alt Hacker NewsDo you have any references for this comment: '"water use" thing is a myth anyway'. I would like to show my kid who keeps complaining to me about AI water usage.
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how does this square against georgia just ignoring it draining the water supply,
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center...
and reports of undrinkable water due to the ai center construction?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
even in the article you linked, it admits AI data centers CAN harm water supplies
"Individual data centers can sometimes stress local water systems in the way other industries do, but when you use AI, you are not contributing to a significant problem for water management compared to most other things you do in your day to day life. "
What is the point youre trying to make?
He also posits in the popular NYT article about a data center sucking up all the water: "But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater from construction. It had nothing to do with the data center’s normal operations (it hadn’t begun operating yet, and doesn’t even draw from local groundwater). The residents were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this is not an example of a data center’s water demand harming a local population."
And its like he claims "its not ai data centers themselves, its the construction of them" as if its an important distinction that exempts data centers from harm. It's not.
One day, the data center wasnt there, now it is. And the sudden presence of that DC caused the water problems.
Visit datacenters.
The original paper that started this meme said "data centers consume water indirectly through the water used for electricity generation" and then counted water evaporating out of Lake Mead behind the Hoover dam as water use. This made the numbers seem gigantic, people got mad at it on social media, and 1 year later here we are.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...