If a salesman misrepresents his product in any way of form, he gets called a swindler, faces potential legal consequences, and the people who bought his product are called "victims".
If a politician does this, it's just "business as usual", and his voters were supposed to do enough research to make the correct choice.
You know, I said a similar thing about Brexit. To a British person. In their face. While being way less intoxicated than I care to admit. And she replied a thing that still resonates with me to this day. She said that I have to remember that there were a significant number of people who didn't vote Leave, and they're now being fucked over as well. They didn't want that, they didn't vote for that, and yet they still have to live with the consequences. And leaving the country is not an option for most people.
Remember that when you talk about what "y'all Texans" voted for. Have some empathy and compassion for the people that did the right thing and still have to live through this shit now. Learn from my mistake.
It's been, idk, six years or something since, and I still cringe at least once a week thinking about how ignorant I was. Never had/took the chance to apologize either.
If Britain had reentered the EU, began to stabilize, and voted to Leave a second time, the analogy would be fair. But as it is, Americans that voted for trump or didn't vote on morality reasons, had ALL of the evidence, and consequently I think deserve to be reminded of that. In my experience people that voted Blue are pretty happy to share that and jump of the "Have the day you voted for" train.
I'm not sure how much, if any, this applies to Brexit, but Trump 2 was also the result of the inaction, complacency and outright complicity of plenty of people who "did the right thing." This goes way beyond the fascists, so I'm still pretty comfortable saying Americans did this to themselves.
No, I've just thought about the trajectory America is on for more than five seconds, so I put the "did the right thing" bar higher than voting blue. The self-defeating stupidity and willful ignorance of most of the "good" half of the American political spectrum leaves very little room for sympathy. For the exact same reason that MAGA thinking everything they don't like is a liberal hoax isn't an excuse for their stupidity, the liberal center thinking everything they don't like is a Russian conspiracy isn't an excuse for their stupidity. I mean hell, did you see how people here were talking about Uncommitted in 2024? That's not "doing the right thing;" that's being a useful idiot, and there's not much reason to distinguish between blue useful idiots and red useful idiots. I do feel bad for the non-idiots, but the past year and a half have proven that that demographic is distressingly small.
I think it's implied that this is targeted at people who voted Trump. Of course I feel bad for the people who voted Harris, but now have to deal with the same bs. Same thing for Brexit. At least that is how I understand it.
Not for people, whose political knowledge were much less. I've talked with people on Facebook, who legit thought Project 2025 was a hoax made to "trigger the libs". They only realized there were literal instruction videos and a 700 page plan (not just a few pages), once Trump returned to office.
Ignorance isn't innocence. Playing games to "trigger the libs" makes you just as guilty as every one else, and even more a piece of shit. We don't have elections to "trigger" another party. We do it because the lives of millions are on the line.
The signs where there 2016 and it was even clearer 2020, those people should have done thier own research and used critical thinking...
but the truth is they kind of where incapable of that
The fact so many people are not equipped with such skills is half meticulous conspiracy to consolidate power and half Reagan and likewise idots of both parties.
The education system, news media and so many factors that should be helping people be informed and help them to inform themselves have been purposefully dismantled and happenstancely mangled.
It is not an accident, it is not coincidental, it is not a mystery that so many people are not taught critical thinking and related skills.
(Hell the gop is still hellbent on getting rid of the modern codification of critical thinking and education best practices (SEL))
It's like we are complaining of all the people stumbling into things because they are blind and we're mad because they ain't really blind they just have thier eyes closed but the systems and people that where supposed to teach them how to open thier eyes was dismantled and they lived thier lives so long blind they cannot fathom anything else, it would mean they where lied to and betrayed all thier life, it is much easier for them to accept everyone is blind and sight is the lie.
According to many suspicions and now also reported from an NSA agent that was involved in the investigations, Harris beat trump by a wide margin. The voting machines had been tampered with in order to fix the election, and that the machines used have more or less been vulnerable to this happening and likely has been happening for the last 15+ years, allegedly.
So we may not have voted for this. Not to mention the hard gerrymandering that has been happening for the past 20 years. (There's pretty much always been gerrymandering, though).
It's concerning that I see no real momentum picking up over this and voter roll purges, and all the bomb threats on election night that absolutely no one wants to talk about.
It feels like the conservatives have poisoned the water on election "stealing" rhetoric so well, so that now, when there is evidence and patterns that deserves to be picked up, no one wants to do it at the risk of, "being like them."
And that is dangerous logic when dealing with bad faith actors with power, access and motive.
There's one critical difference between these two things: Your vote affects the whole country, not only yourself. Someone who decides to use that power based on vibes and willful ignorance while there's no shortage of people telling them the truth can't later claim innocence; we as people have a duty to at least try to be informed on the consequences our actions have on other people. MAGAs would deserve some sympathy if their stupidity only affected themselves, but there's certainly no party affiliation filter to being thrown in Alligator Alcatraz.
People should be angry and upset about this. Similar to the story some weeks ago where residents of a small Texan town (seemingly rightfully at first) complained about the noise pollution of a Bitcoin mining farm. Turns out they all voted Republican. It's always "we'll deregulate and bring business" just that the modern businesses they bring are a net negative for the area except for the politicians and the companies. Is almost like these regulations were there for a reason.
Both Bitcoin and AI are stupid VC money that only matters in a very small bubble, and they're not business in a traditional sense. They just leech resources at their compute centers to make the people who own them and live far away rich. I pity all this who didn't vote for this kind of bullshit. The rest, enjoy your shorter showers and everything else! But remember, it's the Dems who want to dictate stuff like water usage. Not in my free country! Oh, the water is gone because a greedy Corp stole it? That's fine, one day it's my turn to be rich.
At least mining did create some local jobs, though I do think that the area itself loses out because it's a finite resource and the environmental impact is always there. And as you said, these modern examples don't really require a big local workforce. It doesn't stimulate the local economy a bit.
It doesn't matter if you voted Republican. These problems are a direct consequence of Republican policies that they announced before the elections. Fearmongering about "any party left of us will take away your freedoms to limit your resource consumption" is a trait of far-right parties. My point was not about Democrats. It was about people who vote Republican.
The US has a political problem with its voting system that benefits two parties, and they won't get rid of it. As long as this is the case, no other party matters. Also, Dems usually enact more regulations for the environment; see also California.
I voted neither Reps or Dems because I live in the EU, and my vote always went to Greens or other environmental parties.
Well, yeah. If you put it somewhere cold like the Arctic it’ll melt the ice caps and make global warming worse. Better to let the cold places stay cold and put the hot data centres somewhere that’s already hot! Sorted - no more global warming (just some localised warming I guess)
I often wondered about how much chaos one or two individuals were to just pump 3 or 6 high powered rounds into that place from 1k-3k yards out. Then do it again another day from a different spot, and then another day at different facility, and so one.
Yeah damage and casualties would be insignificant at those ranges but the fear and panic as random bullets crack over head in the parking lot, punching holes in the roof. The place would have to shut down for days while they search for damage.
It would take two or three of these in a row before the police realized they weren't just loose bullets from drunks shooting into the air. Then it would get WAY worse because of the panic and bad press but also because the FBI and AFT will shut them down even longer while agents scour the entire plant to recover every single bullet fragment as evidence.
It would lead to a total loss of productivity. Like they would have to treat every facility with same security levels as fucking Groom Lake after something like started happening lol. More likely they'd just have fuck off with these data center monstrosities if they started to become bullet magnets.
And there's a good chance that the culprits will never be caught. Lots of unsolved crimes out in those deserts.
Well, it could work. If the local government gave a shit. Which they don't, because Texas. But the water going into a datacenter does come out... The main downside being that it's hotter (which is a limiting factor, you can't run it in a loop without some big cooling system, and rivers/lakes are by far the most effective way way to do that).
The article I saw doesn't say what the problem is exactly. Is the datacenter pumping from an aquifer rather than a lake/river? Are they raising the temperature in ways that affect the environment negatively? Are they abusing the municipal water supply instead of pumping their own water, forcing the taxpayer to essentially subsidize their infrastructure? Lots that could go wrong, but it's all shit that should be fully figured out during the permitting process.
There's lots of factors to consider beyond just water. Cost of power, cost of construction and staff, access to internet, proximity to demand for low-latency access, and so forth.
On a suspicion, I had a quick look, and of course there's also tax incentives, apparently.
Love this quote "Texas had long been a preferred location for large data centers given its central location, economic climate, reliable electric grid, historically low occurrences of natural disasters, educated workforce and pro-business environment." :|
Yeah, the Texas electric grid is as reliable as a cardboard shed in a hurricane.
Speaking of hurricanes, "historically low occurrence of natural disasters" is also the exact opposite of reality and rapidly getting WORSE.
The real reason is of course corrupt politicians in charge of a kakistocratic government that'll let them get away with anything up to and including mass murder while throwing money at them.
...reliable electric grid, historically low occurrences of natural disasters, educated workforce...
Lol. More like, "...pro-business environment with developing-nation levels of regulation while still having a minimally sufficient power grid, the kind of natural disasters that don't affect data centers enough to offset cost savings and a desperately exploitable and cheap workforce.
I'm aware Texas has some top tier educational institutions, but for whatever reason, they're not accessible to their workforce. Texas is about #30 for education in the US.
Apparently only partially, but mostly a natural gas plant to even further wreck the planet.
There's hundreds of billions of dollars available to pour into this, and for what benefit to the nation? Meanwhile, the rest of the country's infrastructure is crumbling.
Interestingly, solar panels work more efficiently in cooler temperatures.
During the 1986-1992 California drought, we were informed in the San Francisco Bay Area region that water service prices were going to go up unless we conserved strictly.
They said this to a bunch of California hippies, on account that we were in California.
So we way got on board. We stopped flushing. Any water that was rendered non-potable we'd repurpose for watering plants or filter it for second use. Japanese naval baths (weird tiny bowl seats and a sponge, used in the Imperial Navy, WWII) got popular so people were keeping clean via a tenth of normal water usage.
We conserved too much according to the water department and they raised prices anyway.
This sparked some investigations (by journalists, since investigative journalism was still a thing then) and found that agriculture got water for much cheaper, and was still using it once before flushing it (now laced with pesticides) out into the sea. Needless to say, we conservationist hippies were livid.
It's still a problem, as the utility companies routinely lobby our congress and governor (and Newsom may know how to be a California liberal, but he's still a Dianne-Feinstein-style ( / Nancy-Pelosi style) money-grubbing neoliberal. He just has game, especially when opposed to far right idiots. The setup in Monster's Inc (power crisis in a city where scream is the principal power source) was inspired by the Enron fraud affair leading to rolling blackouts and Texas siphoning off California's general fund. And our governments from Schwarzenegger (who I will never forgive) to Newsom are in the pocket of PG&E. (I'm on SMUD now and my bill is conspicuously less.)
Also, according to Climate Town, the Sauds own a lot of California farmland, where they grow alfalfa to import to the mid-east to feed their cows. Alfalfa crops are one of the most water hungry, and is one of the big ways beef is driving the climate crisis (and towards a massive food shortage and global famine!) and the water tables, to which they have access and first-tap rights, gets lower every year. 🕙
So I suspect that the Texas AI centers are getting water at a cheaper rate than private homes. Maybe it's something to get active about.
So the people should build a giant warehouse that uses a bazillion gallons of water that feeds into the warehouse and in the same pipe back to the water system, get wholesale rates and charge consumers the cheaper rate!
Same pipe, just make sure it goes into the warehouse so you can charge people for what leaves.
No, I want the people to buy a warehouse, have the utility run pipe into the building and back out to the water supply, have the warehouse pay wholesale rates and resell it to the people at wholesale after its half second journey through the detour pipe in the warehouse.
How strong is Fair Maps Texas? Assuming it's sincere in its effort to redistrict Texas fairly, Maybe they need more brickthrowerssaboteurs sign wavers and clerical volunteers.
I know not everyone's guilty, but let's be real. Anyone still living in Texas after having a near decade to see the writing on the wall to get their shit together and leave (and I don't mean something as arduous as immigrating, I mean literally just moving across the state border) kind of only has themselves to blame.
It's ground zero for Trump Administration neo-conservatism [fascism]. Genuinely, what do they expect?
I worked 10 years at a data center, all that water is recycled - it is very carefully chemically balanced so as to not corrode the pipes and pumps, no they do not use it once and dump it out.
From what I've seen it's "not worth the effort or expense" to reuse the water. Some of them literally just send tap water through the cooling loops and then into the sewer drains
Because the massive stacks of high-powered chips that they use, tend to get very hot. They don't use the kind of computers that work through passive cooling.
The priorities are completly screwd up. If they found a way to power the AI datacenters with humans, Matrix style, would they ask Texans to sacrifice their first borns to do so?
Industrial cooling is all about evaporating some liquid into gas. For evaporative coolers, that liquid is water and works best if the air is dry and water is plentiful (the absurd part). If you don't have water or the air is so humid that evaporation is difficult, the liquid is expensive refrigerant which must recycle back into liquid in a closed loop with a gas compressor that pumps the waste heat into the air through forced convection heat exchangers (big fans blowing air past hot refrigerant-filled pipes), all of which consumes a lot of energy.
Ideally, we'd live in a post scarcity society in which huge arrays of solar panels would provide electricity to run closed-loop refrigerant plants that would consume zero water to cool our data centers.
There's only one obvious answer to that question in a capitalism world. Because it's cheaper than other places. Why is it cheaper for the corporations in the driest places where common people need to stop using showers is also obvious.
its funny how these AI centers are mostly if not all in red states only, simply because they know the legislation wont do anything, and encourage them anyways, plus the resident that leans right are less likely to make a big fuss over it.
Why aren’t they building these things underground or repurposing old mines in areas where geothermal is plentiful for power and aquifers are stable, instead of in water-poor, temperature extreme places like Texas and KY? …Oh right, poverty and red voters. Better to exploit and damage then have some upfront cost and long-term stability. I forget.
Building anything like this is seen as a jobs creator. Data center companies then pass the proposal around to municipalities and ask them who want jobs. These places then bend over backwards to offer tax incentives, fast permitting, etc. with no regard to whether their location can actually support the building.
So of course they get built in the most corrupt places.
Yep most local governments will give tens of millions away for "local jobs" even if there's only like 3 local jobs.
Could literally just hand those 3 people 4 million each, and save the environmental disaster.
Literally dealing with that in my own local community. They want to build an outdoor concrete batch plant in the middle of downtown to create like 10 jobs. I mean you'll make the small city into a ghost town. Shut down the multi-million dollar observatory, all the small business down restaurants. Not to mention they will cause everyone wealthy enough to move out of town. This will leave the poorest residents left in the tax base but hey they're creating jobs!
It's not just jobs as in the physical bodies that are going in to work at the place, it's also the taxes and the net expansion of the local economy (eg, the people working there will be spending money at local restaurants and businesses, the facility will be paying for utilities, and so forth). It's a complicated thing to evaluate.
It's not complicated when you factor in that tax payers are paying for the incentives. And they rarely work out for the local residents.
When Amazon was flirting with building their second headquarters for AWS, a small number of cities tried to band together and require a floor amount for reinvestment into the city. Amazon, being one of the richest companies in the world, said, "Nah...well just cancel the building."
These companies want to socialize the cost of their buildings but privatize the profits those buildings create.
My country is int he middle of a data center boom, fuelled by the usual royal and political, uh, inputs. We also have seasonal droughts, which often result in water rationing and angry people upset at the mismanagement of our resources. Wonder which will give way first.
You should complain whenever million gallons of water are wasted by corporations seeking profits or by governments for their shady operations. Not just when it's about AI.
How much time before someone figures these infrastructures make very good targets for vandalism? I risk I will see datacenters destroyed by mobs and other actors before I die.
It’s not vandalism, it’s direct action. Or sabotage, if you consider this to be a time of war (which it undoubtedly is — a class war). Don’t use the enemy’s language against ourselves.
In theory we have elected representatives looking out for their constituents. Surely they would limit water use so this wouldn’t happen, and prevent the datacenters from relying on generators while waiting for power hookup, right? Oh, a red state. Never mind
In my country, I know of two cases of datacenters that use waste water. And another is supposed to run on salt water, in the future. Those cases don't trouble me.
You should look them up. They forced the closure of two factories owned by Elbit Systems and forced Barclay's Bank to divest from Elbit through sustained sabotage actions. They were actually incredibly successful at disrupting the Israeli genocide machine, which is the real reason for their proscription - not for their latest action at Brize Norton, as the government and mainstream media would have you believe.
Well, I mean...Not for nothing, but Texas being one of the reddest states there is, and even being willing to double it down by heavily gerrymandering themselves for Trump worship, means that they did vote to serve their deep state and oligarch overlords. Which is quite ironic for the small government party. And that's coming from me, who believes in the potential of AI for humanity in the long-term, but only if used responsibly and not at the cost of people's quality of life to satisfy the corrupt elite.
But then again, irony is in their DNA, starting with all their preaching about "keeping kids safe". Speaking of which, Trump files where? I need to check if Epstein's name comes up in those.
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down AI response time? A lot of the time you get an instant response from an LLM, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don't need it that urgently.
The majority of energy consumed is for training the AI models, not providing output from those models.
This means the resource consumption is not tied to usage and prompts. Also it means resource consumption to train models is temporary, relative to the model.
That is how water use works, yes. The water goes back into the environment and is later reused.
Also, there's a good chance the AIs are not being trained in the same facilities that they're later being run in. Different sorts of work is being done.
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down Ai usage? A lot of the time people make unnecessary prompts or receive unhelpful generated text, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don't need it at all.
At scale? None. If we assume that (a) the number of queries are constant (i.e. that the slow response doesn't drive away users) and (b) that the efficiency is the same whether it's fast or slow, then having computers that take longer to calculate each response just means you need to have more of them working in parallel to service the demand.
Now, for a home user running AI locally, you could maybe save some energy by using more efficient silicon since you only need it to process one query at a time (assuming lower-spec parts actually are more efficient, which may or may not be the case), but that's not really what we're talking about here.
Oh, and THEN, the AI will ask you to go take a shower if you're feeling dry, dirty or thirsty. I mean after telling you why taking a shower is good, why people take showers, which celebrities took showers the past week and asks if you want to ads taking a shower to next week's reminders.
This is already happening in Iceland. Iceland is so cold, AI datacenters can just use the passive cooling from the environment. Iceland also has some of the cheapest electricity on the planet, thanks to public investment in energy infrastructure.
Hopefully we'll see more development in Greenland for similar reasons.
Start moving where it's cold, people. That's where the new 'coasts' will be.
I know politicians are spineless but the obvious solution seems to be to keep increasing the cost of using water until the data centers switched to a closed system. Don't most nuclear power plants recycle most of the water they use?
Charging the data centers more would also be a nice increase in revenue for the local municipal area
In regards to nuclear power plants, the first and second loops are recycled constantly but the third loop can either be recycled or open loop. That's why most nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water. They use the water from a lake, ocean, or whatever to do the last cooling step. It's possible but it's not as cheap as throwing away the warm water once you're done with it with cheap cold water.
They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you're cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I've seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.
Apparently closed loop systems are not good enough for these kinds of applications, and often instead use evaporative. Which kind of logical, since they're not running a single factory overclocked GPU with a top of the line desktop CPU, but a cluster of factory overclocked GPUs with a server CPU.
Apparently closed loop systems are not good cheap enough
There I fixed that for you.
What should happen is that the cost of water to these businesses should increase, which would then incentivise other more expensive methods of cooling, but that would make line go up at a less steep angle which makes shareholders sad.
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.
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.
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.
Of course it would be possible to capture and condensate the steam but that equipment would cost money. If just using more water is cheap and unregulated there is no incentive not to do just so.
A lot of the need is due to the heat density of the GPUs used for GenAI. Could they build less densely? Yes, and they likely already are but need to go further. I have seen data centers with racks less than half (I think it was closer to one quarter) populated for energy density issues.
Could they use sea water? Sea water causes more corrosion. (I am uncertain if this data center is close to the ocean.)
that can also do GenAI work for a similar "hardware cost per output"? No
FYI, the server hosts for the cards often have eight of the cards each. The power draw becomes the host server's RAM and CPU, plus eight times 750w (or whatever). It scales up quickly.
LOL! The Red Run Deregulated Texas Oblast does not surprise me with this kind of shit. If it dries up, the fucking red voters can stay and find the fuck out.
So genuine question, how is a datacenter needing water equivalent to showering? When people shower, the water gets dirty and needs to be cleaned. When water is used to cool servers, it gets warm but that should not be a problem, it doesn't need to go through a water treatment facility afterwards (?)
I have no idea what the infrastructure setup is like for cooling that data center, but one way of water cooling is to take in cool water and dump the hot water. If you do this in your home, it's an "open loop geothermal heat pump." You pull in water from a well, heat or cool the water with your AC heat exchanger, then pump it back into the ground or into the sewer.
The 2022 estimate for how much water was used in Texas in total was 15.2 million acre-feet, or approximately 5 trillion gallons. So these AI centers are accounting for 0.00926% of Texas' water use.
The issue is not the statewide consumption. The Texas water grid is not one unified system. It's a patchwork of local aquifers, municipal supplies, and private wells.
If a datacenter is built in an area with a water grid that can not handle its consumption, people will run out of water sooner or later.
(Especially AI) Datacenters are built in areas with low energy costs, as it is their biggest expense, with no regard for the local water levels:
... about two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress.
Water is often the last consideration when making siting decisions for data centers because it’s cheap compared to the cost of real estate and power, said Sharlene Leurig, a managing member of Fluid Advisors, ...
Water laws are often times asinine on a large scale. Depending on where the center is it'd probably be easier to run them out of town or otherwise cut off the water through sabotage than to increase the price of water.
Honest question: wouldn't it be advantageous to build data centers in cooler areas next to large body's of water, like the upper Midwest? I'm sure there are metrics I'm ignorant of, but that would seem to make more sense than building in a hot/dry place.
There are many other inefficient uses of water much bigger that these data centers. Texas has a major agriculture sector despite being basically a desert. People love to have green lawns. And a quarter of Texas is currently in a drought.
My point is that if you shut these data centers down right this instant the needle isn't going to budge much.
Imagine complaining about the water a data center uses in Texas but being totally fine with the billions of gallons it uses to cool it's two nuclear power stations. Yes I looked it up, yes it's a ridiculous hypocrisy and yes it would be lovely if people stopped falling for clickbait like this.
You are missing the point that it's millions of gallons daily, just for AI. You know the thing that actively makes our lives worse for no reason at all
I'm sorry it's making your life actively worse and I'd love to hear exactly how, because for me it's done nothing but improve my life in so many ways. It's got me over writers block so many times, helped me work through tricky problems of all kinds, taught me all sorts of excellent drawing, singing and music creation skills, helped me make sense of societal and political issues that I would not normally have understood and answered questions with a total absence of ego that I would never have had the nerve to ask before for fear of sounding stupid.
Hegelian dialectical materialism? It walked me through conversationally until I got it. The feasibility of someone being rich enough to build a rocket and just leave earth forever? It laid everything out in incredible detail (the resources required, it turns out, would be mindbogglingly insane).
AI hating is dumb and that's a hill I'll happily die on.
Considering the odd strawman comparison to nuclear power plants you started your argument with, I suspect the level of understanding of Hegelian dialectical materialism you have learnt from the AI, is probably not as advanced as you seem to think it is.
Also every single one of your examples describe situations which could have been solved by other means (and it would even require you to exercise that brain of yours a bit as well, an added bonus no doubt).
What does your precious AI say to the fact that people are being forced to save water so a corporation can mindlessly waste it on their profits instead? That seems to me to be the core of this subject, something you not only breezed lightly over but in fact completely ignored in favour of your personal anecdotes.
Taught you bullshit. You put in a prompt and got shit out. You don't care shit. Did you go and fact check everything it told you? Because guess what they make shit up constantly.
It's not a conversation though is it... but I think you know that. There's so much bandwagoning against AI at the moment. It's just sad and unfortunately, quite predictable.
It's okay for simple stuff. But the amount of times it has given me blatantly wrong information or impressive looking solutions that are needlessly over complicated and broken is incredible.
You're not unique because you love llms, it actually is something less intelligent and people with psychopathic tendencies tend to like as well. Ask your little chat bot to look up some studies on it if you like.
You could have already done all of this with the internet itself...I dont understand why people think they need llms. Hell, you could have done all of that just from books, no internet needed. I feel like people are as lazy as they've ever been.
Also, you totally trust everything you learned. Thats not smart, being that its literally a corporate owned propaganda machine thats purpose is only to sell you ads to make the rich richer. Why do you think they are putting billions into it? Its sure as FUCK not for betterment of humanity.
Something tells me all of the stuff you're creating with the assistance of AI is garbage.
Not even because you're using AI to do it, but because what most people create isn't impressive and I doubt your skilled enough to be an exception.
You might think AI is helping you and making you better, but that's probably because you're not put in actual positions where your performance is measured and matters.
For me, AI is only useful for consolidating search results into a response. It's wrong more often than its not, and to make use of what it says in any meaningful capacity requires knowledge that AI can't give you.
Actually yes. They did vote for this.
If a salesman misrepresents his product in any way of form, he gets called a swindler, faces potential legal consequences, and the people who bought his product are called "victims".
If a politician does this, it's just "business as usual", and his voters were supposed to do enough research to make the correct choice.
You know, I said a similar thing about Brexit. To a British person. In their face. While being way less intoxicated than I care to admit. And she replied a thing that still resonates with me to this day. She said that I have to remember that there were a significant number of people who didn't vote Leave, and they're now being fucked over as well. They didn't want that, they didn't vote for that, and yet they still have to live with the consequences. And leaving the country is not an option for most people.
Remember that when you talk about what "y'all Texans" voted for. Have some empathy and compassion for the people that did the right thing and still have to live through this shit now. Learn from my mistake.
It's been, idk, six years or something since, and I still cringe at least once a week thinking about how ignorant I was. Never had/took the chance to apologize either.
If Britain had reentered the EU, began to stabilize, and voted to Leave a second time, the analogy would be fair. But as it is, Americans that voted for trump or didn't vote on morality reasons, had ALL of the evidence, and consequently I think deserve to be reminded of that. In my experience people that voted Blue are pretty happy to share that and jump of the "Have the day you voted for" train.
I'm not sure how much, if any, this applies to Brexit, but Trump 2 was also the result of the inaction, complacency and outright complicity of plenty of people who "did the right thing." This goes way beyond the fascists, so I'm still pretty comfortable saying Americans did this to themselves.
People love to have a reason to look down on other people.
It is practically an animal instinct, it is an effect of our hard wired tribalism.
Your comment is pretty telling that you are just as influenced by this.
No, I've just thought about the trajectory America is on for more than five seconds, so I put the "did the right thing" bar higher than voting blue. The self-defeating stupidity and willful ignorance of most of the "good" half of the American political spectrum leaves very little room for sympathy. For the exact same reason that MAGA thinking everything they don't like is a liberal hoax isn't an excuse for their stupidity, the liberal center thinking everything they don't like is a Russian conspiracy isn't an excuse for their stupidity. I mean hell, did you see how people here were talking about Uncommitted in 2024? That's not "doing the right thing;" that's being a useful idiot, and there's not much reason to distinguish between blue useful idiots and red useful idiots. I do feel bad for the non-idiots, but the past year and a half have proven that that demographic is distressingly small.
If I remember correctly, a lot of people just didn't vote, which means the people who did vote to stay just got screwed that much harder
I think it's implied that this is targeted at people who voted Trump. Of course I feel bad for the people who voted Harris, but now have to deal with the same bs. Same thing for Brexit. At least that is how I understand it.
Not for people, whose political knowledge were much less. I've talked with people on Facebook, who legit thought Project 2025 was a hoax made to "trigger the libs". They only realized there were literal instruction videos and a 700 page plan (not just a few pages), once Trump returned to office.
Ignorance isn't innocence. Playing games to "trigger the libs" makes you just as guilty as every one else, and even more a piece of shit. We don't have elections to "trigger" another party. We do it because the lives of millions are on the line.
yes, and yes.
The signs where there 2016 and it was even clearer 2020, those people should have done thier own research and used critical thinking... but the truth is they kind of where incapable of that
The fact so many people are not equipped with such skills is half meticulous conspiracy to consolidate power and half Reagan and likewise idots of both parties.
The education system, news media and so many factors that should be helping people be informed and help them to inform themselves have been purposefully dismantled and happenstancely mangled.
It is not an accident, it is not coincidental, it is not a mystery that so many people are not taught critical thinking and related skills. (Hell the gop is still hellbent on getting rid of the modern codification of critical thinking and education best practices (SEL))
It's like we are complaining of all the people stumbling into things because they are blind and we're mad because they ain't really blind they just have thier eyes closed but the systems and people that where supposed to teach them how to open thier eyes was dismantled and they lived thier lives so long blind they cannot fathom anything else, it would mean they where lied to and betrayed all thier life, it is much easier for them to accept everyone is blind and sight is the lie.
According to many suspicions and now also reported from an NSA agent that was involved in the investigations, Harris beat trump by a wide margin. The voting machines had been tampered with in order to fix the election, and that the machines used have more or less been vulnerable to this happening and likely has been happening for the last 15+ years, allegedly.
So we may not have voted for this. Not to mention the hard gerrymandering that has been happening for the past 20 years. (There's pretty much always been gerrymandering, though).
It's concerning that I see no real momentum picking up over this and voter roll purges, and all the bomb threats on election night that absolutely no one wants to talk about.
It feels like the conservatives have poisoned the water on election "stealing" rhetoric so well, so that now, when there is evidence and patterns that deserves to be picked up, no one wants to do it at the risk of, "being like them."
And that is dangerous logic when dealing with bad faith actors with power, access and motive.
There's one critical difference between these two things: Your vote affects the whole country, not only yourself. Someone who decides to use that power based on vibes and willful ignorance while there's no shortage of people telling them the truth can't later claim innocence; we as people have a duty to at least try to be informed on the consequences our actions have on other people. MAGAs would deserve some sympathy if their stupidity only affected themselves, but there's certainly no party affiliation filter to being thrown in Alligator Alcatraz.
People should be angry and upset about this. Similar to the story some weeks ago where residents of a small Texan town (seemingly rightfully at first) complained about the noise pollution of a Bitcoin mining farm. Turns out they all voted Republican. It's always "we'll deregulate and bring business" just that the modern businesses they bring are a net negative for the area except for the politicians and the companies. Is almost like these regulations were there for a reason.
Both Bitcoin and AI are stupid VC money that only matters in a very small bubble, and they're not business in a traditional sense. They just leech resources at their compute centers to make the people who own them and live far away rich. I pity all this who didn't vote for this kind of bullshit. The rest, enjoy your shorter showers and everything else! But remember, it's the Dems who want to dictate stuff like water usage. Not in my free country! Oh, the water is gone because a greedy Corp stole it? That's fine, one day it's my turn to be rich.
At least mining did create some local jobs, though I do think that the area itself loses out because it's a finite resource and the environmental impact is always there. And as you said, these modern examples don't really require a big local workforce. It doesn't stimulate the local economy a bit.
Presumably they also pay some taxes, although it sounds like may of these places set up in unincorporated areas to avoid such things.
Often the municipalities will offer tax breaks in order for the mega corps to set up shop in their town, so they often don’t pay taxes.
If you care about the environment and are upset about corporations and their datacenters your best voting option is neither the red or blue party.
It doesn't matter if you voted Republican. These problems are a direct consequence of Republican policies that they announced before the elections. Fearmongering about "any party left of us will take away your freedoms to limit your resource consumption" is a trait of far-right parties. My point was not about Democrats. It was about people who vote Republican.
The US has a political problem with its voting system that benefits two parties, and they won't get rid of it. As long as this is the case, no other party matters. Also, Dems usually enact more regulations for the environment; see also California.
I voted neither Reps or Dems because I live in the EU, and my vote always went to Greens or other environmental parties.
This but just the Microsoft logo lol
"Since Microsoft dropped its DEI initiatives, it's good actually!"
I've heard it said that the austrian school/anarcho capitalism is the anti Vax/flat earth of economics
It's always a good idea to put computer centers in areas with water scarcity. /s
In hot areas with water scarcity.
And an electrical grid held together by duct tape and chewing gum
Ok, if MacGyver did it then it'll hold for ages.
Well, yeah. If you put it somewhere cold like the Arctic it’ll melt the ice caps and make global warming worse. Better to let the cold places stay cold and put the hot data centres somewhere that’s already hot! Sorted - no more global warming (just some localised warming I guess)
I mean from Microsoft's perspective it is working out...
Until someone goes all eco terrorism.
I often wondered about how much chaos one or two individuals were to just pump 3 or 6 high powered rounds into that place from 1k-3k yards out. Then do it again another day from a different spot, and then another day at different facility, and so one.
Yeah damage and casualties would be insignificant at those ranges but the fear and panic as random bullets crack over head in the parking lot, punching holes in the roof. The place would have to shut down for days while they search for damage.
It would take two or three of these in a row before the police realized they weren't just loose bullets from drunks shooting into the air. Then it would get WAY worse because of the panic and bad press but also because the FBI and AFT will shut them down even longer while agents scour the entire plant to recover every single bullet fragment as evidence.
It would lead to a total loss of productivity. Like they would have to treat every facility with same security levels as fucking Groom Lake after something like started happening lol. More likely they'd just have fuck off with these data center monstrosities if they started to become bullet magnets.
And there's a good chance that the culprits will never be caught. Lots of unsolved crimes out in those deserts.
Well, it could work. If the local government gave a shit. Which they don't, because Texas. But the water going into a datacenter does come out... The main downside being that it's hotter (which is a limiting factor, you can't run it in a loop without some big cooling system, and rivers/lakes are by far the most effective way way to do that).
The article I saw doesn't say what the problem is exactly. Is the datacenter pumping from an aquifer rather than a lake/river? Are they raising the temperature in ways that affect the environment negatively? Are they abusing the municipal water supply instead of pumping their own water, forcing the taxpayer to essentially subsidize their infrastructure? Lots that could go wrong, but it's all shit that should be fully figured out during the permitting process.
There's lots of factors to consider beyond just water. Cost of power, cost of construction and staff, access to internet, proximity to demand for low-latency access, and so forth.
Yeah. It's just water. Who cares, if at least the internet is good and such. /s
If AI centres need so much cooling, why are they building them in Texas in the first place?
Lack of regulations of all kinds
On a suspicion, I had a quick look, and of course there's also tax incentives, apparently.
Love this quote "Texas had long been a preferred location for large data centers given its central location, economic climate, reliable electric grid, historically low occurrences of natural disasters, educated workforce and pro-business environment." :|
Found the reason
Yeah, the Texas electric grid is as reliable as a cardboard shed in a hurricane.
Speaking of hurricanes, "historically low occurrence of natural disasters" is also the exact opposite of reality and rapidly getting WORSE.
The real reason is of course corrupt politicians in charge of a kakistocratic government that'll let them get away with anything up to and including mass murder while throwing money at them.
Lol. More like, "...pro-business environment with developing-nation levels of regulation while still having a minimally sufficient power grid, the kind of natural disasters that don't affect data centers enough to offset cost savings and a desperately exploitable and cheap workforce.
I'm aware Texas has some top tier educational institutions, but for whatever reason, they're not accessible to their workforce. Texas is about #30 for education in the US.
Solar power?
Apparently only partially, but mostly a natural gas plant to even further wreck the planet.
There's hundreds of billions of dollars available to pour into this, and for what benefit to the nation? Meanwhile, the rest of the country's infrastructure is crumbling.
Interestingly, solar panels work more efficiently in cooler temperatures.
Texans are some of the dumbest Americans, so they are proud to allow businesses to exploit them.
Texans are some of the dumbest Americans, so they are proud to allow businesses to exploit them.
Texans are some of the dumbest Americans, so they are proud to allow businesses to exploit them.
During the 1986-1992 California drought, we were informed in the San Francisco Bay Area region that water service prices were going to go up unless we conserved strictly.
They said this to a bunch of California hippies, on account that we were in California.
So we way got on board. We stopped flushing. Any water that was rendered non-potable we'd repurpose for watering plants or filter it for second use. Japanese naval baths (weird tiny bowl seats and a sponge, used in the Imperial Navy, WWII) got popular so people were keeping clean via a tenth of normal water usage.
We conserved too much according to the water department and they raised prices anyway.
This sparked some investigations (by journalists, since investigative journalism was still a thing then) and found that agriculture got water for much cheaper, and was still using it once before flushing it (now laced with pesticides) out into the sea. Needless to say, we conservationist hippies were livid.
It's still a problem, as the utility companies routinely lobby our congress and governor (and Newsom may know how to be a California liberal, but he's still a Dianne-Feinstein-style ( / Nancy-Pelosi style) money-grubbing neoliberal. He just has game, especially when opposed to far right idiots. The setup in Monster's Inc (power crisis in a city where scream is the principal power source) was inspired by the Enron fraud affair leading to rolling blackouts and Texas siphoning off California's general fund. And our governments from Schwarzenegger (who I will never forgive) to Newsom are in the pocket of PG&E. (I'm on SMUD now and my bill is conspicuously less.)
Also, according to Climate Town, the Sauds own a lot of California farmland, where they grow alfalfa to import to the mid-east to feed their cows. Alfalfa crops are one of the most water hungry, and is one of the big ways beef is driving the climate crisis (and towards a massive food shortage and global famine!) and the water tables, to which they have access and first-tap rights, gets lower every year. 🕙
So I suspect that the Texas AI centers are getting water at a cheaper rate than private homes. Maybe it's something to get active about.
So the people should build a giant warehouse that uses a bazillion gallons of water that feeds into the warehouse and in the same pipe back to the water system, get wholesale rates and charge consumers the cheaper rate!
Same pipe, just make sure it goes into the warehouse so you can charge people for what leaves.
You want to trust the water a data center with zero regulations is regurgitating?
No, I want the people to buy a warehouse, have the utility run pipe into the building and back out to the water supply, have the warehouse pay wholesale rates and resell it to the people at wholesale after its half second journey through the detour pipe in the warehouse.
Don't hold your breath on that.
I hate how datacenters get blamed for issues that are clearly caused more by shitty outdoor farms than cooling towers
What The actual fuck?
elon is currrently using the aquifer drinking water under memphis to cool grok. he’s also powering it with generators and smogging out the city.
please do not use grok.
I don't care, nothing will come inbetween me and my boi, mecha hitler!
/j if that wasn't obvious
So someone fed it Cards Against Humanity, huh?
Ol' Muskie can't the King of Edgelords unless Cars Against Humanity is feed into his LLM.
Texan here: we barely get to vote on shit at all. And they're gerrymandering to make it even harder.
I'd call Texas a clown car but it's too big to qualify.
The estimate of the majority Democrats would need to retake the Senate is something like 70/30, based on the degree of gerrymandering.
And the math just gets worse every time maps are redrawn.
How strong is Fair Maps Texas? Assuming it's sincere in its effort to redistrict Texas fairly, Maybe they need more
brickthrowerssaboteurssign wavers and clerical volunteers.After Civil War 2, Texas and parts of Mexico would end it with a treaty as a single independent country with their own shit stains to live with.
Yes, Texas did vote for that. Haha, Red states suffering is funny.
How a fraction of voters decide who runs Texas
I know not everyone's guilty, but let's be real. Anyone still living in Texas after having a near decade to see the writing on the wall to get their shit together and leave (and I don't mean something as arduous as immigrating, I mean literally just moving across the state border) kind of only has themselves to blame.
It's ground zero for Trump Administration neo-conservatism [fascism]. Genuinely, what do they expect?
Texas is a big state with a large number of interior groups and cultures. Also, go where, exactly?
Is everyone in Montrose supposed to pick up and move to LA, the city Trump is currently telling to bite the curb?
Whether or not they did we all exist under the same atmosphere.
They owned the
libsthemselves..They owned the themselves
@grok this true?
incomprehensible text about being mechahitler
Grok: "Antisemetic, communist bankers are being stingy with public water."
I don't understand why AI data centers would CONSUME water. Once they fill up their chiller loops, then... that's it, right?
It's hard for me to imagine them relying on the temperature of the incoming water, and dumping all the warm water as discharge.
They're probably using cooling towers, which cool through evaporation. They should be using reclaimed though.
As long as it is cheaper to buy water, then evaporate it, big firms will continue to do so.
With a COP of around 15 and up it is difficult to argue with the economy of this.
Local regulation would be required, but that would need politicians who don't suck.
This is the right answer. They use evaporative cooling. Which does save a lot of power so they can claim to be "green".
Hmm, I wonder if that plays into the wild and frequent thunderstorms in Texas now.
Its got to be the data centers or global warming overall (and its shifting of the Jetstream's).
I worked 10 years at a data center, all that water is recycled - it is very carefully chemically balanced so as to not corrode the pipes and pumps, no they do not use it once and dump it out.
But it does spoil and evaporate doesn't it? So it's still a continuous demand that's not sustainable in that part of the world.
From what I've seen it's "not worth the effort or expense" to reuse the water. Some of them literally just send tap water through the cooling loops and then into the sewer drains
Because the massive stacks of high-powered chips that they use, tend to get very hot. They don't use the kind of computers that work through passive cooling.
I say, as my Laptop burns into my lap.
The priorities are completly screwd up. If they found a way to power the AI datacenters with humans, Matrix style, would they ask Texans to sacrifice their first borns to do so?
Narrator voice: in fact that is what they did
This Texas, the state where the lieutenant governor Dan Patrick wanted the elderly die for the God of Economy.
Prerequisite to that would be banning abortions so that tracks
Google "Roko's Basilisk"!
Why the fuck do they alway pick the driest places to use the most water. Fucking morons
I always rant about tech moving to Austin.
They need low heat, reliable power, cheap / fast internet, and an abundance of water.
Texas is literally none of those things.
We have low regulations though. Which is why they do it.
Industrial cooling is all about evaporating some liquid into gas. For evaporative coolers, that liquid is water and works best if the air is dry and water is plentiful (the absurd part). If you don't have water or the air is so humid that evaporation is difficult, the liquid is expensive refrigerant which must recycle back into liquid in a closed loop with a gas compressor that pumps the waste heat into the air through forced convection heat exchangers (big fans blowing air past hot refrigerant-filled pipes), all of which consumes a lot of energy.
Ideally, we'd live in a post scarcity society in which huge arrays of solar panels would provide electricity to run closed-loop refrigerant plants that would consume zero water to cool our data centers.
Vapor chamber with the river.
There's only one obvious answer to that question in a capitalism world. Because it's cheaper than other places. Why is it cheaper for the corporations in the driest places where common people need to stop using showers is also obvious.
Less regulations also
Because that usually means it's hot and sunny so things grow well if you can get water to it.
It's easier to get water places than make it warmer or sunnier in the optimal water place.
Edit: sorry this was me thinking about the alfalfa sprout comment above. Makes zero fucking sense for IT.
Stoopid Texans. You've got the guns, start using the things. If they need cooling, maybe aerate a few blocks of servers for them.
Now you got me wondering if we can shoot the heat away from AI datacenters. /s
its funny how these AI centers are mostly if not all in red states only, simply because they know the legislation wont do anything, and encourage them anyways, plus the resident that leans right are less likely to make a big fuss over it.
So not only are Corporations... People
Now they are more important people than regular citizens?
Under capitalism they always were. Just take a close look at exactly who the "Founding Fathers" were.
Don’t feed the people but we feed the machines
The machines make money. The people cost money.
Why aren’t they building these things underground or repurposing old mines in areas where geothermal is plentiful for power and aquifers are stable, instead of in water-poor, temperature extreme places like Texas and KY? …Oh right, poverty and red voters. Better to exploit and damage then have some upfront cost and long-term stability. I forget.
Building anything like this is seen as a jobs creator. Data center companies then pass the proposal around to municipalities and ask them who want jobs. These places then bend over backwards to offer tax incentives, fast permitting, etc. with no regard to whether their location can actually support the building.
So of course they get built in the most corrupt places.
Yep most local governments will give tens of millions away for "local jobs" even if there's only like 3 local jobs.
Could literally just hand those 3 people 4 million each, and save the environmental disaster.
Literally dealing with that in my own local community. They want to build an outdoor concrete batch plant in the middle of downtown to create like 10 jobs. I mean you'll make the small city into a ghost town. Shut down the multi-million dollar observatory, all the small business down restaurants. Not to mention they will cause everyone wealthy enough to move out of town. This will leave the poorest residents left in the tax base but hey they're creating jobs!
It's not just jobs as in the physical bodies that are going in to work at the place, it's also the taxes and the net expansion of the local economy (eg, the people working there will be spending money at local restaurants and businesses, the facility will be paying for utilities, and so forth). It's a complicated thing to evaluate.
It's not complicated when you factor in that tax payers are paying for the incentives. And they rarely work out for the local residents.
When Amazon was flirting with building their second headquarters for AWS, a small number of cities tried to band together and require a floor amount for reinvestment into the city. Amazon, being one of the richest companies in the world, said, "Nah...well just cancel the building."
These companies want to socialize the cost of their buildings but privatize the profits those buildings create.
Was this concrete batch plant being built by one of the richest companies in the world?
If this was the case for literally every project, then every project would cause cities to lose money and I have no idea how cities could still exist.
The jobs in question are highly specialised and would be entrusted to existing employees only though
Yeah, chances are Jim Bob and Jolene aren't going to get an entry level job at a data center. They don't need many janitors or lunch ladies.
....lunch ladies??
Exactly!
But google promised me a salad bar
If you meet quota you get a Waffle Party!
Texas is a shithole and texans are morons.
My country is int he middle of a data center boom, fuelled by the usual royal and political, uh, inputs. We also have seasonal droughts, which often result in water rationing and angry people upset at the mismanagement of our resources. Wonder which will give way first.
You should complain whenever million gallons of water are wasted by corporations seeking profits or by governments for their shady operations. Not just when it's about AI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
It's hilarious that so many people see Americans as free people
Land of the fee and the home of the slave.
It's worse, Americans choose over and over again to suffer, as long as other people suffer too.
How much time before someone figures these infrastructures make very good targets for vandalism? I risk I will see datacenters destroyed by mobs and other actors before I die.
It’s not vandalism, it’s direct action. Or sabotage, if you consider this to be a time of war (which it undoubtedly is — a class war). Don’t use the enemy’s language against ourselves.
please start with grok.
Allow me to use whatever words I want.
On this specific example, I'll even call it constructive vandalism. It will pass on a very loud message.
In theory we have elected representatives looking out for their constituents. Surely they would limit water use so this wouldn’t happen, and prevent the datacenters from relying on generators while waiting for power hookup, right? Oh, a red state. Never mind
In my country, I know of two cases of datacenters that use waste water. And another is supposed to run on salt water, in the future. Those cases don't trouble me.
Why would you think they make good targets for vandalism? A major data center would have very restricted physical access.
If Palestine Action can break into RAF bases and destroy Israeli weapons factories, what makes you think a data center will be better defended?
Palestine Action spray-painted some stuff. They didn't "destroy Israeli weapons factories", that's rather hyperbolic.
You should look them up. They forced the closure of two factories owned by Elbit Systems and forced Barclay's Bank to divest from Elbit through sustained sabotage actions. They were actually incredibly successful at disrupting the Israeli genocide machine, which is the real reason for their proscription - not for their latest action at Brize Norton, as the government and mainstream media would have you believe.
Spoken like a person with no imagination or access to drones. Has Ukraine's R&D taught you nothing?
I don't doubt many are even built to not be easily noticeable amidst its surroundings but many are as discreet as a sore thumb.
It's either a mater of numbers or strategy.
Some time ago i passed near a famous e-commerce warehouse and the place was surrounded by a 4 meter tall fence and a moat.
Man the trebuchets!
Talk about dystopian headlines
A boring one
Seems like the real problem is that companies aren't being charged enough for their excessive water usage.
It's no surprise this is happening in the Land of Useful Idiots and Dipshits, texas.
less regulation, plus gop/republicans arnt going to protest over something that is pollution/environmental damage, at least not in large numbers.
They deregulated shower heads just in time.
Well, I mean...Not for nothing, but Texas being one of the reddest states there is, and even being willing to double it down by heavily gerrymandering themselves for Trump worship, means that they did vote to serve their deep state and oligarch overlords. Which is quite ironic for the small government party. And that's coming from me, who believes in the potential of AI for humanity in the long-term, but only if used responsibly and not at the cost of people's quality of life to satisfy the corrupt elite.
But then again, irony is in their DNA, starting with all their preaching about "keeping kids safe". Speaking of which, Trump files where? I need to check if Epstein's name comes up in those.
Actual interesting question:
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down AI response time? A lot of the time you get an instant response from an LLM, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don't need it that urgently.
The majority of energy consumed is for training the AI models, not providing output from those models.
This means the resource consumption is not tied to usage and prompts. Also it means resource consumption to train models is temporary, relative to the model.
Oh ok. So they'll put the water back once the models are trained?
No they will just train more models. Do you ever pay attention?
The line must always go up. NO DOWN.
That is how water use works, yes. The water goes back into the environment and is later reused.
Also, there's a good chance the AIs are not being trained in the same facilities that they're later being run in. Different sorts of work is being done.
Not necessarily. Some ground water is ancient "fossil water" and won't replenish. At least not before a very long time.
Back into the environment, yes.
Back into Arlen, Texas water supplies?... M a y b e?
You don't start limiting residential showers unless running the well dry is a possibility.
That's irrelevant to what I was responding to - the question being asked had an incorrect context and I was correcting it.
Another interesting question:
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down Ai usage? A lot of the time people make unnecessary prompts or receive unhelpful generated text, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don't need it at all.
At scale? None. If we assume that (a) the number of queries are constant (i.e. that the slow response doesn't drive away users) and (b) that the efficiency is the same whether it's fast or slow, then having computers that take longer to calculate each response just means you need to have more of them working in parallel to service the demand.
Now, for a home user running AI locally, you could maybe save some energy by using more efficient silicon since you only need it to process one query at a time (assuming lower-spec parts actually are more efficient, which may or may not be the case), but that's not really what we're talking about here.
Maybe you wanted to answer to the original comment? I was mostly ironizing it and mentioning a reduction in overall usage.
I disagree. I think the biggest consumers of AI currently use it for work, and depending on the type of work I think very fast ai == more customers.
Why can't they use the shit and piss water to cool their shit instead of asking people to cut back on water usage?
They can.
My wife is working on a solar project whose off taker is a data center that is doing exactly this.
Oh, and THEN, the AI will ask you to go take a shower if you're feeling dry, dirty or thirsty. I mean after telling you why taking a shower is good, why people take showers, which celebrities took showers the past week and asks if you want to ads taking a shower to next week's reminders.
WTF don't they just use a closed geothermal loop?
Im actually curious on how much energy can be reused from heat alone.
Move the operation to someplace cold, start up a little town around it and provide heat as a utility.
don't give them ideas, or they'll thaw and colonize the antarctic
I'm not sure that's not already the plan.
Frost punk has entered the chat.
This is already happening in Iceland. Iceland is so cold, AI datacenters can just use the passive cooling from the environment. Iceland also has some of the cheapest electricity on the planet, thanks to public investment in energy infrastructure.
Hopefully we'll see more development in Greenland for similar reasons.
Start moving where it's cold, people. That's where the new 'coasts' will be.
I'm about 100 miles inland in a middle lat, I figure it'll come to me.
Nice to see humanity has its priorities straight as usual... :)
Drowning in slop. Showering can wait.
I don't get the news about these data centers guzzling water, where is the water going? If it's for cooling, but that doesn't destroy the water..
Evaporative cooling.
Can't they recycle it.
Technically it gets recycled, by falling down in some other place.
By cooling it down? With what, water?
You can use water in a closed loop with air cooling.
Yes but that's expensive. It's a lot cheaper to just draw from the municipal supply and discharge it.
I know politicians are spineless but the obvious solution seems to be to keep increasing the cost of using water until the data centers switched to a closed system. Don't most nuclear power plants recycle most of the water they use?
Charging the data centers more would also be a nice increase in revenue for the local municipal area
In regards to nuclear power plants, the first and second loops are recycled constantly but the third loop can either be recycled or open loop. That's why most nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water. They use the water from a lake, ocean, or whatever to do the last cooling step. It's possible but it's not as cheap as throwing away the warm water once you're done with it with cheap cold water.
Evaporative cooling is one option, yes, but not the only one. Do we know what method these data centers are actually using?
They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you're cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I've seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.
Imagine not having obese AI fart videos because you want a shower?
Here's the report this came from https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2025-07-25/texas-is-still-in-drought-and-ai-data-centers-are-quietly-guzzling-up-water/
Can't wait for the water wars to start. :-/
Is cooling water not reusable? Shouldn't these be closed systems?
Apparently closed loop systems are not good enough for these kinds of applications, and often instead use evaporative. Which kind of logical, since they're not running a single factory overclocked GPU with a top of the line desktop CPU, but a cluster of factory overclocked GPUs with a server CPU.
There I fixed that for you.
What should happen is that the cost of water to these businesses should increase, which would then incentivise other more expensive methods of cooling, but that would make line go up at a less steep angle which makes shareholders sad.
So they build the computing centers in hot areas with water scarcity and make the air hot-humid?
Also this, we don't have a problem finding child places on earth. Alaska still exists.
Edit: I mean child, cod, fuck, cold.
No wonder the government don't want anymore report on climate change.
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.
Source: https://visualizingenergy.org/what-methods-of-electricity-generation-use-the-most-water/
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.
If you live in Texas, leave.
I wish... We get over a thousand new residents a day. It's awful.
Hilarious, hilarious. Hilarious.
What does a data center need that much water for?
To compensate for the fact that Texas is a stupid place to build something that needs a lot of cooling
Cooling. Even closed loops evaporate a lot.
Closed loops evaporate stuff all. This is 100% from evaporative cooling towers.
If they were using DX or air-to-water chillers the water usage would be negligible. Like how often you top up the radiator in your car.
So assuming the datacenter uses the water for cooling, what happens to the water? Does it just get released as steam?
Of course it would be possible to capture and condensate the steam but that equipment would cost money. If just using more water is cheap and unregulated there is no incentive not to do just so.
It often just evaporates, since they're using evaporative cooling.
don't be selfishn, Microsoft AI will be used by the whole world and only few people will need this water to shower.
S/ hahahha
Yes that's what Americans voted for.
Can't they just use seawater or use air cooling?
A lot of the need is due to the heat density of the GPUs used for GenAI. Could they build less densely? Yes, and they likely already are but need to go further. I have seen data centers with racks less than half (I think it was closer to one quarter) populated for energy density issues.
Could they use sea water? Sea water causes more corrosion. (I am uncertain if this data center is close to the ocean.)
Can't they just make sub 75w GPUs that require basic cooling?
that can also do GenAI work for a similar "hardware cost per output"? No
FYI, the server hosts for the cards often have eight of the cards each. The power draw becomes the host server's RAM and CPU, plus eight times 750w (or whatever). It scales up quickly.
Seems like optimization issue.
If they can't train and run a big ass ai model on igpu power at very fast speeds then they are useless as developer companies.
So much bloat.
Stinky teens need shirts that point the blame at Microsoft. Get ripe and hang out with old people.
LOL! The Red Run Deregulated Texas Oblast does not surprise me with this kind of shit. If it dries up, the fucking red voters can stay and find the fuck out.
Sorry, but a vibe coder just told Chat GPT to fully implement their code. Now you can't shower. Suck it!
Newer aerated shower heads help with that 👀
So genuine question, how is a datacenter needing water equivalent to showering? When people shower, the water gets dirty and needs to be cleaned. When water is used to cool servers, it gets warm but that should not be a problem, it doesn't need to go through a water treatment facility afterwards (?)
They use potable water and they use evaporative cooling.
I have no idea what the infrastructure setup is like for cooling that data center, but one way of water cooling is to take in cool water and dump the hot water. If you do this in your home, it's an "open loop geothermal heat pump." You pull in water from a well, heat or cool the water with your AC heat exchanger, then pump it back into the ground or into the sewer.
https://www.geojerry.com/aboutopenloop.html
The water may be treated with anticorrosives.
The 2022 estimate for how much water was used in Texas in total was 15.2 million acre-feet, or approximately 5 trillion gallons. So these AI centers are accounting for 0.00926% of Texas' water use.
The issue is not the statewide consumption. The Texas water grid is not one unified system. It's a patchwork of local aquifers, municipal supplies, and private wells.
If a datacenter is built in an area with a water grid that can not handle its consumption, people will run out of water sooner or later.
(Especially AI) Datacenters are built in areas with low energy costs, as it is their biggest expense, with no regard for the local water levels:
- https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
So charge them more for the water. The data center builders are making rational decisions based on their costs.
Charging more does not create more water...
Of course not. But it changes the economics that causes things like data centers to be built there.
Water laws are often times asinine on a large scale. Depending on where the center is it'd probably be easier to run them out of town or otherwise cut off the water through sabotage than to increase the price of water.
Honest question: wouldn't it be advantageous to build data centers in cooler areas next to large body's of water, like the upper Midwest? I'm sure there are metrics I'm ignorant of, but that would seem to make more sense than building in a hot/dry place.
Cooler areas with large bodies of water tend to have these pesky things called regulations that means they would make slightly less money.
Why are people being asked to reduce showers over such a small amount?
Perhaps there are reasons beyond just these data centers why Texas has a water shortage.
What are you implying? I'm not asking rhetorically.
There are many other inefficient uses of water much bigger that these data centers. Texas has a major agriculture sector despite being basically a desert. People love to have green lawns. And a quarter of Texas is currently in a drought.
My point is that if you shut these data centers down right this instant the needle isn't going to budge much.
Yeah I love ai hate, but in reality it's a teeny percentage of any water or energy use
Imagine complaining about the water a data center uses in Texas but being totally fine with the billions of gallons it uses to cool it's two nuclear power stations. Yes I looked it up, yes it's a ridiculous hypocrisy and yes it would be lovely if people stopped falling for clickbait like this.
The power plants arguably generate a more valuable output than the AI data centres, thus offering a better return of investment (of water)
Although with the amount of energy consumed by the latter, they are partially responsible for the continued existence of the former.
Yes, AI is as necessary as providing power. They are certainly the same. Let me just refrigerate my food using AI. Oh shit. The power is gone.
In a state that uses 28% of it's power on air conditioning? Interesting...
People in a hot part of the country use air conditioning? Quick, ask GPT for the reason!
You are missing the point that it's millions of gallons daily, just for AI. You know the thing that actively makes our lives worse for no reason at all
I'm sorry it's making your life actively worse and I'd love to hear exactly how, because for me it's done nothing but improve my life in so many ways. It's got me over writers block so many times, helped me work through tricky problems of all kinds, taught me all sorts of excellent drawing, singing and music creation skills, helped me make sense of societal and political issues that I would not normally have understood and answered questions with a total absence of ego that I would never have had the nerve to ask before for fear of sounding stupid.
Hegelian dialectical materialism? It walked me through conversationally until I got it. The feasibility of someone being rich enough to build a rocket and just leave earth forever? It laid everything out in incredible detail (the resources required, it turns out, would be mindbogglingly insane).
AI hating is dumb and that's a hill I'll happily die on.
(Edit: fixed my atrocious spelling)
Considering the odd strawman comparison to nuclear power plants you started your argument with, I suspect the level of understanding of Hegelian dialectical materialism you have learnt from the AI, is probably not as advanced as you seem to think it is.
Also every single one of your examples describe situations which could have been solved by other means (and it would even require you to exercise that brain of yours a bit as well, an added bonus no doubt).
What does your precious AI say to the fact that people are being forced to save water so a corporation can mindlessly waste it on their profits instead? That seems to me to be the core of this subject, something you not only breezed lightly over but in fact completely ignored in favour of your personal anecdotes.
"not as advanced as you seem to think it is"
Didn't say it was advanced, but if you're going to resort to ad hominem tactics then welcome to my block list.
Lol.
Taught you bullshit. You put in a prompt and got shit out. You don't care shit. Did you go and fact check everything it told you? Because guess what they make shit up constantly.
Wait until you find out about Youtube
Oh you can have conversations with YouTube? I had no idea 😲
You can listen to real people
It's not a conversation though is it... but I think you know that. There's so much bandwagoning against AI at the moment. It's just sad and unfortunately, quite predictable.
I think I use AI more than most people here.
It's okay for simple stuff. But the amount of times it has given me blatantly wrong information or impressive looking solutions that are needlessly over complicated and broken is incredible.
You're not unique because you love llms, it actually is something less intelligent and people with psychopathic tendencies tend to like as well. Ask your little chat bot to look up some studies on it if you like.
You could have already done all of this with the internet itself...I dont understand why people think they need llms. Hell, you could have done all of that just from books, no internet needed. I feel like people are as lazy as they've ever been.
Also, you totally trust everything you learned. Thats not smart, being that its literally a corporate owned propaganda machine thats purpose is only to sell you ads to make the rich richer. Why do you think they are putting billions into it? Its sure as FUCK not for betterment of humanity.
"Also, you totally trust everything you learned." Never said I trusted it. You just exaggerated something I said so you could argue the counterpoint.
Something tells me all of the stuff you're creating with the assistance of AI is garbage.
Not even because you're using AI to do it, but because what most people create isn't impressive and I doubt your skilled enough to be an exception.
You might think AI is helping you and making you better, but that's probably because you're not put in actual positions where your performance is measured and matters.
For me, AI is only useful for consolidating search results into a response. It's wrong more often than its not, and to make use of what it says in any meaningful capacity requires knowledge that AI can't give you.
Except nuclear power plants are a net benefit to society as a whole.
Not even close to the same thing. And the fact that you think they are is what's wrong with the world.