AWS shares the small number, as anti-data center protests focus on water usage
  • blargh513@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    19 minutes

    New rule: the data centers are allowed to use unprocessed water. Their output is now potable water that is tested by an independent source and certified to be of the required quality.

    Optional: they can only use sea water and the output is the same: potable treated water. They can have all the water they want for free. Just desalinize it and give it to the people.

    No you cannot just throw the resultant salt waste into the landfill. You gotta dispose of that shit on your dime, properly.

  • iconic_admin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 hour

    I’m not defending or taking a side, I’m just asking a question. Define used. Like can’t they just pump in some amount of water and circulate it around? I assume the water is used for cooling. Did the water get contaminated in some way such that it can’t be used again?

  • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    10 hours

    We could have drowned so many billionaires (and one trillionaire) in this water, instead of wasting it…

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    8 hours

    I wonder how much water plastic extrusion factories go through, compared to data centers.

  • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zipEnglish
    19 hours

    Just for sake of saying, worldwide, golf courses use between 2.5 billion and 5 billion gallons of water PER DAY.

    Can we get rid of amazon and golf courses?

    Golf courses get the extra sweet sauce of maybe an average of about 10 to 30 metric tons of pesticide a day, and then there is the fertilizer…

    • brachypelmide@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4 hours

      I couldn’t believe the numbers and a simple lookup on Wikipedia confirmed the horrors - all golf courses in the U.S. together use approximately 2.5bn gallons A DAY for irrigation. That is such an insanely high number.

    • dil@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3 hours

      Everyone benefits from aws, the vast majority of people will never play golf

  • FireflyDad@infosec.pubEnglish
    1 day

    My understanding is that a data center can be open loop or closed loop. Closed loop is like a water cooling pc with a radiator and you have to cool the water down to ambient temps. Open loop (or semi open loop) is more common which involves dumping hot water into the local sewer system or local waterways.

    More data centers than you expect just dump the water rather than cool it down and reuse it.

    • EatingOnions@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      AFAIK most datacenters use evaporative cooling so water simply evaporate and system has to be filled up again, other systems that are dumping water have issue with all kind of additives like anti corrosion, residual etc and water shouldn’t be just dumped but go through wastewater treatment

      • dan1101@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24 hours

        Yeah and I have little confidence the proper treatment will happen always.

      • DaleGribble88@programming.devEnglish
        23 hours

        Depends on how you define a data center, but you mean the large single purpose data centers that have been hastily built investor bait over the last 5-8 years, then yes, most of those use the evaporative cooling towers that concentrate waste products either already in the water, or added to prevent corrosion because they cheaped out on the plumbing, and then dumps that back into the local water source.

      • FireflyDad@infosec.pubEnglish
        1 day

        Fair. You are probably correct about dumping into waterways. But I know that a substantial amount of warm water is dumped into local wastewater processing.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          6 hours

          Is that supposed to be a positive? Those local plants have capacity, and they are meant to serve the needs of the community who finances said plants through their taxes.

          It’s not ok to just dump billions of additional gallons (for no real benefit) into those existing systems.

          They should be required to build and maintain their own treatment plants, at the very least.

        • EatingOnions@lemmy.worldEnglish
          24 hours

          Yeah as far as I was able to find out even closed loop systems have to be regularly bleed out to control mineral buildup. People argue about closed loop systems as it’s some kind of perpetum moblie you fill it up and it lasts forever which is not true, that’s why they don’t use coolants either because none of that lasts forever, they’re just saving a lot of money by being able to dump toxic wastewater without immediate ecological disaster

  • schnapsman@feddit.orgEnglish
    15 hours

    For anyone who doesn’t immediately have a clear idea of what 2.5 billion redneck units of water is, it’s about 10 million m^3 or 6 Roman colosseums of water. About 1 lake.

  • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22 hours

    There are a lot of questions in this comments section about how data centers use water and how they are cooled.

    At least some of this information is available at resources like these:

    https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

    https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961

    https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/

    https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water

    https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1

    https://eng.ox.ac.uk/case-studies/the-true-cost-of-water-guzzling-data-centres

    It appears they that are using both fresh/potable water and grey water where available and that not all of a data centers water consumption is to do with cooling of servers. There’s also electricity generation and extraneous water usage on site.

    Amazon’s AWS is at least no small portion of the internets infrastructure (30% of web infrastructure world wide). So I was cautious about whether this total was for all of their data centers or just for ones that run AI.

    I’ve read three articles so far reporting on this and none of them make it clear Amazon is reporting their total water usage for all their data centers world wide (I suspect it’s this one), or if they specify the water usage of AI data centers.

  • Grimm665@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1 day

    People with far more knowledge about this: when a data center “uses” water, what happens to it? Does the act of cooling servers with water “use up” the water or can it be cycled back into the water system? And if it is theoretically possible for it to be cycled back into the system as opposed to being dumped like sewer water, why isn’t it?

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      5 hours

      Because that costs money. It’s really that simple.

      In many states with functioning infrastructure, a property like this that’s using that much water, would be required to build and maintain their own treatment plant to cover it.

      But we’ve got regulatory capture, so… Good luck with that one.

    • BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      They use evaporative cooling systems. The water absorbs the heat, turns into water vapor, and is vented into the air. In theory I assume it could be collected, but that would require a lot more post processing to cool it back down or compress it to get back to liquid for.

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23 hours

        Most high rises have cooling systems. They run ambient temp water to all of the floors, and tenant hvac units cool their server rooms by pumping heat into that water.

        It then goes through the loop and gets cooled back down to ambient with large radiator systems outside.

        It’s closed loop.

        There’s no reason this can’t be applied to datacenters.

        • BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3 hours

          I’d imagine DCs are doing it the cheapest way they can. But I think comparing the high rises to a DC doesn’t really work just due to the scale difference and the amount of heat needing removed. I’m sure there’s a way that it could be made something of a closed loop for DCs, but I’m guessing it would be a bit different if a process compared to high rises. I wouldn’t be surprised if a DC removed as much heat as a year of every high rise in NYC in a day or less…

          • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 hours

            Agreed, but i would think it’s mostly an upfront cost. Datacenters have massive footprints, the roofs could be covered with heat exchangers, also covered with solar panels. It just takes some regulation to encourage it.

            If you want to get really into it, you could figure out a way to reclaim all that heat energy.

            • BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3 hours

              If like to see a true engineer mock or what it would entail. I think it would require a dedicated facility to pull it off given just how much heat needs removed and the volume of water used. The problem is there is an insane amount of heat energy from these DCs. It has to go somewhere, and water is a very good medium for that. That heat still has to go somewhere, so removing it from the water is much harder. If you had a huge setup of heat exchangers, they could probably do it with enough time and space, but time isn’t an option, because they run continuously. It would probably end up being just a huge holding tank that lets the hot water cool over time.

              I don’t think anything like solar is going to help. It would be good environmentally to offset some of their power consumption, but I think it would be negligible in their overall power draw and wouldn’t have any effect on their cooling. It’s not like they are cooling airspace, which they also are, but it’s the components themselves.

    • notalannister@fedinsfw.appEnglish
      23 hours

      The problem isn’t about the cooling systems “using” the water in the sense that the water “dissapears” from the water cycle per-se. The problem is that when a Data Center is built, the water that the population of that zone used, is mostly diverted from them to the data center, where it is evaporated and thus the population have access to less and less water.

      • MSids@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20 hours

        Evaporated is ‘used’. It’s arguably more ‘used’ than it is when it goes down the sewer to local wastewater treatment, as that water is often put back into groundwater through infiltration fields. Depleting aquifers is the main concern of data center water usage.

    • Bobby Turkalino@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1 day

      I would also like to know the answer to this.

      I have a water-cooled PC and I only add water to it about once a year when the reservoir is around 2/3 full. My loop is water-tight, not air-tight, so water is slowly lost to evaporation.

      I would think enterprise loops would be air-tight but perhaps the cost of implementing that is less than paying for water to be added

  • cogitase@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    24 hours

    The average for farm land is around 500,000 gallons per acre per year. Using the same amount of water as 5,000 acres of farmland to run >25% of the nation’s cloud resources isn’t enormous. Not that they couldn’t do better.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      6 hours

      Imagine trying to compare AI to food production.

      Do you really need someone to explain why they’re different, and why one might be worth it while the other isn’t?

      • cogitase@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4 hours

        The article is about AWS data centers not AI compute specifically. That’s the cloud infrastructure for a lot of the web. The comparison to agriculture is about scale, not the importance of the Internet vs. agriculture. Using 0.011% of the water as the farms in Kansas to power 25% of the Internet is nothing.

    • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21 hours

      Yeah, I’ve stopped pointing out how relatively insignificant the water use is on Lemmy. That fact isn’t met fondly here, usually.

  • geekwithsoul@piefed.socialEnglish
    23 hours

    While Google and Meta provide water usage data for individual facilities, Amazon did not disclose site-specific information.

    More than a little skeptical of Amazon’s data, as without facility by facility numbers, it’s impossible to get any sort of sanity check on how accurate their numbers are.