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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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Could someone explain to me how these data centers use up water? Like is it evaporating? What happens to the water? I get the water consumption is very high but is the problem we're removing it from places that don't refill or does into the environment mean it's wastewater? Please someone help me understand.
Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.
For cooling many (most?) data centers use evaporative cooling. That evaporated water could be captured again with a heat pump (reducing the wasted water + recuperating heat for other uses), but it's Texas, so it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the data centers have no intensive to be less wasteful. So the evaporated water gets released into the atmosphere and it's gone.
Edit: about your question where the water is coming from: there is no simple answer, it's coming from many sources and it's being used for many things. But irregardless of the source, there's only so much available and using more than is available is not possible. When the math is done, it turns out that Texas is running out of water. At that point choices have to be made, and apparently Texas is chosing to increase/maintain the supply to data centers and to reduce the supply to people.
That is super helpful, thank you.
I doubt those are constantly consuming large amounts of water. hydro just lets it through, and nuclear has chained closed loop systems, and they also let through some after the last loop
A hydro reservoir has much higher evaporation than if there was no reservoir. That's usually a big part of the discussion when a downstream nation objects against another nation building a dam upstream from them.
Depending on the source, nuclear uses a bit more/a bit less water than coal. But they are in the same order of magnitude.
Ps: biomass power generation is a crime against nature.
oh, I wasn't aware of that, makes sense.
why, what's the problem with that?
edit: just opened the page to see the stats better, and yeah, I see now
They use evaporative cooling in the name of being "green". Saves a lot of energy, but at the cost of water use.
Doesnt this mean the water will come back when it rains? Its not being polluted and rendered unusable is it?
It'll come down, but probably over the ocean. Way out to sea, it rains buckets.