The future will talk in awe and condemnation about the scale of our beef consumption.

The amount of water it took to grow the feed they ate.

The amount of greenhouse gases it created.

The fact that the land use required was the size of north america.

The suffering that was required to inflict on the animals themselves.

They won't mention data centers at all.

Stupid Question: Why is the heat not used to generate power through heat exchanging devices and turbines? Or at least for heating the water of nearby town by long distance heating? Wouldnt that be a pretty obvious synergy?

The likely irony that these data centres will be used in the pipeline of creating a commercial for bottled water.

There was a time in the not distant past when "revolt or reform" was even a debate, but it is clear now what needs to be done.

grok is using delicious clean drinking water from the memphis sands aquifer for cooling. elon promised to build a water treatment plant in order to stop using drinking water but, and you’ll never believe this, he didn’t.

fuck elon.

please do not use grok.

I know people LOOOOOOVE to use how many bajillion gallons (wtf is a gallon? is that a bucket? learn to use litres) AI data centers use, without looking into how much that is as a percentage of total water use:

Basis: 322 billion US gallons per day, equivalent to 117.53 trillion gallons per year. Percentages are calculated against total US water withdrawals in 2015. (USGS)

The first eight categories add up to 99.879%. The small difference from 100% is caused by rounding in the USGS daily figures.

The data-center and AI rows represent water-consumption footprints, while the USGS sector rows represent water withdrawals. They are included for scale comparison and should not be added to the sector totals.

We need to make evaporation cooling illegal. They can make a closed loop system like Nvidia uses but they won't, because it's more expensive. We need the law to force them to.

Reminds me of how Britain starved India cause it forced them to grow tea instead of food for themselves.

One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021).

That estimate was from 2021.

Now it's at least around 600 million gallons of water per day.

Corporate capture of our government has destroyed our country, and will soon destroy our entire way of life. If we stop all harmful emissions today, the planet will still warm for another 20-30 years before it starts going back down. 30 more years of hotter summers, shortened winters, extended hurricane seasons, extended and worse droughts/wildfires...

The people that approved these data centers should be charged with crimes against humanity.

There's nothing hard to explain for historians of the future: it was the second gilded age that saw the buildup of the techno-fascist infrastructure by greedy billionaires - sorry, trillionaires - in cahoots with the government. Now get back in line to get counted citizen...

I think it's pretty easy. We let the rich rule our world, and the rich demanded this, and so a lot of people just let it happen through bribes.

The drought statistic is true but the water consumption one is batshit insane lmao. It all comes form a press firm called Mordor Intelligence which hasn't meaningfully backed up that claim.

AI datacenters are likely to not even breach 100 billion gallons BY 2028. (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-ai-drought-water)

Obviously that's still a lot of water, but 264 billion gallons right now is an absurd claim.

False! Tge fruit videos are the side project! The real project is undressing minors and generating them doing CP! If you don't believe me, just ask grok!

Per day? Per year? Per second?

Sounds like a lot of water, but you can't just give an amount of water when you're talking about the rate of something.

Related Digital’s development of a $16 billion data center in Saline Township, Michigan is moving forward after they sued the local government in response to the locals voting AGAINST the construction. They’re just going to ignore the people’s vote 🫩

The worst part is all that drinking water is being wasted semi-permanently. Most of it then goes to the sea and becomes saltwater. Even if the US heavily invested into desalination plants right now - it'd take decades to potentially retrieve most of that.

All that for... another economic crisis?

Meanwhile we have commercials on the radio "debunking" the myth that data centers waste a ton of water. We're brainwashing the people, which is becoming easier as our braincells waste away using LLMs.

Future? Historians?

You are funny.

No mystery. The entire point of capitalism is to please the disgustingly privileged at the expense of everybody else. Literally everything is like this. "AI" is just the latest version. See also cars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

New rule: no water cooling in DCs. Air cooling and air con.

That and some hard rules on power usage would go a long way. If the US ever updates its infrastructure, and especially for power, that should open up new, safe options that don't kill or poison people.

For the mean time, though, let's stop the insanity.

Not to mention the fact that AI companies aren't even profitable