Hacker News

What about water usage?

They do! In great detail:

https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...

Worth considering in the current climate. My impression a while ago is that the exact water and power usage of any large company's data center is seen as a trade secret of sorts; if a large company invested to become XX% efficient, it might not want competitors to know it hit a certain efficiency target.

Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it's low) and people don't believe him.

That would not be good PR because a) it would be seen as flippant and b) no one would believe Google.

Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.

Data centers tend to be higher security facilities for a reason. Publicizing any of their technical specs isn’t really beneficial, especially when any numbers that are provided will be dismissed unless even more information is provided to back them up.

Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.

Google has some custom hardware, so directly reporting it could be an issue.

Now that it has been, though…

> it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.

It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.

LinkedIn CV says 8 Years working for google as a Data Center Facilities Technician, so. Yeah.

Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.

Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something. Giving those people concrete numbers is not gonna change such misconceptions (and that's assuming they look at such numbers in reasonable relative terms in the first place).

Not sure why this is being downvoted. If you noticeably distort the local economy then people are naturally going to want to know what resources you're consuming.

but trade secrets

I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.

My state's gasoline refineries use about ~13 million gallons of water each day. It's about .7 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline refined.

I don't know if you mean to be reinforcing that it's nothing or not

Remind me median income?

It looks to me like there's two Google DCs with different LLCs?

> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.

> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.

> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.

> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.

> If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.

Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.

Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.

This feels like an important point! People comparing to leaks (or other distributed examples that aggregate similarly) are not thinking about how the amount of water used in a single location changes the scale.

Do I understand the logic here to be "if there's an LLC with an obscure name involved, it must be using too much water"?

That’s more of a convenient way to distribute and isolate risks than it is anything nefarious.

Because nobody reasonable believes water use is any issue, but these numbers are proxy for the usual stuff companies don't disclose for usual reasons (ones that rhyme with "competition" and "stock market")?

We have perfectly good reasons to hide behind shell companies and ndas! Anyone who disagrees is a hater!

No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.

Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.

Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).

So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.

He won’t toe the official line. You will always get a vague claim of being “problematic” if you don’t challenge the status quo.

He’s a Pro-AI ideologue who engages in the same motivated reasoning he complains about others using. His piece on heat island effects fell over under scrutiny because he just doesn’t have the analytical background to actually do these investigations.

Is there much impact of a marginal gallon? This is evaporative cooling, no? It's gonna come back down as rain and refill wherever datacenter took it from.

Mostly, but not entirely. It is a huge issue in the Southwest, and it seems like a lot of DCs are being proposed and/or built in areas where water is far from abundant.

Fresh water supply has been on a downward trend for years. We are already looking at a future without enough fresh water, before the new datacenters come into play. The datacenters are being installed in some of the driest areas of the country that were already water stressed. In some cases they can also contaminate local water systems.

The problem in California is that competition for water doesn't raise prices. Much of our water supply is allocated based on property rights rather than as a commodity so prices for some users remain artificially lower than the market price. This causes waste and shortages. Eventually we'll have to reform the system but there's no political will to do so.

In some cases there is no stream involved at all, which is more problematic, but is pumped from groundwater.

Excess water use is actively harming people right now.

Not a conspiracy theorist, but wait that really sounds effective. Just few months back I was wondering why were big datacenter companies not trying to sway the public that the water usage is low per query or whatever metric.

There will be protests and cases related to water usage of AI, but none of them would hold any ground. And winning the water case would just make the argument in their favour.

I thought some cooling setups aren't closed loop?