Data Centers Are Not the Problem

But almonds might be.

Andrew Heaton | 9.4.2026 12:30 PM

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Andrew Heaton hates the reasons you hate data centers.

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Spiritus Mundi 2 months ago

No, it what people do with them. Just like nuclear tech. Technology is neutral. Power hungry despots on the other hand.....
MWAocdoc 2 months ago

I object to the word "consume" in this context. If I drink water, I have consumed it. It turns into urine which cannot be used again without major recycling technology. It goes into the wastewater processing system before being released back into the wild. Every drop of rainwater in America seeps back into aquifers or runs off into lakes and streams or - in some cases - gets stored in a rainbarrel to water your garden or into reservoirs for municipal use. Is water used for cooling contaminated? Does it have to be dumped into the wastewater system before releasing it back into the wild? Or could it be used over and over again for cooling purposes (theoretically) and not be, thereby, "consumed?"
1. Zeb 2 months ago
  
  If the water is used for evaporative cooling, it's consumed even more than than the water you piss out since it's likely to travel much farther before becoming available liquid water again.
  If the water is in a closed loop cooling system, I doubt people would be complaining about that so much (though I could be wrong; people love to complain about stupid shit).
  1. jimc5499 2 months ago
    
    Data Centers don't use evaporative cooling. They use a dual loop system. The inner loop is Distilled Deionized Water and the outer loop is filtered water. Outer loop water does not to need to be potable. Outer loop water has it's temperature raised a few degrees when it cools the inner loop. Then it is either returned to the source or placed in a cooling pond and reused. I don't work on Data Centers, I design comparable cooling systems for other electric equipment.
    1. mad.casual 2 months ago
      
      I don't work on Data Centers, I design comparable cooling systems for other electric equipment.
      
      jimc5499 4 months ago
      
      Actually the Company I work for is in a partnership to build power management systems for small nuclear reactors that will provide self-contained power for Datacenters.
      
      Izza tyou? No?
      
      How about:
      
      jimc5499 5 months ago
      
      Water cooled systems are the most cost efficient. There is no huge use of water in these systems. You have been fed a lie.
      
      One of the cooling systems that I've helped design, fits in a 48 inch x 48 inch x 72 inch cabinet. It contains 50 gallons of water in a closed loop system and loses less than 6 ounces of water per year.
      
      Izzat you too?
      
      I'd ask if you actually have hands-on access to the specs for the nuclear reactors that are going to power data centers internally or if you don't work on data centers at all... but I don't care.
      
      This is like sarc working as or knowing a guy who worked as a janitor in an ER and overheard... whatever... from cops or doctors or cop doctors to fit his narrative. I'm sure you purge AC lines at an Autozone or something the same way he probably actually mopped floors somewhere. You're probably even pretty good at it. But as far as playing authority for anything on the internet goes; fuck off, retard.
    2. Zeb 2 months ago
      
      OK, thanks. I don't really have a good sense of the scale of these things. There's got to be some loss of water in the cycle you describe, but once they're set up it doesn't seem like they would be consuming that much net water from the local source.
      1. middlefinger 2 months ago
        
        If that is true they can easily bring in their own water and off grid electricity.
      2. mad.casual 2 months ago
        
        Per your own point: Almond farms generally dump the water right back into the local aquifer. They don't do a lot to avoid evaporation, but it is, however small, a waste to them. Data centers explicitly vaporize it to the wind.
        
        Moreover, for whatever faults the almond farm has, and there are many (and I agree with most of them but that's not the issue), they produce actual food for humans to consume.
        
        Data centers consume phenomenal amounts of power and water and their profits are frequently between extremely diffuse, marginal improvements in existing technologies, fixing problems they, themselves cause, or "Trust me, bro."
        
        Everybody who keeps saying, "They consume about as much resources as a steel mill or a reactor or an Amazon warehouse." keeps skipping past the fact that we wouldn't want to live without steel or electricity and that the US Post Office has been effectively delivering mail and packages to doorsteps for over a century and skipping forward to the point where AI provides us with... something... that we're being retrograde for daring to live without today.
        
        Maybe AI will change the laws of physics. Science being what it always was, it will have to prove that it can violate the laws of thermodynamics. Until then, it will have to get regulated for boiling off or dumping gigawatts of heat into water supplies the same way nuclear reactors, gas refineries, steel mills, etc., get regulated while generating the fuel for it. Right now, the optimists (ironically) don't even seem aware enough, or honest enough, to make those projections and/or commitments.
        
        I kinda even wonder if the rise of the AI-optimist religion isn't entirely coincidental with the demise of the climate-doomer religion. The science-fiction perception of basic science (At scale is where the *magic happens*!) feels awful similar.
2. John Rohan 2 months ago
  
  You are right that "consumed" is not the best word, but it's good enough in this context. It's true that water is not destroyed, when it's used for crops it goes into the soil adding to groundwater or evaporates, and eventually comes back down as rain.
  
  But it's being taken from the rivers and lakes where we can use it and sent elsewhere where we can't use it. A lot of that rain then falls down over the ocean, mixing it with salt water, so it's unusable after that.
  
  Just Google "Aral Sea".
mad.casual 2 months ago

I just traveled here from the past were I've said the amount of water the Colorado River Basin devotes to almond farming rather than producing actual food, supporting infrastructure, and preventing the food and infrastructure from catching on fire has been fucked up since before people were using almond milk to flavor their frappacinos. And AI isn't making either the water situation or the frappacino situation any better.

Also, almonds just re-use the same water over and over again too.
1. Jada 2 months ago
  
  Yeah, I've said for years that we might have to give up almonds because of the amount of water, irrigation, that they use. Agricultural irrigation in general is a real problem and I have no idea what to do about it. Deserts are not good places to grow things.
  1. mtrueman 2 months ago
    
    " Deserts are not good places to grow things."
    
    I've found prickly pear cactus (opuntia ficus-indica) grows well in the desert. It grows slowly though and if you're thinking cash crop, you'll have to water it. It responds very well to watering. Opuntia can make do with 200mm rain a year. Almonds, 1200mm. According to Google.
middlefinger 2 months ago

Almond growing Kulaks
middlefinger 2 months ago

Why aren’t the investors willing to bring their own water in, dig wells, septics, off grid energy-whatever-that is the free market solution.

We live in a world where tech investors think they deserve a risk free return. Spreading the costs among taxpayers and ratepayers is literal fascism/corportisim.
Mayor Larry Vaughn for President 2 months ago

The tech sector is now fully a de facto arm of the government, able to fully skirt past constitutional protections on account of being 'private'.

One has to be willfully blind to not see that their future rounding up and imprisonment will come from these private entities that are in bed with the Feds.

While clowns celebrate their future detainment and silencing, I do not.

Those that sit around focused on arguing against the whines of the tree-huggers, while ignoring the obvious, are entirely missing the point. The notion that Big Government will not become drastically more authoritarian and totalitarian with these at their disposal is fucking childish.

I do not propose the prevention of their assembly, but at least wake the fuck up and stop pretending this is all roses.
1. Juliana Frink 2 months ago
  
  "The tech sector is now fully a de facto arm of the government, able to fully skirt past constitutional protections on account of being 'private'."
  
  Exactly. But they are essentially Globalist super-powers, making deals behind closed doors with the worst control freaks on the planet. And as such, they need to be looked at with the utmost scrutiny, and dealt with as foreign and/or domestic enemies when they try to put their jackboot on our neck.
  
  I brought this up in another thread and some asshole pretender accused me of drinking the leftist progressive Koolaid. Yep. Roses.

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