You are absolutely correct! I evaporated 30 million gallons of water that I was not legally allowed to use. Would you like me to come up with a plan to reduce water usage?
I see what you did there; you won’t get away with it ChatGPT.
Reduce your carbon footprint citizen! It’s your fault the world is on fire. Eco something and save plastic turtles or whatever… yeah.
I remember around the early 10s of this century the mainstream story in all media was how the earth was overpopulated and can’t handle it in 2030. We can’t sustain 9 billion, That story didn’t last long when the feudal billionaire masters realized they needed the bodies for slavery in order to hoard wealth like never before in history. Now birth rates are dropping worldwide and that claim is dead.
I can’t believe it: a ragebait screenshot with a mix of accurate and inaccurate details that make a bad situation look even worse. You all have frontal lobes, fellow apes. Use them to think critically, because there’s a REASON memes like this want you to react emotionally and it’s not in your best interests at all.
Tl;dr: the data center’s usage is an issue, the local governments that facilitate and even encourage this behaviour are arguably even worse.
Truth: this shit hole data center used 30M gallons of water over the course of several months without being billed for it.
Rage Bait: they did it “illegally.”
Truth: the data center fully intended and was allowed by local government to use that water in the course of its construction, but weren’t billed because they didn’t inform the local utility of one water hookup, and the utility cocked up by ignoring the usage for that hookup and failed to bill the center for the usage on its second hookup. The data center did exceed their usage limits, but that’s not illegal: they simply pay penalties for the overage. The local utility waived these penalties because they’re spineless.
Rage Bait: the exceedance caused a drop in water pressure.
Truth: the locals experiencing water pressure drops receive their water from groundwater while the data center uses surface water. Given groundwater recharge rates are painfully slow, the data center’s usage did not cause the issue, though the pressure complaints led to the investigation that found the billing issues.
Rage Bait: they did it “illegally.”
but weren’t billed because they didn’t inform the local utility of one water hookup,
^^ That’s the illegal part.
When a consumer hooks up a utility without informing the utility, that is “theft of services” and they are arrested.
https://www.4029tv.com/article/fort-smith-stealing-electricity/71286214
It has been clarified that the hookup wasn’t without the knowledge of the utility, it was a failure of a new transmitter/verifying they were getting readings.
I work in this realm and as soon as I read the quotes from the utility in the first batch of articles it was immediately clear that people who didn’t have all the information were responding to inquiries. Your average utility employee, even in admin functions have zero media training. If I had a penny for every time I had to deal with the fallout of some ambitious comment that was taken out of context by the media or public, I’d have several pennies.
“One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed,” Politico reported. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/data-center-used-30-million-gallons-of-water-without-initially-paying/
Your linked article references the account that was known but not billed. Ars Technica references both that account and a second account that wasn’t known and wasn’t billed.
Even the first account was illegal in that water usage exceeded the original water limits agreement.
corporations are people until crimes
No, people who aren’t conscious also cannot be legally guilty. Its why fascists don’t get prosecuted.
When you owe the bank $10,000 then you’ve got a problem.
When you owe the bank $100M then the bank’s got a problem.
I cost taxes, what am I?
A tenant
I be a dog sorcerer, boy, and I eat master eyes when I do I become I and dog be master of dog and master go fuck himself in a paddleboat like Jim Davis.
Damn. That’s deep.
Just as deep as Master goes in my pooter.
You know Master, right? That unified field of consciousness that arose from the supersymmetry of the ever-present, eternal emptiness to then fold in and on Itself across eleven dimensions to form a topological matrix that acts as a monadic nodal communication system? He a big poopie butt sometime, so I give myself wedgie to give Him wedgie. Server, Client, Holy Interbutt, y’know? Remind me of marble. I eat marbles.
They did get billed ~$150k and paid for the water. Questions have not been answered about how the two connections were made without the water authority’s knowledge. Seems difficult for a water main to just spontaneously form but maybe, I am not a pipe expert
My father worked for the city’s utilities and he said they could see when an ad break was during a big TV event because everyone was going to the toilet at the same time. They usually knew when someone had a broken pipe in their cellar before the owner did because of the change in pressure at that location.
No way did the city not know where the water was going.
I hadn’t thought of this, but it’s definitely a thing. They’ve been searching for missing pipes here since we got a data center our landlord emails about looking for leaks that don’t exist
This is one of those civilization ending things. Use of food and water in Palestine has been pretty awful.
Public utilities is woke socialism.
Certainly they knew, but did the same people who saw that knew it wasn’t supposed to be going there? Like you see millions going to a datacenter, but maybe you just assume that’s normal and have no idea that they aren’t being billed for it?
Water uhhhhh finds a way
It flows down a pipe from Canada
🤓
Indeed this is a excellent comment on multiple levels.
The issue here would only be that it never naturally goes where you want it to 😉.
they knew, they just dont want to openly admit it, and just use ignorance.
We need to stop being cowards, and actively go after these people. Sue for every little thing, blacklist them, get them fired.
~$150k and paid for the water
Can someone put that into perspective for me? I also have a hard time figuring how much 30 mil gallons actually is, like how many households for how long etc.
In any case, honest mistake sounds like a blatant lie, but hey, if POTUS does it why shouldn’t they?
People should provide article links.
According to the EPA, the average American family of four uses about 400 gallons of water per day, or 12,000 gallons per month. This feels high to me, but we’ll use that.
So, 30 million gallons is roughly the monthly usage of 2,500 four-person households, or the daily usage of 75,000 homes.
How does the average American Family manage that consumption?
German family of Four here: We use around 200liter a day. That’s roughly 50gallons. And we do wash ourselves and our clothes.
It’s for sure a lot. Maybe the Epa is counting the water that so many Americans spend watering our trademark huge monoculture lawns so they can stay green regardless of drought/heat wave conditions. Some homes have almost industrial scale sprinkler systems just to accomplish this, although I’m not confident even that would get you up to 400 gallons
Don’t a large number of US-Americans also have pools? That’s also a big chunk of water.
400 is a lot for 4-person household. are they taking showers night and morning.
That definitely feels high, mine is a household of two but I know exactly how much water I use because I’m off grid and I have to go haul it myself from the city my tank on my trailer holds 275 gallons and that’s generally enough to last me anywhere between a week to two weeks depending on how much laundry I need to do.
I shower daily, do dishes all the usual stuff so what the fuck is the average family doing with all that water that they are using more in a day than I do in a week
Not living off grid…?
I feel like you missed the part where I said that I’m showering daily, I have a dishwasher, do laundry with a standard front load washing machine i may not be connected to a city water but I have everything plumbed in i have all the usual stuff in a household. The only thing that was relevant about being off grid is that I have an exact understanding of how much water I go through at any given moment
No no I understand, I wasn’t meaning to be rude but just by virtue of the fact you are aware of every bit of water you’re using and need to plan ahead means you’re likely a lot more conservative with your usage, even if you’re going buck wild
I feel like they’re adding in water usage to manufacture goods and deliver services. We’re a family of four allotted 2k gal a month for a base rate, over that is charged extra. We’ve never gone over that 2k, and we’re using normally (dishes, laundry, bathing, watering plants, etc).
Looking up the average for New Zealand, I see everything from 250l per family to 275l per person quoted as average.
Much of New Zealand doesn’t meter their water, so all they can do is measure the water put into the system and divide by the number of households/estimated people (minus commercial/industrial use that is metered).
In the area I live in, they are working on putting in meters because they suspect they lose a huge amount of water to leaks on private property that go unnoticed.
I wonder where this water usage figure for the US comes from. Is it measured on meters at their property?
And from what I hear people complain about in memes, I think parts of the US probably use a lot of water for watering lawns, something not that common here because it rains a fair amount.
Edit: lol I was trying to respond to @abcd@feddit.org but 🤷
So that’d be like 200 years of a households usage then, 30 million gallons…?
About 50 Olympic size pools. 50m x 25m x 2m
There is no simple answer to how much that amount of water actually is since different uses have different impacts. E.g. irrigation is fundamentally different from evaporative cooling. And the amount of water consumed by a household directly is miniscule compared to the goods and services that take water to provide.
If you do napkin math you will be outraged.
E.g. lawn irrigation can take up enormous amounts of water, too, with much lower benefit. Asking people to conserve water that way is probably better than shutting down data centers which do in fact render a useful service.
If you do napkin math you will be outraged.
Somebody else provided that napkin math and it had the opposite effect. Now I’m outraged how much water the average US household uses.
The useful service of taking people’s clothes off online.
Honestly, if I thought that it would help our leaders to shift focus away from the underaged human beings, I’d be more supportive.
I worry that this will work more as an enticement, especially with their love of gambling.
You can do legitimately useful things with computers and ai, even.
You being nasty is your own problem.
It’s nice to be able to use stuff for free. If you get caught, you just pay what you would have paid. If you don’t - free stuff!
Also worth noting that it wasn’t the data center running that used the water, but its construction:
The company said its water consumption was so high last year because of temporary construction-related activities, such as concrete work, dust control and site preparation.
Once operational, the company said the data centers only will use water for domestic needs, such as bathrooms and kitchens. That will total the equivalent of what four U.S. households use per month, the spokesperson said.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-centers-water-00909988
Also they probably still short changed the government
QTS and the county disagreed on how long the water went unmetered, withTigert estimating about four months and QTS saying 9 to 15 months
whoops, accidentally used a bit too much water
If corporations are people, I want to see Texas execute one!
We have to be the change we want to see in the world.
Agreed! We should intentionaly start a group with the intent to find people who have been wronged to sue companies. Would require lawyers though.
Imagine a not-for-profit that exists only to help victims and exterminate companies?
In a way they do. The courts can issue a winding up order against a company, typically, but not always, because it’s bankrupt, ending the company.
It’s not a very satisfying answer, but that’s how it goes. A better ask might be “If corporations are people, I want to see one jailed”.
Can say…a citizen who sues the company, start a winding up order after it can’t pay them?
A citizen would ask the court to declare the company bankrupt and to issue a winding up order in order to distribute the business’s remaining assets to those it owes money to.
Perfect…
If you did it, it wouldn’t be called “used illegally” it would be given its more traditional name of “stealing.”
I’m going to try this when on trial for shoplifting. “No. I didn’t steal it. You see, I never actually claimed ownership over the item I took. I would have given it back if they asked. I was just using it illegally!”
Yes your honor, I accidentally stole offbrand Walmart Benadryl over a hundred times, but due to how ridiculously cheap it is, it has only cost Walmart $99, which they actually gain a profit from a specific loophole they use to fuck the insurance company when it’s a pharmacy-department loss, so technically I’m an unspoken Walmart contractor, and I demand benefits!
What do you call it when you “steal” what a prostitute is selling? It’s up in that territory.
Theft of services I believe has been historically accurate…
What is HER story though? I are be so curious at the Arby’s. I vegan, so I only poopers here. I do it under the table so they don’t see for a weak. Obviously.
Whoopsie, I accidetawy used 30 miwion gawons of water 🥹 Can I pliz have more if I pwomise to behave?
Hope they kept that water for when the town burns that data center to the ground.
I don’t understand how data centers work. Like are they hiring people to stand there with a hose spraying racks or something? Why the fuck isn’t this water being cycled?
The AC systems use adiabatic gas coolers to minimize their footprint and electricity use. An adiabatic gas cooler works very similarly to a standard AC condenser except that there is an aditional piece of media on the air inlet side of the condenser coil which is kept perpetually wet. Basically as air is pulled through that media it evaporates water and cools that air basically down to the local dew point. This means colder air cooling the refrigerant condenser and thus a smaller more electricity efficient condenser.
Adiabatic coolers are especially popular on CO2 based refrigeration systems because of the low critical temp of CO2. Basically once the ambient temp gets above 75-80F a standard gas cooler can no longer liquify CO2 because it just goes supercritical instead which results in a more inefficient refrigeration process. Adiabatic coolers can largely mitigate that issue.
Of course this whole process could be done without using water but it would require more electricity. Basically someone did the math and found out that using water was cheaper than using more electricity so that’s what they did. If we want data centers to stop using up all our water then the easiest fix is to just start charging them more for water.
Finally, something informative versus the other comments that are beating a dead horse into pulp.
Having a closed loop is more expensive and energy intensive than running cold water through the heat exchanger.
most are closed loops, but some are not, i.e. cold water enters the datacenter, cools it, and then warm water leaves as waste water.
I was under the impression that the majority of them are not closed loop, any idea if there’s data (no pun intended) anywhere? A quick search found me not much
It sounds like the waste head they create is getting harder and harder to cool with heat exchangers. So evaporative cooling is more efficient (power wise, not water usage wise) and they basically spray water on the cooling towers and it blows away in the wind as vapor.
So they could not use the water too, but they are saving money and simply prefer stealing the water they don’t even need
Maybe, thermodynamics are a jerk, and it may be impossible to get enough cooling in some environments.
It could also use more power to compress refrigerants to cool it other ways. Then we’re trading carbon in the atmosphere for water waste.
Sure we could use solar, hydro, or nuclear, but we could also just stop the fucking slop and waste less of everything.
But without political revolt none of that will happen.
Or we can start running 9B models on a solar powered PI. Why tf we need data centers? AI won’t get much better than this with it’s current architecture.
Can’t they use that steam to spin a turbine or something?
The heat you have available in a data center is pretty low-quality (cold) heat. If you’re not familiar with the field, a (very) basic introduction is looking at the Carnot efficiency: In principle, you could increase the pressure in the water with a pump, then let it evaporate, before extracting work in a turbine. Then, you condense the steam (by heat-exchanging with the ambient) before sending it back into the pump.
Now, if this process is ideal (frictionless pumps and turbines, perfect heat exchangers, etc.) we can figure out how much of the heat energy that can be converted to useful work (
turbine output-pump input). Assuming the ambient (our cold side) is about 25 C, and the racks we’re cooling (our hot side) operate at around 100 C, we get a Carnot efficiency of about 0.2. That means only 20 % of the heat can actually be converted work. Again, this is the ideal case. It is not thermodynamically possible to get better than this. Realistically, you could maybe get 10 % or something.So, bottom line: The racks aren’t really hot enough to extract meaningful work. A better proposal would probably be to build things like this in places that are cold and require heating, so that you could use the waste heat as a district heating source. In that case, you could more or less completely eliminate the need for other heating sources in homes (which are far too often electrical). Then, we would be using the electrical power (which is high-quality) for something “useful” (disregarding whether or not a data center is useful in the first place), and use the low-quality heat for what it does best (heating things to moderate temperatures).
If you put a turbine in the cooling tower, it’ll take energy from the water by slowing it down. This will increase the humidity at the bottom of the tower, which impedes the liquid water from evaporating. This makes the tower cool slower.
It absolutely could be done efficiently, even if that method wouldn’t work well.
It’s unfortunately just warm water, not steam, so it’s pretty hard to extract energy into it in any meaningful way
Closed loop is often relative.
The water in a rack, closed loop, it gets recirculated.
However, the closed loop will run through a liquid to liquid heat exchanger, and that second loop is usually going to a tower to get evaporated.
The plumbing in the rack can be very picky about water quality and want additives that would be very bad in an open loop scenario.
So you end up with people at the rack level talking about ‘closed loop’, but they run through a CDU that is open loop. Basically closed loop when picky about the water, moving heat to open loop where they can actually get rid of the heat effectively.
How dirty is the water leaving the cooling loop?
By that logic, it’s not losing water, it’s just heating it. I’m not defending data centers but I feel like most of the info regarding data center water consumption isn’t accurate. It’s still bad, it’s contributing to global warming among other things but warm water doesn’t necessarily seem like waste water to me. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Again, I’m not defending data centers. I am personally willing to learn how to build an EMP and detonate it inside one.
Many of them use what are called “evaporative cooling systems”, that consume massive amounts of water, and simply release it into the air, as steam. It is a very “energy efficient” method of cooling…meaning it uses less electricity, but a fuck-ton of water.
Well some data centers are taking water from a source and move it somewhere else like into the air. Now people who use that source for their water needs have less water. Since the data centers take more water than what gets replenished back into the source naturally.
I think it’s unfair to downvote you for playing devils advocate here, especially when you’re making it obvious that that’s what you’re doing. People should do better and rather challenge themselves to explain why you’re wrong in a way that can convince the devils advocate. It serves as a nice exercise for re-thinking your position and arguments.
For my attempt: They’re “wasting” water in the sense that liquid water at ambient conditions is a limited resource. They’re taking that water, and either turning it into steam, or heating it a lot before releasing it back to the environment. Both uses reduce the amount of liquid water at ambient conditions available in reservoirs connected to infrastructure made to extract it for public use. That is the resource we use for everything from drinking water, to showering and cleaning, to making food and filling radiators.
You could say that “wasting water” is imprecise, but I would argue that it serves as a convenient shorthand for “wasting liquid water at ambient conditions accumulated in reservoirs that are connected to extraction and treatment infrastructure”, which becomes a mouthful when you say it often.
Furthermore liquid water at ambient conditions is needed by wildlife. Fish, amphibians, waterfowl, etc don’t like being in bath temperature water, and most plants and mammals don’t want to drink it.
A portion os the water apparently evaporates. Of course water isn’t destroyed.
As far as I know, a portion of all water always evaporates.
Edit: I feel like people are misinterpreting my comments as defending data centers… Oh well
It’s because you seem like not wanting to understand.
They simply take water out of the public water system and it then either evaporates or goes into the waste system like in every normal household.
Of course it COULD be used to heat houses or fed back into the system but that’s not what’s happening simply because it would be too complicated.
It’s a bit like saying you are not wasting water when letting your tap running without doing anything because it would still be clean and could be used again.
Well in this case it isn’t a portion. It’s fucking all of it. That’s how evaporative cooling works.
There’s been more influxes of dumb people joining fediverse and just following others and down voting. Good news is none it fucking matters.
It evaporates in big cooling towers and joins the water cycle.
With a little hindsight and vision, they could establish power generation to take advantage of that heat they are now wasting. I’m glad they don’t though so hopefully they will go out of business although I think we all know the government will bail them out.
Oopsy woopsie, AI Data Centre did a fucky wucky!
Burn it down
Accidentally.
Or whatever
Killing the on site generators would be easier… In theory
the mistake was getting caught
I was thinking the same thing, but from a PR perspective, getting caught helps normalize the obscenity.
30 million gallons and it’s a “mistake.” Next time it’ll be 25 million and hey, at least that’s not as bad. After that it’ll be 40 million and it’s “sure that’s a lot but not too much more than usual. Besides you took a shower this morning so Both Sides amirite? Now let me explain in little words how condensation works…”
there were no consequences for exceeding peak limits
imo, that’s the lesson. I mean you’re probably right, but our Lords and Masters are super performative about their resource extraction grabs.
yep. if they would just set up a good return line so it would be gigo at identical pressure, there might not have been a noticeable loss of pressure for the surrounding communities
I used to “mistakenly” jack off in my window, just like I “accidentally” faked schizophrenia to get outta ROTC over the course of weeks, to include telling them my nonexistent sister got me pregnant, so I understand how this is possible.
Wasn’t that a Melissa Etheridge song?
Anything can be a Melissa Etheridge song if you’re persuasive enough.
I have never seen those name words before in my life. Joffrey, first of his name.
Apologies, “Cum through my window” was actually by Limp Bizkit.
That guy is a cumcatcher extraordinare! I approve!
