Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.

The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.

Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]

So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]

To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.

It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/water/

Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.

If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.

A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.

So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.

I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.

That turns the focus to almonds and how insanely bad they are.

I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.

No, it's just that people notice when they're being asked to concern themselves with numbers this far to the right of the decimal point. It's not just that almonds are bad. It's that they're vastly, heroically worse than data centers, so much so that optimizing water usage at data centers is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic.

If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.

> But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.

you've hit the silent nail on the head.

The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).

If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?

It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.

None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the talk about the water consumption is a red herring intentionally spread by the PR machines of these companies because it's it reframes the debate around an aspect of the issue that is ultimately irrelevant and distracts from ones that are more important like carbon emissions, pollution, electrical/gas price spikes due to induced scarcity and ultimately how these mega projects have little benefit for the people who will experience all the negative consequences of them.

Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.

That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure and our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things.

Sorry if you think 280 household of water is not a lot and if the facts don't help your cause.

For a small locality it is a real amount of water. And if there's a draining reservoir, then that's _even more_ water being pulled out of a reservoir.

The almond discussion is tiring as well. We're not growing almonds in most of the world. The water in Montana isn't the water in Cali as well.

If the facts aren't on your side on a specific issue, at least have the courage to accept it.

> I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.

People protest golf course water usage. Water usage problems in Cali are not as big of a concern to people in Montana than water usage in Montana.

And of course there are people who think that the added buildout of data centers _for AI usage_ (people acting like "oh these data centers are just from everything", let's not kid ourselves what the source of the demand is) is a net negative. People don't think that about food.

Personally I think we shouldn't be setting up massive farms in a desert (and perhaps just figure out how to make society work in a way where during winter we accept having less fresh veggies available) either.

Data center defenders need to get better talking points, cuz they sound very silly (perhaps as silly as the arguments heard on the other side!)

Should I start running through the list of industries that use more water than datacenters?

Montana exports tons of petroleum products and beef. Should I illustrate how those industries also uses orders of magnitude more water than datacenters?

In fact, I would be impressed if you could come up with a single locale where a datacenter would be the primary water consumer. Even top 3 would be kind of impressive.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say other than "datacenters use water and I don't like it, and yeah those other industires in the area use 10-100x more, but like, I don't like datascneters so we need to focus on that"

I think the real snag is that average people have absolutely -zero- concept of how much water industry uses. Your local recycling plant washes all that dirty plastic you throw in the recycling to the tune of thousands of gallons an hour. And you're learning this right now for the first time in your life. But sure, datacenters running water through metal pipes, five alarm crisis here

What happens to the water used by data centers? Is it still clean, just warmed up?

It's turned into steam. It's sent up into the atmosphere.

What the water figures show is that water usage is not the problem of these data centers. It's a drop in the bucket, literally. Yet another way to see it is that given the average weather in Lincoln, NE (29 inches of rain annually) it rains 480 million gallons annually on the 600 acres campus that Google's data center is located on. So it would be possible to collect only 3% of this rainwater, and it would be enough to cover all their water needs. Water, at the local scale of this campus or city, is an infinitely renewable resource.

Other issues than water are far worse, like pollution associated with the manufacturing and running of all the data center gear. Water is not the issue.

>Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France

I wouldn't be surprised if this 4x difference was purely caused by lawns.

My state's gasoline refineries use about ~13 million gallons of water each day. It's about .7 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline refined.

I don't know if you mean to be reinforcing that it's nothing or not

Remind me median income?

$87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill.

Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.

Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.

Yeah I’m sure someone on median income feels the same

Probably, yeah.

Do you think people look at big facilities and calculate that they're spending whatever times the medium wage on a crucial service and get mad about it?

Converting things into median wages is a way to put them into scale. They spent this many wages for construction, they spend this many on supplies, they sell this many in product, they hire this many people to work there. If anyone thinks its bad for anything a company buys to exceed a median wage, that's a very silly expectation and I wonder where they got it.

Remind me who leaves 8 bath tub faucets running 24/7/365?

Me?

So a system to recirculate the same 24 gallons per minute would be more expensive than $100k per year for water?

Condensing the steam back into water would undo the cooling power, so yes. Massively less efficient. Negative efficiency, as required by thermodynamics.

Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.

Apparently so

Evaporating a gram of water is 2260 joules. Evaporating 20 gallons per minute, 1/3 of a gallon per second, gets rid of around 3 megawatts of heat.

If you had to use heat pumps to move all that out of the water, you'd have to spend about a million dollars on their electricity. If you're somewhere that you can use unassisted radiators all year, great. If you need to force the heat out part of the year, that easily gets worse than boiling off water.

I live in a country of 5 million people and we lose 40 times that a year to leaks.

still stays in the ground

ground is actually a vector of loss for water.

if you look at household water consumption, most places in north america treat their water and return it to a freshwater source. you can scale cities very wide and water use might go up, but the consumption rate is actually low. more depending on how much people water their lawns.

farms on the other hand 'spray water on the ground' but it actually removes the water from the freshwater source and needs to be replenished.

leaks is water loss/consumption. human activity is no guarantee. leak in this case is still bad.

The freshwater source might be an aquifer so staying in the ground isn't a loss to the local water supply, though it may be a loss in regards to effort to move and treat it.

So a single datacentre introduces a water consumption cost that is within an order-of-magnitude of a near-median-population nation.

Within the amount of water lost by a near-median-population nation, perhaps. Not within the amount of water used productively by a near-median-population.

Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?

Lincoln data center "comes online" in 2026 (info from Google). These are early, non-mature operating numbers. I'm disappointed this wasn't made more clear in the story and, of course, most of the comments here don't understand the context.

Transparency is not the same thing as honesty.

Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.

Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.

Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.

> Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.

none of these are reason for the country not to demand transparent data for monitoring.

Being able to monitor things properly has high societal value - it prevents fraud (more data being visible makes it harder to fake). It prevents skirting regulations, and makes it easier for competitors to sniff out high margin opportunities (which serves to break monopolies in some sense).

Not to mention that statistics collected could have value in aggregate in research sometime in the future.

Like auditing and accounting, the country should mandate transparent data reporting of utilities usage for all industries.

The rub is that datacenters rank like 34th for water usage by industry.

So by ignoring the other 33 higher users and just focusing on DCs, what are we actually trying to accomplish?

I agree. And let it be legislated.

I was replying to "Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?".

You're assuming they're hiding the numbers because they think they seem bad in the discussions about data centers using too much water. The cover up is likely motivated much differently, and I would bet that doesn't really care about people complaining about waiter usage.

I don't understand your question. I'm commenting on the figures we know from this report. I don't have to work out the motives behind them to evaluate whether they're material (they are not).

Because the marketing teams don't do numbers and it's a high risk strategy

They are, and people just accuse them of lying!

Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.

Google prints the water usage of each of their sites in their annual report. What other industry is more transparent about water usage?

Perhaps not a meaningful amount at a national/worldwide scale. However, an individual datacentre consuming that amount at a local/regional scale could be more impactful.

The nearby city uses as 30Mgal to 60Mgal per day vs the data center that uses 13Mgal per year. The article gives you the data.

Water in Omaha, Nebraska isn't all that scarce, either.

“Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion… reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption”.

I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.

It looks to me like there's two Google DCs with different LLCs?

> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.

> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.

> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.

> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.

Even that 765 is like 0.04% of the water needed to irrigate Nebraska's ethanol corn crop alone. And ethanol is basically an agricultural proof-of-work function.

Also even in the totally fake scenario where that water completely evaporates, it's just gonna rain on Iowa a bit more.

I guess it has to be said: it is not guaranteed that the water rains in the "right" spots for it to be useful freshwater again anymore. Dumb example: maybe the wind currents mean that the water simply comes back down downstream.

One shouldn't assume that evaporated water comes back into the system in the place you want it to. Water management orgs try to reduce loss from evaporation for a reason!

OK sure but this is like defense in depth. It's a negligible amount of water, most of it doesn't evaporate, and most of what does rains somewhere it's useful anyway. The actual damage here is microscopic.

You're literally on a thread just a comment or two from the water cost of producing ethanol. Why are you still talking about data center water evaporation? This is morally equivalent to worrying about the water consumption of Slip-N-Slides. Everything is a rounding error compared to agricultural misuse of water.

Maybe I was replying to the comment I was replying to and not to the top-level comment.

Don't you have a company to found or run or whatever? What are you doing in here?

You can’t eat your algorithm.

So while pointing to agriculture and saying look there - those guys & gals way more than us it’s a red herring because we need food.

Sure improve efficiency of ag, but a better comp for water usage should be made. Reasonable people tune out.

you can't eat ethanol either, you burn it to create more global warming

That's why they talked about ethanol.

How does it compare to the water used growing alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia?

"... and keep your hand up if your ethical, water saving stance means you've become vegan."

i'm guessing it means that when datacenter gets too hot (maybe load, maybe climate, or maybe a combination), they may use more evaporative or other methods to help cool. e.g. a turbo mode for cooling that uses more water, but isn't required at all times.

Please elucidate if I'm wrong, but, isn't the problem the distribution of the water and not the amount? If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.

I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.

> If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water.

Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.

Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.

I think that's true, but also is the corruption of allowing works going without enough preparation.

If I remember correctly there are a considerable number of cases where habitants said they would have increased price in their bills or some even saying that their supply will be cut short or completely.

And this is not even considering other problems such as noise, pollution, etc

This feels like an important point! People comparing to leaks (or other distributed examples that aggregate similarly) are not thinking about how the amount of water used in a single location changes the scale.

Also by making more data centers you don't have inherently less leaks XD

Not a meaningful amount of water in early reporting from a non-mature operating state. Why are we drawing any conclusions at this point?

The only conclusion I am drawing is about this particular report.

So you’re limiting the scope of your analysis to this report only? Where does it mention water usage by housing built in Austin over the past two years?

You’re comfortable making those comparisons and concluding how significant the water usage is but you’re unwilling to check the context of the data in the report? Not sure I follow.

I'm commenting on the story we are all commenting on.

You addressed nothing I said/asked. Have a nice day!

You as well!

Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.

Real estate is almost always "hidden" behind an LLC or REIT, as recommended as common practice by CPAs and attorneys.

It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.

Do I understand the logic here to be "if there's an LLC with an obscure name involved, it must be using too much water"?

No, it’s that if there’s nothing to hide, then they shouldn’t jump through so many hoops to avoid basic industrial reporting requirements.

It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.

If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.

I'm commenting here about the water figure. Are you talking about something else? Because the impact of that amount of water usage is knowable regardless of the corporate structure of the data center.

To me, the logic is companies don’t put their brand on activities that contribute to tragedies of the commons.

Alphabet could have named the company “google data center 083941, llc.”

But Alphabet deliberately obfuscated its control of the facility.

That’s more of a convenient way to distribute and isolate risks than it is anything nefarious.

You see, that is nefarious. Not taking responsibility is nefarious.

Or to shift blame and hide wrongdoing.

Literally every movie ever made was made by an LLC created specifically to make that movie. This is not some nefarious thing. It’s common business practice in any number of industries

What I now wonder is why the hell they're trying to hide it then. If the numbers are strongly on your side, why hide them?!

Because nobody reasonable believes water use is any issue, but these numbers are proxy for the usual stuff companies don't disclose for usual reasons (ones that rhyme with "competition" and "stock market")?

They sure as hell aren't making it easy for the "reasonable" to take their side when their response to the "unreasonable" is "the numbers you claim are bad are actually good, but you don't get to see them because they go to a different school".

We have perfectly good reasons to hide behind shell companies and ndas! Anyone who disagrees is a hater!

Because hedge funds are going to use those numbers to get better estimates of their business and revenues and use that in their forecasting which means Google loses in the stock market.

Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.

Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.

No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.

I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.

It doesn't seem insignificant. It is in fact insignificant. And it supports one of the most popular and widely used consumer products of the last 100 years, so it seems like a pretty incredible bargain.

Tech companies are bundling AI into their base subscriptions and force feeding it to consumers, so I doubt the metrics they are reporting to their shareholders represent real demand or value.

>they are not meaningful users of water.

How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.

See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...

Yes. GP is literally saying that 1-2 million gallons of water is a pretty small number not meaningful to anything at scale.

It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.

Please compare 1 million gallons to the 1 quadrillion gallons in the aquifer, or the 31 trillion that falls from sky each year in Nebraska and get back to me.

A single average sized fully occupied apartment building uses 8-13 million gallons per year on average.

A typical single family home uses over 100K gallons.

Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).

So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.

How do you get the California water to this datacenter?

In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.

Did you stop reading the article at the first data center? "More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports _547.88 megagallons_ for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption." (emphasis mine)

That's still not a meaningful amount of water! Did you work out what that equates to? We discussed it elsewhere on the thread.

A typical house uses 100,000 gallons a year. So that's 5000 homes.

Austin alone added over 70,000 homes over the last 2 years.

Austin metro area has a larger population than the state of Nebraska.

Do you recall reading many articles about the water usage calamity 70,000 new houses constitute?

Yeah, though it says right below that 6 data centers report using 750MG, which is weird cause each of them would average 125MG, so 10 times more than the 13MG reported above.

At what point does it become significant? I’d think 200 olympic swimming pool worth of water taken out of the local ecology would have some impact. I guess it depends on the region.

The article doesnt say though if all the water ends up evaporated.

Read TFA, that is just the usage of the smallest data enter in NE, across NE their water usage is ~50x that, and that’s just Nebraska, not exactly a hub for data centers

You get that 50x that is a rounding error too, right?