Funny how “honest mistake” only works when you’re rich enough to call it that. 30 million gallons is insane.
Oopsy woopsie, AI Data Centre did a fucky wucky!
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?
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.
whoops, accidentally used a bit too much water
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.
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.
And it has NOTHING todo with corruption, I resent the insinuation! Everyone knows that since trump all government corruption disappeared overnight, like magic.
CAFO “Factory Farms” in Minnesota used 2.3 billion gallons of water in 2017 and the number is going up
A typical Hog CAFO uses 5-10 million gallons per month, every month, all year long.
Dairy CAFOS use 10-20 million.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/11365/ https://www.elpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/MI-CAFO-Report-Section-1-ELPC.pdf
In Georgia where this data center is they have hundreds of these farms which not only drain the local aquifers but create shit lagoons that pollute mostly black neighborhoods.
It is the height of hypocrisy to complain about datacenters and support animal agriculture which is unnecessary.
You do know that multiple things can be bad at once, right? Like, yes, agriculture uses an ABHORRENT amount of water, but we at least get food out of it. What do we get out of datacenters? Chatbots that drive people insane and endless worthless slop. Both are bad.
I agree both are bad. That is why you should be vegan. “At least we get food out of it” the food is bad for you and the environment and tortures living, feeling, sentient beings. You should absolutely stop this ASAP if you are that concerned about the environment.
The datacenter is using enough water to lower the local water pressure. Defending them is honestly disgusting.
No one is defending them. Both are bad and you should stop eating meat if you are going to be using this as an excuse to be against data centers. Factory farms produce waste that give people cancer and destroy the environment. Optional animal agriculture causes 15% of all global emissions. You can stop today. Defending animal ag is honestly disgusting.
~30 ft subsidence at a California farm from extraction of the groundwater. Agricultural use is immense and wipes out historic rivers, lakes, even seas and slowly replenished groundwater reserves and something like 40% of water used is wasted because the sun just evaporates it before it used by the crops.
Everyone (agricultural or data center) would be far less wasteful if they had to at least pay for the true value of the water they’re extracting in their local area, i.e. a lot more if it’s scarcer/from slowly replenishing sources. Though that would probably result in a lot of economic relocation to wetter areas as many business models in dry areas become unviable.
It’s not just agriculture and data centers either, manufacturing uses a lot too.
Hey, look, it’s the Roman Polanski documentary Chinatown.
Everyone (agricultural or data center) would be far less wasteful if they had to at least pay for the true value of the water they’re extracting
Currency is, itself, just an accounting construct. There is no “true value of the water” that people pay for because the thing they used to pay for it is predicated on rapid economic growth rather than efficient allocation of resources.
One might ask the question “What is material cost-benefit of 30’ of subsidence?” Like, how is California worse (or better) off thanks to the harvesting of that groundwater? Given that the state is one of the most popular places in the country to live, I might suggest the 40M residents are better for that water harvesting than they would have been without it.
I might also suggest that a public sector dedicated to balancing the resident water demands and industry water-use demands could improve the rate/volume of consumption. But that would require a public voting base / private executive staff that valued the long-term health of the state rather than the short term economic growth of the local neighborhoods.
People would love to live in a state with Mediterranean climate mostly year-round regardless of subsidence. You can say it would reduce agricultural jobs if charging for unsustainable water use put down farms dependent on it and that would make California less attractive economically. But even assuming the entire hulk of California agriculture was destroyed, that’s in the low single digit percentage of the state’s economic activity.
It’s not just a matter of that the soil went down. The water was extracted from a matrix of soil and water, and the soil sinks because the matrix of soil and air no longer stands up to the weight above it and gets compacted down. Less voids in the soil means that when rain comes in, instead of seeping down and recharging aquifers it piles up on the surface in sheets that then race down to lower elevations in floods that sweep away whatever is in their path. And with enough extraction and lessened recharge eventually the wells stop working and force the issue. Everyone suffers from natural disasters for the benefit of a few who just so happened to get water rights from early settlement.
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?
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 see what you did there; you won’t get away with it ChatGPT.
Whoopsie, I accidetawy used 30 miwion gawons of water 🥹 Can I pliz have more if I pwomise to behave?
And nothing will happen to them.
Go check out what’s going down in Corpus Christi right now. Water prices are skyrocketing as the available groundwater nears total depletion. The city doesn’t have a reliable alternative source of fresh water, thanks to the voracious demand of new refineries and processing plants. So all that new industry is also facing a simple math problem of needing more water inputs than is available in the region.
As a result, the city is looking at a combination cost-of-living price explosion and the threat of massive layoff waves as industrial sites are forced to shut down. CC is also where the state gets its jet fuel processed, so there’s a real risk of neighboring Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio airports seeing a fuel shortage before the end of the year.
Something is going to happen. You can’t just use infinity water forever, because there is not infinity water available to consume.
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
30 million gallons of water… you know with all that money that they are throwing at these data centers, they could solve world hunger or at least alleviate it in America, cure cancer, do something for the environment like reforestation especially in the desert parts of America and there are methods do it but no their unwavering focus is on something that makes that will make everything worse! More heat, faster resource depletion and destruction of environment around these data centers, like for who is this supposed to make life better? if you immediately thought of the terminator then yeah they’ll be fine but us? we are so fucked if this keeps going.
Silly none of those make them more money. You know that thing that is made up and doesn’t exist.
Oh i know, all this money is being invested on a promise of imaginary returns and IOUs. Loved it a few weeks ago when i read that HK Hynix promised Sam Altman 40% of their memory chips but it was just a letter of intent and not a binding contract so they jumped on expecting a big payout and got screwed, beautiful.
Even the companies that invested heavily in AI, that is they replaced people with AI and are getting screwed over with subpar work and don’t forget Grok’s pedo heaven and fake nudes and so much more to say how this AI “revolution” is a shitstorm that nobody needed.
Do you have a link for the HK Hynix / OpenAI thing you are talking about?
Is there more detail than what we already knew a few months ago?
https://thedeepdive.ca/openai-locked-up-40-of-global-ram-with-no-obligation-to-buy-any-of-it/
Here is one of the articles but nothing new.
Preaching to the choir.
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.
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.
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.
How dirty is the water leaving the cooling loop?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Up next: Paper Mario goes digital.
