Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water!

Yes, Texas did vote for that. Haha, Red states suffering is funny.

Yes, Texas did vote for that.
How a fraction of voters decide who runs Texas

Texan here: we barely get to vote on shit at all. And they're gerrymandering to make it even harder.

I'd call Texas a clown car but it's too big to qualify.

The estimate of the majority Democrats would need to retake the Senate is something like 70/30, based on the degree of gerrymandering.
And the math just gets worse every time maps are redrawn.

Here's the report this came from https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2025-07-25/texas-is-still-in-drought-and-ai-data-centers-are-quietly-guzzling-up-water/

During the 1986-1992 California drought, we were informed in the San Francisco Bay Area region that water service prices were going to go up unless we conserved strictly.

They said this to a bunch of California hippies, on account that we were in California.

So we way got on board. We stopped flushing. Any water that was rendered non-potable we'd repurpose for watering plants or filter it for second use. Japanese naval baths (weird tiny bowl seats and a sponge, used in the Imperial Navy, WWII) got popular so people were keeping clean via a tenth of normal water usage.

We conserved too much according to the water department and they raised prices anyway.

This sparked some investigations (by journalists, since investigative journalism was still a thing then) and found that agriculture got water for much cheaper, and was still using it once before flushing it (now laced with pesticides) out into the sea. Needless to say, we conservationist hippies were livid.

It's still a problem, as the utility companies routinely lobby our congress and governor (and Newsom may know how to be a California liberal, but he's still a Dianne-Feinstein-style ( / Nancy-Pelosi style) money-grubbing neoliberal. He just has game, especially when opposed to far right idiots. The setup in Monster's Inc (power crisis in a city where scream is the principal power source) was inspired by the Enron fraud affair leading to rolling blackouts and Texas siphoning off California's general fund. And our governments from Schwarzenegger (who I will never forgive) to Newsom are in the pocket of PG&E. (I'm on SMUD now and my bill is conspicuously less.)

Also, according to Climate Town, the Sauds own a lot of California farmland, where they grow alfalfa to import to the mid-east to feed their cows. Alfalfa crops are one of the most water hungry, and is one of the big ways beef is driving the climate crisis (and towards a massive food shortage and global famine!) and the water tables, to which they have access and first-tap rights, gets lower every year. 🕙

So I suspect that the Texas AI centers are getting water at a cheaper rate than private homes. Maybe it's something to get active about.

So the people should build a giant warehouse that uses a bazillion gallons of water that feeds into the warehouse and in the same pipe back to the water system, get wholesale rates and charge consumers the cheaper rate!
Same pipe, just make sure it goes into the warehouse so you can charge people for what leaves.
- You want to trust the water a data center with zero regulations is regurgitating?

Why the fuck do they alway pick the driest places to use the most water. Fucking morons

There's only one obvious answer to that question in a capitalism world. Because it's cheaper than other places. Why is it cheaper for the corporations in the driest places where common people need to stop using showers is also obvious.
- Less regulations also
Because that usually means it's hot and sunny so things grow well if you can get water to it.
It's easier to get water places than make it warmer or sunnier in the optimal water place.
Edit: sorry this was me thinking about the alfalfa sprout comment above. Makes zero fucking sense for IT.
I always rant about tech moving to Austin.
They need low heat, reliable power, cheap / fast internet, and an abundance of water.
Texas is literally none of those things.
- We have low regulations though. Which is why they do it.

Seems like the real problem is that companies aren't being charged enough for their excessive water usage.

It's no surprise this is happening in the Land of Useful Idiots and Dipshits, texas.

They deregulated shower heads just in time.

I'm not joking when i say that not using ai is mostly improving my reasoning. Probably, each time I used it, i had to subconsciously offset some thinking to that brainless machine. I'm fine the way I am, i know it's being propped up as some ultimate solution but my creative output improved too.

We're probably offsetting some thinking and memorisation to a computer with a complete lack of experience of the real world, and it's somehow being presented as acceptable. I do n't think it's fine.

This but just the Microsoft logo lol

I've heard it said that the austrian school/anarcho capitalism is the anti Vax/flat earth of economics
"Since Microsoft dropped its DEI initiatives, it's good actually!"

Stoopid Texans. You've got the guns, start using the things. If they need cooling, maybe aerate a few blocks of servers for them.

Now you got me wondering if we can shoot the heat away from AI datacenters. /s

You should complain whenever million gallons of water are wasted by corporations seeking profits or by governments for their shady operations. Not just when it's about AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

So not only are Corporations... People

Now they are more important people than regular citizens?

Under capitalism they always were. Just take a close look at exactly who the "Founding Fathers" were.

I don't understand why AI data centers would CONSUME water. Once they fill up their chiller loops, then... that's it, right?

It's hard for me to imagine them relying on the temperature of the incoming water, and dumping all the warm water as discharge.

From what I've seen it's "not worth the effort or expense" to reuse the water. Some of them literally just send tap water through the cooling loops and then into the sewer drains
They're probably using cooling towers, which cool through evaporation. They should be using reclaimed though.
- This is the right answer. They use evaporative cooling. Which does save a lot of power so they can claim to be "green".
- As long as it is cheaper to buy water, then evaporate it, big firms will continue to do so.
  With a COP of around 15 and up it is difficult to argue with the economy of this.
  Local regulation would be required, but that would need politicians who don't suck.
I worked 10 years at a data center, all that water is recycled - it is very carefully chemically balanced so as to not corrode the pipes and pumps, no they do not use it once and dump it out.
Because the massive stacks of high-powered chips that they use, tend to get very hot. They don't use the kind of computers that work through passive cooling.
I say, as my Laptop burns into my lap.

elon is currrently using the aquifer drinking water under memphis to cool grok. he’s also powering it with generators and smogging out the city.

please do not use grok.

I don't care, nothing will come inbetween me and my boi, mecha hitler!
/j if that wasn't obvious
- mecha hitler!
  So someone fed it Cards Against Humanity, huh?

The priorities are completly screwd up. If they found a way to power the AI datacenters with humans, Matrix style, would they ask Texans to sacrifice their first borns to do so?

Prerequisite to that would be banning abortions so that tracks
This Texas, the state where the lieutenant governor Dan Patrick wanted the elderly die for the God of Economy.
Narrator voice: in fact that is what they did
Google "Roko's Basilisk"!

Stinky teens need shirts that point the blame at Microsoft. Get ripe and hang out with old people.

Can't they just use seawater or use air cooling?

A lot of the need is due to the heat density of the GPUs used for GenAI. Could they build less densely? Yes, and they likely already are but need to go further. I have seen data centers with racks less than half (I think it was closer to one quarter) populated for energy density issues.
Could they use sea water? Sea water causes more corrosion. (I am uncertain if this data center is close to the ocean.)
- Can't they just make sub 75w GPUs that require basic cooling?

It's always a good idea to put computer centers in areas with water scarcity. /s

Well, it could work. If the local government gave a shit. Which they don't, because Texas. But the water going into a datacenter does come out... The main downside being that it's hotter (which is a limiting factor, you can't run it in a loop without some big cooling system, and rivers/lakes are by far the most effective way way to do that).
The article I saw doesn't say what the problem is exactly. Is the datacenter pumping from an aquifer rather than a lake/river? Are they raising the temperature in ways that affect the environment negatively? Are they abusing the municipal water supply instead of pumping their own water, forcing the taxpayer to essentially subsidize their infrastructure? Lots that could go wrong, but it's all shit that should be fully figured out during the permitting process.
In hot areas with water scarcity.
- Well, yeah. If you put it somewhere cold like the Arctic it’ll melt the ice caps and make global warming worse. Better to let the cold places stay cold and put the hot data centres somewhere that’s already hot! Sorted - no more global warming (just some localised warming I guess)
- And an electrical grid held together by duct tape and chewing gum
I mean from Microsoft's perspective it is working out...
Until someone goes all eco terrorism.
There's lots of factors to consider beyond just water. Cost of power, cost of construction and staff, access to internet, proximity to demand for low-latency access, and so forth.
- Yeah. It's just water. Who cares, if at least the internet is good and such. /s

WTF don't they just use a closed geothermal loop?

Im actually curious on how much energy can be reused from heat alone.
- Move the operation to someplace cold, start up a little town around it and provide heat as a utility.

Talk about dystopian headlines

A boring one

So assuming the datacenter uses the water for cooling, what happens to the water? Does it just get released as steam?

Of course it would be possible to capture and condensate the steam but that equipment would cost money. If just using more water is cheap and unregulated there is no incentive not to do just so.
It often just evaporates, since they're using evaporative cooling.

Could someone explain to me how these data centers use up water? Like is it evaporating? What happens to the water? I get the water consumption is very high but is the problem we're removing it from places that don't refill or does into the environment mean it's wastewater? Please someone help me understand.

Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.
For cooling many (most?) data centers use evaporative cooling. That evaporated water could be captured again with a heat pump (reducing the wasted water + recuperating heat for other uses), but it's Texas, so it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the data centers have no intensive to be less wasteful. So the evaporated water gets released into the atmosphere and it's gone.
Edit: about your question where the water is coming from: there is no simple answer, it's coming from many sources and it's being used for many things. But irregardless of the source, there's only so much available and using more than is available is not possible. When the math is done, it turns out that Texas is running out of water. At that point choices have to be made, and apparently Texas is chosing to increase/maintain the supply to data centers and to reduce the supply to people.
- That is super helpful, thank you.
- Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.
  I doubt those are constantly consuming large amounts of water. hydro just lets it through, and nuclear has chained closed loop systems, and they also let through some after the last loop
They use evaporative cooling in the name of being "green". Saves a lot of energy, but at the cost of water use.
- Doesnt this mean the water will come back when it rains? Its not being polluted and rendered unusable is it?

How much time before someone figures these infrastructures make very good targets for vandalism? I risk I will see datacenters destroyed by mobs and other actors before I die.

It’s not vandalism, it’s direct action. Or sabotage, if you consider this to be a time of war (which it undoubtedly is — a class war). Don’t use the enemy’s language against ourselves.
- please start with grok.
- Allow me to use whatever words I want.
  On this specific example, I'll even call it constructive vandalism. It will pass on a very loud message.
In theory we have elected representatives looking out for their constituents. Surely they would limit water use so this wouldn’t happen, and prevent the datacenters from relying on generators while waiting for power hookup, right? Oh, a red state. Never mind
- In my country, I know of two cases of datacenters that use waste water. And another is supposed to run on salt water, in the future. Those cases don't trouble me.
Some time ago i passed near a famous e-commerce warehouse and the place was surrounded by a 4 meter tall fence and a moat.
- Man the trebuchets!
Why would you think they make good targets for vandalism? A major data center would have very restricted physical access.
- Spoken like a person with no imagination or access to drones. Has Ukraine's R&D taught you nothing?
- If Palestine Action can break into RAF bases and destroy Israeli weapons factories, what makes you think a data center will be better defended?
- I don't doubt many are even built to not be easily noticeable amidst its surroundings but many are as discreet as a sore thumb.
  It's either a mater of numbers or strategy.

People should be angry and upset about this. Similar to the story some weeks ago where residents of a small Texan town (seemingly rightfully at first) complained about the noise pollution of a Bitcoin mining farm. Turns out they all voted Republican. It's always "we'll deregulate and bring business" just that the modern businesses they bring are a net negative for the area except for the politicians and the companies. Is almost like these regulations were there for a reason.

Both Bitcoin and AI are stupid VC money that only matters in a very small bubble, and they're not business in a traditional sense. They just leech resources at their compute centers to make the people who own them and live far away rich. I pity all this who didn't vote for this kind of bullshit. The rest, enjoy your shorter showers and everything else! But remember, it's the Dems who want to dictate stuff like water usage. Not in my free country! Oh, the water is gone because a greedy Corp stole it? That's fine, one day it's my turn to be rich.

You could consider it an extractive industry like mineral mining. In this case the electricity and water are turned into profit. It creates some short term local jobs like construction, but the system administrators are likely hired from elsewhere. The R&D is likely being done elsewhere as well. Most of the money these businesses spend goes straight to Nvidia and the profit goes straight to a small group of executives and investors.
- At least mining did create some local jobs, though I do think that the area itself loses out because it's a finite resource and the environmental impact is always there. And as you said, these modern examples don't really require a big local workforce. It doesn't stimulate the local economy a bit.
If you care about the environment and are upset about corporations and their datacenters your best voting option is neither the red or blue party.
- It doesn't matter if you voted Republican. These problems are a direct consequence of Republican policies that they announced before the elections. Fearmongering about "any party left of us will take away your freedoms to limit your resource consumption" is a trait of far-right parties. My point was not about Democrats. It was about people who vote Republican.
  The US has a political problem with its voting system that benefits two parties, and they won't get rid of it. As long as this is the case, no other party matters. Also, Dems usually enact more regulations for the environment; see also California.
  I voted neither Reps or Dems because I live in the EU, and my vote always went to Greens or other environmental parties.

Actually yes. They did vote for this.

If a salesman misrepresents his product in any way of form, he gets called a swindler, faces potential legal consequences, and the people who bought his product are called "victims".
If a politician does this, it's just "business as usual", and his voters were supposed to do enough research to make the correct choice.
- Project 2025 was pretty fucking clear. Y'all picked and continue to pick the red team 🎉
- There's one critical difference between these two things: Your vote affects the whole country, not only yourself. Someone who decides to use that power based on vibes and willful ignorance while there's no shortage of people telling them the truth can't later claim innocence; we as people have a duty to at least try to be informed on the consequences our actions have on other people. MAGAs would deserve some sympathy if their stupidity only affected themselves, but there's certainly no party affiliation filter to being thrown in Alligator Alcatraz.

If AI centres need so much cooling, why are they building them in Texas in the first place?

Texans are some of the dumbest Americans, so they are proud to allow businesses to exploit them.
Texans are some of the dumbest Americans, so they are proud to allow businesses to exploit them.
Texans are some of the dumbest Americans, so they are proud to allow businesses to exploit them.
Lack of regulations of all kinds
- On a suspicion, I had a quick look, and of course there's also tax incentives, apparently.
  Love this quote "Texas had long been a preferred location for large data centers given its central location, economic climate, reliable electric grid, historically low occurrences of natural disasters, educated workforce and pro-business environment." :|
Solar power?
- Apparently only partially, but mostly a natural gas plant to even further wreck the planet.
  There's hundreds of billions of dollars available to pour into this, and for what benefit to the nation? Meanwhile, the rest of the country's infrastructure is crumbling.
  Interestingly, solar panels work more efficiently in cooler temperatures.

Actual interesting question:

How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down AI response time? A lot of the time you get an instant response from an LLM, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don't need it that urgently.

The majority of energy consumed is for training the AI models, not providing output from those models.
This means the resource consumption is not tied to usage and prompts. Also it means resource consumption to train models is temporary, relative to the model.
- Oh ok. So they'll put the water back once the models are trained?
I disagree. I think the biggest consumers of AI currently use it for work, and depending on the type of work I think very fast ai == more customers.
Another interesting question:
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down Ai usage? A lot of the time people make unnecessary prompts or receive unhelpful generated text, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don't need it at all.
- At scale? None. If we assume that (a) the number of queries are constant (i.e. that the slow response doesn't drive away users) and (b) that the efficiency is the same whether it's fast or slow, then having computers that take longer to calculate each response just means you need to have more of them working in parallel to service the demand.
  Now, for a home user running AI locally, you could maybe save some energy by using more efficient silicon since you only need it to process one query at a time (assuming lower-spec parts actually are more efficient, which may or may not be the case), but that's not really what we're talking about here.

No wonder the government don't want anymore report on climate change.

Why aren’t they building these things underground or repurposing old mines in areas where geothermal is plentiful for power and aquifers are stable, instead of in water-poor, temperature extreme places like Texas and KY? …Oh right, poverty and red voters. Better to exploit and damage then have some upfront cost and long-term stability. I forget.

Texas is a shithole and texans are morons.
Building anything like this is seen as a jobs creator. Data center companies then pass the proposal around to municipalities and ask them who want jobs. These places then bend over backwards to offer tax incentives, fast permitting, etc. with no regard to whether their location can actually support the building.
So of course they get built in the most corrupt places.
- The jobs in question are highly specialised and would be entrusted to existing employees only though
- Yep most local governments will give tens of millions away for "local jobs" even if there's only like 3 local jobs.
  Could literally just hand those 3 people 4 million each, and save the environmental disaster.
  Literally dealing with that in my own local community. They want to build an outdoor concrete batch plant in the middle of downtown to create like 10 jobs. I mean you'll make the small city into a ghost town. Shut down the multi-million dollar observatory, all the small business down restaurants. Not to mention they will cause everyone wealthy enough to move out of town. This will leave the poorest residents left in the tax base but hey they're creating jobs!

I don't get the news about these data centers guzzling water, where is the water going? If it's for cooling, but that doesn't destroy the water..

Evaporative cooling.
- Can't they recycle it.
- Evaporative cooling is one option, yes, but not the only one. Do we know what method these data centers are actually using?
They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you're cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I've seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.

So genuine question, how is a datacenter needing water equivalent to showering? When people shower, the water gets dirty and needs to be cleaned. When water is used to cool servers, it gets warm but that should not be a problem, it doesn't need to go through a water treatment facility afterwards (?)

They use potable water and they use evaporative cooling.
I have no idea what the infrastructure setup is like for cooling that data center, but one way of water cooling is to take in cool water and dump the hot water. If you do this in your home, it's an "open loop geothermal heat pump." You pull in water from a well, heat or cool the water with your AC heat exchanger, then pump it back into the ground or into the sewer.
https://www.geojerry.com/aboutopenloop.html
The water may be treated with anticorrosives.

@grok this true?

incomprehensible text about being mechahitler

Newer aerated shower heads help with that 👀

Don’t feed the people but we feed the machines

The machines make money. The people cost money.

It's hilarious that so many people see Americans as free people

It's worse, Americans choose over and over again to suffer, as long as other people suffer too.
Land of the fee and the home of the slave.

My country is int he middle of a data center boom, fuelled by the usual royal and political, uh, inputs. We also have seasonal droughts, which often result in water rationing and angry people upset at the mismanagement of our resources. Wonder which will give way first.

Yes that's what Americans voted for.

Is cooling water not reusable? Shouldn't these be closed systems?

Apparently closed loop systems are not good enough for these kinds of applications, and often instead use evaporative. Which kind of logical, since they're not running a single factory overclocked GPU with a top of the line desktop CPU, but a cluster of factory overclocked GPUs with a server CPU.
- Apparently closed loop systems are not ~~good~~ cheap enough
  There I fixed that for you.
  What should happen is that the cost of water to these businesses should increase, which would then incentivise other more expensive methods of cooling, but that would make line go up at a less steep angle which makes shareholders sad.
- So they build the computing centers in hot areas with water scarcity and make the air hot-humid?

Why can't they use the shit and piss water to cool their shit instead of asking people to cut back on water usage?

They can.
My wife is working on a solar project whose off taker is a data center that is doing exactly this.

If you live in Texas, leave.

I wish... We get over a thousand new residents a day. It's awful.

Oh, and THEN, the AI will ask you to go take a shower if you're feeling dry, dirty or thirsty. I mean after telling you why taking a shower is good, why people take showers, which celebrities took showers the past week and asks if you want to ads taking a shower to next week's reminders.

What does a data center need that much water for?

To compensate for the fact that Texas is a stupid place to build something that needs a lot of cooling
Cooling. Even closed loops evaporate a lot.
- Closed loops evaporate stuff all. This is 100% from evaporative cooling towers.
  If they were using DX or air-to-water chillers the water usage would be negligible. Like how often you top up the radiator in your car.

The 2022 estimate for how much water was used in Texas in total was 15.2 million acre-feet, or approximately 5 trillion gallons. So these AI centers are accounting for 0.00926% of Texas' water use.

The issue is not the statewide consumption. The Texas water grid is not one unified system. It's a patchwork of local aquifers, municipal supplies, and private wells.
If a datacenter is built in an area with a water grid that can not handle its consumption, people will run out of water sooner or later.
(Especially AI) Datacenters are built in areas with low energy costs, as it is their biggest expense, with no regard for the local water levels:
... about two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress.
Water is often the last consideration when making siting decisions for data centers because it’s cheap compared to the cost of real estate and power, said Sharlene Leurig, a managing member of Fluid Advisors, ...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
- So charge them more for the water. The data center builders are making rational decisions based on their costs.
- Honest question: wouldn't it be advantageous to build data centers in cooler areas next to large body's of water, like the upper Midwest? I'm sure there are metrics I'm ignorant of, but that would seem to make more sense than building in a hot/dry place.
Why are people being asked to reduce showers over such a small amount?
- Perhaps there are reasons beyond just these data centers why Texas has a water shortage.
Yeah I love ai hate, but in reality it's a teeny percentage of any water or energy use

Imagine complaining about the water a data center uses in Texas but being totally fine with the billions of gallons it uses to cool it's two nuclear power stations. Yes I looked it up, yes it's a ridiculous hypocrisy and yes it would be lovely if people stopped falling for clickbait like this.

Yes, AI is as necessary as providing power. They are certainly the same. Let me just refrigerate my food using AI. Oh shit. The power is gone.
- In a state that uses 28% of it's power on air conditioning? Interesting...
The power plants arguably generate a more valuable output than the AI data centres, thus offering a better return of investment (of water)
Although with the amount of energy consumed by the latter, they are partially responsible for the continued existence of the former.
You are missing the point that it's millions of gallons daily, just for AI. You know the thing that actively makes our lives worse for no reason at all
- I'm sorry it's making your life actively worse and I'd love to hear exactly how, because for me it's done nothing but improve my life in so many ways. It's got me over writers block so many times, helped me work through tricky problems of all kinds, taught me all sorts of excellent drawing, singing and music creation skills, helped me make sense of societal and political issues that I would not normally have understood and answered questions with a total absence of ego that I would never have had the nerve to ask before for fear of sounding stupid.
  Hegelian dialectical materialism? It walked me through conversationally until I got it. The feasibility of someone being rich enough to build a rocket and just leave earth forever? It laid everything out in incredible detail (the resources required, it turns out, would be mindbogglingly insane).
  AI hating is dumb and that's a hill I'll happily die on.
  (Edit: fixed my atrocious spelling)
Except nuclear power plants are a net benefit to society as a whole.
Not even close to the same thing. And the fact that you think they are is what's wrong with the world.