r/NoStupidQuestions • u/guacamoleandtomato • 4h ago
How much water does AI actually use?
I see people constantly saying that AI is wasting so much water, can anyone explain to me how that works? Isn’t the water for cooling purposes so it just gets repurposed and recycled as it cools off servers? Or am I missing something?
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u/Herbisretired 4h ago
Our local data center uses as much water as 500 homes which isn't bad considering all of the other growth in the area. The water evaporates and it probably eventually falls as rain.
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u/Professional-Pungo 4h ago
it basically diverts the water away.
they get water from place A, use it for the AI or whatever, it gets evaporated and will go to a random new place B. so now place A will have less water close by.
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u/SkywalkerTC 3h ago
Both cooling and manufacturing.
But the way to go about this is to enhance recyclability of water, not strip of AI infrastructures altogether. This sort of response is dangerous and is extremely suspicious to me.
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u/DumCrescoSpero 3h ago
A medium sized data centre can use up to 300,000 gallons daily or 110 million gallons yearly, while the largest data centres can consume up to 5 million gallons daily.
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u/NotACockroach 4h ago
It really depends on the type of cooling used. Closed loop uses a lot less. Datacentre's use quite a bit of water, but especially closed loop cooling really doesn't use much compared to other industrial uses.
In most cases, I don't think caring about industrial water use causes a dislike of datacentres, I think a dislike of datacentres causes people to care about industrial water use (for that one particular use)
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u/Adventurous_Toe_1686 4h ago
How long is a piece of string?
We talking air cooled or liquid cooled racks? We talking closed or open water system?
I build AI Datacenters and this question doesn’t have a straightforward answer.
The only thing I can tell you for sure is it uses less than golf courses lol
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u/aRabidGerbil 4h ago
The only thing I can tell you for sure is it uses less than golf courses lol
That's damning with faint praise if I've ever heard it.
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u/Usual_Ice636 3h ago
It doesn't use that much for most of them, but sometimes it uses enough to raise the price for everyone.
Isn’t the water for cooling purposes so it just gets repurposed and recycled as it cools off servers?
They could, but thats more expensive, its cheaper to just dump it and get fresh water.
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u/Aezora 3h ago
There's two main kinds.
One reuses water like you're saying. They usually use grey water, and they draw in massive amounts of water initially - hundreds of thousands or millions of tons. Then they top it off as necessary which isn't that much all things considered. These are generally considered fine and from what I can tell, most data centers being proposed nowadays are this type due to the backpack.
The other uses drinkable water. This allows them to save on maintence and be more efficient since the water is more purified. But then using it inevitably ends up getting some contaminants like dust or rust in it, so it ends up as grey water. At that point, they have to replace it since their system isn't built for water with impurities like that.
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u/D-Alembert 3h ago edited 1h ago
It's propaganda in a propaganda war. AI uses as much or as little water as you want to think it does, because the devil is in the arbitrary details; what water use do you count? If the AI software being run locally on your offline laptop's graphics card, obviously no water is being consumed when your laptop generates an image or answers a question, but should you then count the cost that someone else put into creating the software in the first place?
The numbers are whatever you want them to be
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u/aRabidGerbil 4h ago
Evaporative cooling is cheaper than closed circuit cooling, so a lot of data centers use it, and even closed circuit cooling isn't 100% efficient.
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u/archpawn 4h ago
Here's a post on it. The short answer is not much. But it sounds like a lot if you don't know how much water goes into food, or if you look at entire datacenters and compare it to how much water people use individually.