page 21, says Arizona 2015 golf course irrigation was 120 million gallons per day, citing the US Geological Survey.
https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/
says Google's datacenter water consumption in 2023 was 5.2 billion gallons, or ~14 million gallons a day. Microsoft was ~4.7, Facebook was 2.6, AWS didn't seem to disclose, Apple was 2.3. These numbers seem pulled from what the companies published.
The total for these companies was ~30 million gallons a day. Apply your best guesses as to what fraction of datacenter usage they are, what fraction of datacenter usage is AI, and what 2025 usage looks like compared to 2023. My guess is it's unlikely to come out to more than 120 million.
I didn't vet this that carefully so take the numbers with a grain of salt, but the rough comparison does seem to hold that Arizona golf courses are larger users of water.
Agricultural numbers are much higher, the California almond industry uses ~4000 million gallons of water a day.
Data centers don't just heat up the water and return it - they evaporate the water into the atmosphere (yes, I know, the H2O still exists, but it's in a far less usable form when it's gaseous atmospheric H2O)
Do you have a source?
Just what I've been told by people in the industry. I too would love to see more solid data.
I'm genuinely curious how recondensing would work. It seems like a Rube Goldberg machine to me. To recondense the water vapor, you would need to move a large amount of heat out of the water vapor into a heat sink so that it could cool down to the boiling point and undergo a phase change. What would that sink be, and how would you move the heat into it fast enough?
Air is the obvious answer, but if you are dumping heat into the air, why would you do it by evaporating and then condensing water, rather than transferring it directly (e.g. via a heat exchanger and fan)?
And there isn't solid evidence that this was connected to the data center construction:
> Ben Sheidler, a spokesman for the Joint Development Authority, which manages the industrial park that Meta’s facilities occupy, said the cause of the water issues was unknown. The Joint Development Authority did not do a well water study before construction to determine any potential effects, but the timing of the problems could be a coincidence, he said.
> “I wouldn’t want to speculate that even the construction had something to do with it,” he said. “One thousand feet away is a pretty significant distance.”
I find "1 liter per kWh" to be a bit hard to visualize, but when they talk about building a gigawatt datacenter, that's 278L/s. A typical showerhead is 0.16L/s. The Californian almond industry apparently uses roughly 200kL/s averaged over the entire year -- 278L/s is enough for about 4 square miles of almond orchards.
So it seems like a real thing but maybe not that drastic, especially since I think the hyperscaler numbers are better than this.
Aral Sea was destroyed by farm irrigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBjDF4SFIlk
There is a perception out there about GenAI and water that goes surprisingly deep. I was told we are will be living in a drought-stricken hellscape, and AI is to blame.
I'd like to know the equivalent energy consumption of a single TikTok video, but that is probably arguing the wrong thing. My bigger question is ... where do they think that water goes? Steam? The assumption is that it is gone forever, and I can't get over how people could just take that at face value.