Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?
Edit: Links provided in the comments…
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=1264
- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_cooling_towers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
Notable comments:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/23672269
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25288634
- https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25294655
Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.
To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.
The water gets used over and over and over in the data center. It’s in a loop. The reporting that data centers consume vast quantities of water completely misunderstand the core concept of a water loop.
That said, most data centers use the water for evaporative cooling. In that case, it comes back down as rain. But again, even in that case the reporting is still very overblown.
That is not the conclusion of the video you linked
From the video (timestamped):
He even mentions how US corn uses 80x more water than worldwide AI use; with 40% of that corn burned as ethanol. And that power usage is the much larger concern.
It’s amazing that Hank can come to this conclusion since basically every genai company is hiding their resource usage. (Well, actually not that amazing as Hank has gone completely on the side (and gets sponsored by) these companies and is strongly biased).
Have a look at eg https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
That link shows Altman saying current datacenters use closed loop systems and make vague rhetorical questions. That’s not a source
Corn ethanol being stupid doesn’t make AI less stupid.
There’s plenty of stupidity out there. That logic would make everything useless.
By that logic, no one outside the US would care about voting, since they already reached peak stupidity, so voting for a better president in Argentina will not get rid of trump.
It is useful if you’re trying to figure out what to focus on. In this case, the concern is wasteful water usage. If you point to a larger area of wasteful water consumption, it would make more sense to target that first.
Except we are already focusing on AI data centers. By bringing up corn you’re just unfocusing. Which is the opposite of what you want.
Yes, both are bad, and we should get rid of both. But both things can be done at the same time. You don’t need to steal the focus from another issue to try to redirect it.
Instead of “why are we caring about data centers? Corn is worse!”. Try “while we are fighting data centers, we should also look at corn, they’re bad too”.
I made a point to update my post, not only with your link, but also with your timestamped link.
This is why I’m here, to ask questions and seek answers…
I appreciate it. <3
Lots of other people are making solid points as well. Glad to see people engaging.
So, similar to a vehicle radiator, just larger scale?
Well, if that’s the case, yeah antifreeze isn’t good for anyone, but still a proper closed loop cooling system isn’t exactly wasting water is it?
If you take good water from underground, it evaporates, and you’re in a drought-prone area, your area effectively just lost the water. Even if you’re not in a drought-prone area, you’re never going to have easy access to that clean, underground water again.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
I found this, and it has a cool overview of water towers and such.
This is exactly why I asked, hoping for more information like this.
👍
Welcome to Lemmy. “AI bad” downvoting will always happen at anything that symbolizes sympathy, even when you’re just providing an objective factual take. Thanks for your informative post.