), so their NRE costs to date are not an impossible burden. It really depends on four things:

1. Can they hit such a low price target as US$30 million per 50-megawatt power plant? Can they ship anything for US$30 million a pop?

2. Will they be allowed to sell to China, where the customers are?

3. Will solar energy get cheaper still, forcing them to an even lower price point?

4. Will opex of the resulting reactors be manageable?

I'd expect that they probably wouldn't focus on copying Orion exactly, since Orion is just the initial PoC and will only use a single 50 MW generator. Their Nucor plant is planned to have 10x higher capacity, which seems likely to be more in line with typical deployments outside of remote areas. Opex also seems like a non-issue to me, given that the machines will be automated, the fuel will be cheap, and they won't have the same safety-critical need for strict regulation and human oversight as fission plants.

My understanding is that exporting might not be a huge hurdle to get a green light for due to the low proliferation concerns, although I wouldn't be surprised if Helion itself had some reservations around that or blocked it on designing some sort of tamper-resistant enclosure for IP protection purposes.

But I also don't see a reason why the US couldn't be a highly lucrative market for Helion, particularly given the increasing demand from AI. Solar in China today benefits from major alignment of interests and political tailwinds. Similarly, fusion could cut through partisan divides and NIMBYism that have hamstrung power buildout in the US. The left will buy in for climate benefits, the right will buy in for energy independence, both will buy in for economics + practicality, and NIMBYs will buy in for lower electric bills with minimal risks or drawbacks. Whether or not directly publicly funded, there will at least be every incentive to collectively get out of private industry's way and allow mass fusion deployment with minimal regulatory burdens.

That said, I'm sure solar will continue to get cheaper, and iron-air batteries from companies like Form Energy seem to be an extremely promising solution for high-scale storage. I also like the idea of using Prometheus Fuels to repurpose existing fossil fuel plants as storage for renewables. But there are still theoretical limits on the efficiency of solar panels, and space usage and intermittency could make it less cost-efficient than fusion in many if not most cases. We can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison between a mature technology in active high-volume production and a speculative future technology, but the latter in this case does seem to me to have a higher ceiling on its potential value over the long run.

No, nothing is obvious to anyone outside the company.

> I'd expect that they probably wouldn't focus on copying Orion exactly,

Hopefully their next model will come out before another billion dollars of investment goes down the drain.

> Opex also seems like a non-issue to me, given that the machines will be automated, the fuel will be cheap,

Yes, that could happen, but what it really means is that we don't have any idea what the opex is.

> My understanding is that exporting might not be a huge hurdle to get a green light for due to the low proliferation concerns,

I think the bigger concern there would be whether China would import it.

> But I also don't see a reason why the US couldn't be a highly lucrative market for Helion,

Well, the US hasn't been a highly lucrative market for power plants for 50 years. Maybe the advent of new, radically cheaper technology could change that, but I suspect it won't; the advent of new, radically cheaper energy in the late 18th century didn't turn China or Japan into a highly lucrative market for power plants, for essentially social or political rather than technical and economic reasons.

> We can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison between a mature technology in active high-volume production and a speculative future technology, but the latter in this case does seem to me to have a higher ceiling on its potential value over the long run.

Yes, I agree. But we weren't talking about the long run, but rather about currently existing companies that need to return money to their investors in the next ten or twenty years. Breakthroughs do happen, but rarely.

Just to clarify, Orion is one site, not a particular generator model. Orion working would be the green light to build and ship more generators, not a sign that they'd need to go back to the drawing board on an "Orion v2".

re: opex, we do have some idea of what it will be. We know that deuterium is cheap, we know that fusion produces low waste, we know that extensive safety protocols to protect against meltdown are not required, we know that preventing theft of fissile materials is not a security concern, and we know that these machines are substantially automated. We may not have precise balance sheets, but it's also not entirely opaque or mysterious.

I'm not sure the examples of historical China and Japan apply. They didn't invent coal power and then decide not to use it (although Japan was nevertheless fairly quick to industrialize). Fusion as of now seems likely to reach commercialization first in the US, and there's currently a lot of demand for power here with insufficient supply to meet projected growth. It's a very different market from when we were actively shipping our high-power-consumption industries overseas.

I don't agree that breakthroughs happen "rarely". I mean, we wouldn't be here in this thread without the massive breakthrough of useful LLMs, which were considered sci-fi before ChatGPT's release less than three years ago; fusion had the breakthrough of ignition at NIF just a few days after that; and we're only in the position of considering solar and batteries as a competitive energy source due to many small breakthroughs that have occurred in recent history. Breakthroughs happen all the time, but we quickly forget their significance and let them become boring.

I first came across this type of info with the book "How Bad Are Bananas", from Mike Berners-Lee. I really enjoyed it, and I just saw that the new edition even includes stuff like hosting a World Cup, data centers, and space tourism!

It should give a good foundation to start talking about it.

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

Unlike most datacenters, AI datacenters being far away from the user is okay since it takes on the order of seconds to minutes for the code to run and generate a response. So, a few hundred milliseconds of latency is much more tolerable. For this reason, I think that we should pick a small number of ideal locations that have a combination of weather that permits non-sub-ambient cooling and have usable low carbon resources (either hydropower is available and plentiful, or you can build or otherwise access nuclear reactors there), and then put the bulk of this new boom there.

If you pick a place with both population and a cold climate, you could even look into using the data center's waste heat for district heating to get a small new revenue stream and offset some environmental impact.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzirpvTiOo

What prevents data centers from using non-evaporative cooling to keep their water usage low? The water usage argument loses a lot of its relevant in that case.

In europe several power plants get shut down each summer because the heated water from those plants would have significant impact on the local wildlife.

That particular one routed the hot water to a set of fan-cooled radiators (rejecting most of the heat into the air).

I think you're still good on your original assertion, it seems many/most of the biggest players are using non potable in new facilities and also retrofitting some old ones to avoid potable water as well [1]

I think you'd be good either way: The distinction sounds like an important point until you realize that the cost of turning raw water potable is so vanishly small compared to the cost of these data centers. Some rough estimates place it as less than one single rack of a GB200 NVL72 to build enough-- or more economically, bolster the local existing plants for raw water processing. Even if they had to go to brackish water desalination the cost there looks to be mostly in ongoing electricity costs which amount to ~$3k per day such that their existing power plant build outs for these would easily cover it, or a few such new desalination plants to cover many many data centers.

I'm not unsympathetic to aspects of these overall concerns either, but critics have to do a lot better than concerns that are less hyperbolically expressed as the much less catchy "No AI!... without small and reasonable policies for covering proportional infrastructure cost increases!".

[1] https://datacentremagazine.com/articles/reclaimed-wastewater...

If you look at the original paper they are quite upfront with the difficulty of estimating water use. It’s not public data—in fact it’s usually a closely held trade secret, plus it’s got all kinds of other issues like you don’t know where the training happened, when it happened, what the actual cooling efficiency was, etc. The researchers were pretty clear about these limitations in the actual paper.

Basically, it’s urban legend at this point. When OpenAI’s CEO later said ChatGPT uses ~0.3ml per query, that’s roughly 100x less than the viral claims.

[1] <https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271> [2] <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-...> [3] <https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai>/

People are critical of farmland and golf courses, too. But Farmland at least has more benefit for society, so they are more vocal on how it's used.

So, even if there's no recycling, a data center that is said to consume "millions" rather than tens or hundreds of millions is probably using less than 5 acres of alfalfa in consumption, and in absolute terms, this requires only a swimming-pool or two of water per years. It's trivial.

I think the source is the bigger problem. If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. There probably wouldn't be any complaints if they would use sewerage or saltwater from the ocean.

> Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool

Cooling and returning the water is not always that simple. I don't know specifically about datacentres, but I know about wasting clean water in other areas, cooling in power plants, industry, etc. and there it can have a significant impact on the cycle. At the end it's a resource which is used at least temporary, which has impact on the whole system.

Surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this mentioned.

The water use argument is highly local and depends on where we are building these data centers. Are you building in the great lakes region with plenty of fresh water and no water scarcity issues (yet)? Ok fine.

But we aren't building there. We're building in Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa putting further stress in an area that water scarcity is already an issue, or soon going to become one due to long term drought conditions. Or Texas, which already has problems with their power grid.

We're building in these locations because they're cheap. If we're going do to this, we need to not let the bottom line be the sole driving decision of data center locations. If it's not profitable to build elsewhere, don't build it until you've figured out how to make it efficient enough to where it is profitable.

This goes against American freedom

There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options, but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction of data centers globally.

Only 14% use municipal water systems to draw water. https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...

That said, here are the relevant numbers from that 2012 article in full:

> Most 18-hole golf facilities utilize surface waters (ponds, lakes) or on-site irrigation wells. Approximately 14 percent of golf facilities use water from a public municipal source and approximately 12 percent use recycled water as a source for irrigation.

> Specific water sources for 18-hole courses as indicated by participants are noted below:

> 52 percent use water from ponds or lakes.

> 46 percent use water from on-site wells.

> 17 percent use water from rivers, streams and creeks.

> 14 percent use water from municipal water systems.

> 12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.

Some golf courses also are designed to spread floodwater and protect surrounding development. Golf is sort of a happy bonus on top of that.

Private courses are usually far better irrigated than their public counterparts where even the fairway is liable to be left to dry out.

It uses as much water per year as 200 acres of alfalfa in California’s Central Valley. There are around 1M acres of alfalfa growing in California.

2.5MW of data center capacity is roughly equal to 1 acre of irrigated alfalfa in water usage. If you’re pulling fossil aquifer water, open loop evaporative cooling may not be the best idea, but there are plenty of places east of 100 degrees west in the US that have virtually ‘unlimited’ water where cooling towers are a great idea since they almost double the COP of a chilled water system.

People are using these arguments for the simple reason that they demonstrably resonate with average people who live near data centers.

They probably don’t resonate with people who have plenty of income and/or do not compete with data centers locally for resources.

Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people than not will assume that using water means it's not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer, untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation. Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it seems then some education is in order.

If it was being used for evaporative cooling then the argument would be stronger. But I don't think it is - not least because most data centres don't have massive evaporative cooling towers.

Even then, whether we consider it a bad thing or not depends on the location. If the data centre was located in an area with lots of water, it's not some great loss that it's being evaporated. If it's located in a desert then it obviously is.

If you discharge water into a river, there are environmental limits to the outlet temperature (this is a good thing btw). The water can't be very hot. That means you need to pump a large volume of water through because you can only put a small amount of energy into each kg of water.

If you evaporate the water on the other hand, not only is there no temperature limit but it also absorbs the latent heat of vaporisation. The downside is it's a lot more complex and also the water is truly consumed rather than just warming it up.

To say that it's never an issue is disingenuous.

Additionally one could image a data center built in a place with a surplus of generating capacity. But in most cases, it has a big impact on the local grid or a big impact on air quality if they bring in a bunch of gas turbines.