Meta announces new data centers

https://www.engadget.com/ai/meta-announces-huge-new-data-centers-but-they-could-gobble-up-millions-of-gallons-of-water-per-day-174000478.html

by ksec • 1 year ago

31 60 1 year ago

engadget.com

ksec• 1 year ago

If the water is only used for cooling then it should be a closed loop system and doesn't "used up" any water?

Unless Data Center uses water in a way we dont know?

asib• 1 year ago

Hmm bit of googling indicates one example: at least some data centers use cooling towers which dissipate heat via evaporation, i.e. loss of some water from the system.

I suppose not all water cooling systems (especially of this scale) work exactly like e.g. a water-cooled PC.

devmor2• 1 year ago

Some types of industrial cooling pull fresh water in and dump heated water back out as waste water. I don't know how Meta's datacenters are cooled, but such a thing does exist.

Describing it as "gobbling" is definitely odd, in either case.

haiku2077• 1 year ago

Sometimes the heated water is useful. I worked at a campus in a cold region where our on site DC's heated water was used to heat the floors.

cbm-vic-20• 1 year ago

I've not "done the math", but venting slightly warmer water vapor from a tower seems less ecologically damaging than releasing warm water back into an ecosystem that can't handle it, by diluting the waste energy over a wider area.

In the end it's about energy dissipation; that heat's got to go somewhere, and there's only so much you can recapture with cogeneration.

surge2• 1 year ago

Engadget often has sensationalist, inaccurate headlines. I stopped reading them when I was intimately with the actual details of an article vs the way they framed/presented it. Also, what kind of water? Pure clean water, untreated water, Grey water, etc? Bottled water and other industries consume millions of gallons too. If its for cooling, I imagine water can be used that isn't being used for any other purpose. At least the water cycle is a thing, the alternative is A/C cooling which would be even more harmful. This is one of those cases where even if a company picks the least bad option, they're going to get criticized because negative agitating headlines get clicks.

A reminder that Meta tried to go green/nuclear, but couldn't because some bees were on or near the proposed location. Another example, of letting the perfect environmental ideal that isn't feasible be the enemy of the good.

barbazoo3• 1 year ago

Do some research, there's lots of info online. Water use for example: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

perihelions2• 1 year ago

"A reminder that Meta tried to go green/nuclear, but couldn't because some bees were on or near the proposed location."

https://www.ft.com/content/ed602e09-6c40-4979-aff9-7453ee284... ("Meta’s plan for nuclear-powered AI data centre thwarted by rare bees")

https://archive.is/gPkii

barbazoo3• 1 year ago

From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.

Doesn't seem to be a closed system.

jeffbee5• 1 year ago

I guess this statement is technically correct, since a data center that needs a net of 5 million gallons of water per day would indeed be large, but I wonder if there are any such data centers in reality. None of the data center sites, which are agglomerations of data centers, rather than individual data centers, in Google's 2025 environmental report use that much. Google's worldwide footprint is a net 22 million gallons per day, and their largest complex of data centers in or near Council Bluffs, Iowa, uses less than 3 million gallons per day. So this supposed "large data center" would be something like 10x as large as any Google data center?

tacticalturtle• 1 year ago

That article has been posted several times in this thread.

But that article lists out several solutions for using water cooling - one of which is evaporative. And another mentioned is closed loop.

How do we know which solution Meta is using here?

rixed2• 1 year ago

Cooling towers can take water from a stream for instance, and return it mostly to that stream (just a few °C hotter). The quantity of water that is lost to the atmosphere is quite small. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower it's less than 1% of the circulating water.

At first approximation, water "lost" to cool down industrial installation seems not a concern at all compared to water lost to grow corn to feed cows for human consumption.

lxgr2• 1 year ago

It's also used for humidification to avoid static discharges, apparently: https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/

Looking at the figures quoted there, this can explain why e.g. the Ariozona data center uses so much more water than the Singapore one, although evaporative (i.e. open loop) cooling probably also plays a role in many of these cases.

red-iron-pine3• 1 year ago

most don't use closed loop

leakycap• 1 year ago

Who "gobbles" water? What a weird title by the site.

Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier.

Then they go on to say guzzling. Really personifying the monster. First, it's bigger than Manhattan... then it's gobbling and guzzling.

I wonder if the author or any people reviewing the piece 'fed' it into a 'starving' LLM?

GlacierFox• 1 year ago

Mark?

khurs2• 1 year ago

Yeah Mark. Robotic Alien Lizard types gobble water.

Everyone knows that.

jeffbee5• 1 year ago

500,000 gallons of water per day is approximately 1 golf course. There are 400 golf courses in Georgia. But "we just don't have the water!" screech bad-faith reactionaries.

If the press insists on covering this, it should be in terms of competing economic interests bidding on water, not rapacious ecovillains.

anonymousab• 1 year ago

I would wager that the average person against the resource usage of AI datacenters are also against the resource usage for golf courses.

The difference being that those opposing view LLMs as an inherently negative technology, and thus it is a waste of resources for something that is actively detrimental to society. Whereas golf courses are just golf, so the negative aspect is merely the resource usage.

wwweston• 1 year ago

Golf courses are semi-regular targets of concern for both people concerned about water availability and housing. So while I’m not sure what your purpose for looping them in is, their existence hardly absolves other water-demanding industry much less establishes anything remotely like a sound basis for establishing bad faith.

We could use more media discourse on the current political realities of water use and potential improved economic structure though.

redeux• 1 year ago

I wasn’t aware of gold course water consumption and I’m willing to bet most people aren’t, so instead of thinking they’re acting in bad faith it’s probably better to understand that they’re just naive.

unethical_ban2• 1 year ago

If it's impacting water availability to residents, it's a problem, full stop.

eggn00dles• 1 year ago

this whatsboutism comment reminds me of ralph wiggum ‘im helping’

the venn diagram of people supporting golf courses but objecting to data centers has a much smaller overlap than you think

raldi• 1 year ago

Data center water usage should be reported in units of McDonaldses.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 year ago

Ohio is not exactly short on water.

You've got Erie to the North, the Ohio to the South East, and about 40 inches of rainfall per year, or 81M acre-feet of water for the whole state in precipitation, or around ~80 BILLION gallons of rain water per day.

The water is returned to the atmosphere as vapor, not transmuted into bismuth and shipped overseas, never to be seen again.

You're talking about 1/20,000th of the rain water.

Okay, it's not nothing. But it's not going to ruin all the farms or something.

snowwrestler2• 1 year ago

Water availability is highly local unless you build massive canals or pipelines.

SteveGerencser• 1 year ago

You would be surprised how little water drop is required to cause wells to "go dry". When wells are punched into an aquifer, they stop when they hit water, they don't keep going to be deeper. A water level drop of just 2 inches caused all sorts of issues for locals when Intel built its new Fabs in New Mexico.

Intel said that it wouldn't be an issue, yet when it happened, they did nothing to help and forced a huge number of people to have to put in new wells. The same will happen in Ohio.

II2II• 1 year ago

If I had to guess, the issue is that they are taking treated water and releasing it back into the environment. It is consumed in the sense that what comes out is not identical to what goes in in terms of its temperature and composition (e.g. what's dissolved in it). If they aren't treating their own water, it will also have an impact on local water treatment facilities.

pj_mukh2• 1 year ago

The constant drum of limited-pie headlines is getting really grating. Stock/Personal "paper-money" valuations coupled with Citizens United has really broken our brain into thinking that everything everywhere is just Billionaires stealing stuff, when realistically this is just water that will be recycled, available for anyone else to use.

But the imagery of Mark Zuckerberg personally guzzling 500,000 gallons of water to simply waste it away is too attractive to pass up.

Lets Anti-Trust! Let's Break Citizens United! But let's also stop with this sensationalist pablum.

P.S: In the dry western deserts, couldn't this just be salty ocean water just piped through too? Doesn't even need to be de-salinated? Or hell, use the heat to boil the water and de-salinate it. Win-Win!

akomtu• 1 year ago

It's boiling water with GPUs, I guess. Even a fancy anti-matter AI reactor will be boiling water and spin turbines in the future.

throwoutway• 1 year ago

If only shareholders had the proper shares to vote against this dilettante.

Looking forward to reading "The rise and fall of Zuck"

mrits2• 1 year ago

I prefer to focus my activism toward the companies of the shares I don't hold

red-iron-pine3• 1 year ago

this is why the world never gets better

khurs2• 1 year ago

Shareholder, not shareholders.

The shares have different voting rights, and Zuck has majority control that way.

barbazoo3• 1 year ago

The Ohio Prometheus development will use gas turbines and is based on a new data center design focused on speed to deployment

So it takes away water from people and pollutes the environment. Got it. AI is great!

slt2021• 1 year ago

We really need to find a better use of heat generated by data centers.

Is there a way to harness exhaust heat to generate electricity ?

or for other industrial use case, for example light manufacturing, textile, pulp & paper ?

Is it possible to harness heat to boil water and like generate electricity ?

carlosjobim2• 1 year ago

Have you considered the trillions of gallons of water which get heated every day by the sun and then all that heat evaporates in the night?

timeon• 1 year ago

Do those trillions of gallons of water require generated energy for water treatment?

lxgr2• 1 year ago

The main problem is that the temperature difference isn't high enough to do a lot of useful things with the waste heat from data centers.

Boiling things directly doesn't work, as the temperature is way below the boiling point of water, and for anything indirect you'll need some type of heat pump – at which point the data center heat also doesn't look that attractive anymore compared to e.g. just using heat from the air or ground.

Maybe you could heat a few buildings in very cold climate, but again, the time or area required for heat exchange is a function of the temperature gradient, so this is something that's typically done using the "waste heat" [1] of power plants, which is much hotter.

[1] Removing steam from CHP cogeneration isn't free in that every joule of heat removed reduces the electricity output a bit, but within a few kilometers of the power plant, it's much more efficient than electric heating using the electricity generated.

perihelions2• 1 year ago

Datacenter district heating is a thing in Finland,

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-14/finland-s... ("Finland's Data Centers Are Heating Cities, Too" (2025))

pascoej• 1 year ago

Maybe district heating will start make sense, even given the low efficiency due to low temperature gradient.

snowwrestler2• 1 year ago

There's a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years.

This is a real issue that could get much worse.

Data centers do open-loop cooling systems because water is cheap… to them. The market reaction would be to raise water prices until it is “worth it” for data centers to invest in closed-loop, low-loss cooling systems. However they have WAY more purchasing power than local residents. So long before the market solution can kick in, social unrest will show up.

In the U.S. we just had a massive cultural shift over ~9% increase in food costs. Imagine how things will go when water starts getting too expensive. And BTW potable water availability is decreasing globally due to global warming.

Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county's entire daily usage.
“What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”

RRL• 1 year ago

We largely stopped growing avocados in the US when water rates went up. With the increased rates, and NAFTA, US avocado ranchers could not compete. There is speculation that Mexican cartels own/operate much of the Mexican avocado industry that we rely on.

I say this as someone who whole heartedly believes in desalination as a way forward, but if we refuse to embrace desalination we need to recognize the tradeoffs like you point out.

karmakurtisaani• 1 year ago

I think the problems with desalination are the cost (facilities, energy) and the leftover brine, which is damaging to the environment wherever it's dumped. It has its uses, of course, but not without drawbacks.

red-iron-pine3• 1 year ago

what's that meme...

"AI uses more power than Bolivia to help some 900/hr consultant poorly craft a painfully generic slide deck to a manager who outsourced most of his primary job functions to the Big4."

tmaly• 1 year ago

what actually happens with the water used by these data centers?

Is it just turned to steam?

Does the water get polluted?

Meta announces new data centers

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