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.
Clouds can move at up to 100 miles an hour if they’re high altitude, average closer to 25 miles an hour for regular cumulus clouds. You pump that vapor into the air and it’s off to the races. If it forms a cumulonimbus cloud those last. What, 5 days? (Can fact check me here, I’m going off my memory of facts from a weather obsessed kid I knew).
5 days x 24 hours in a day x 20 miles per hour = 3000 miles.
So vapor from a datacenter in California might potentially come down in North Carolina or something. For the sake of those Californians, that’s gone.
Sure maybe not all hits high enough in the atmosphere, and some might travel in a circle and fall back around the datacenter, but not all. I guarantee not all.
I mean sure, but that’s an argument against where you locate data centres, not necessarily to stop them entirely. i.e. evaporating that water is a problem in a region that’s already over populated and doesn’t have enough water
Not really, because you also start depleting the readily available potable water and increasing toxin concentration in remaining sources. See other comments for just how much these things suck up. It’s truly mind staggering amounts of water. There’s very few areas that can handle that amount of water with no issue for extended periods of time. For some reason (read money) the politicians in charge of approving these things are turning a blind eye to those problems.
Low population areas with high amounts of water are usually nature preserves and things we don’t want these data centers anywhere near. If you do chance into finding a low population center with high water that isn’t a needed nature preserve, odds are you won’t have all the infrastructure you need to build the thing and you’ll run into other issues that might have an equally large but different impact. You can’t just plop these anywhere and run a power line and call it good.
That’s why in other sane countries outside the US you see a large number of proposed data centers get blocked during the environmental impact assessment stages.