Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?
Edit: Links provided in the comments…
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=1264
- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_cooling_towers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
Notable comments:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/23672269
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25288634
- https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25294655
Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.
To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.
Ok follow up question here. Is there cause to be concerned that releasing tons and tons of steam into the environment that was not there before will cause other environmental impact beyond just the reduced water supply? Like… If the ambient air is cooling all that water back into rain or something will that tangibly impact temperatures, or will average humidity change? Or is that part at least too small of an impact to be particularly material?
The atmosphere is very very very big and water is very very very normal thing to have there.
Not meaningfully, no. In the middle of a dry desert far from other bodies of water you could theoretically form cumulus clouds downwind of your site (I have heard of this happening), but it would be teeny tiny.
The amount of water evaporation is just orders of magnitude too small. The earth gets about 1kW of energy per square meter, so a 9GW data center is approximately the same amount of waste heat as 9 million square meters, which is 900 hectares.
There is almost certainly an impact somewhere, but I don’t have the data to know where it is. My conjecture is that a localized mass of steam would cause convection currents and drive microweather phenomena, especially downwind of such an air cooled facility. I’m not sure rain is necessarily the result, unless there’s a sizable mountain downwind, since although hot air will rise, it might run out of steam (pun intended) before cooling down enough to fully condense out. So it might just be adding a layer of humidity that floats a few hundred meters above the surface.
But even that could be devastating, if said layer blocks natural convection currents over a downwind town or city. It could act as a thermal cap, making that town warmer at night, because heat rising from the city would meet that humid layer and get absorbed by the water. The thermal capacity of water comes into play again, but this time against the city.
Heat energy is a driver for cyclones, such as when the warm, moist water of the Caribbean accelerates air as it approaches the southern USA, and only once landborne does it start to slow down due to drag and losing its energy source. I doubt we’ll ever have an AI-induced hurricane, but in a situation where there’s already an energetic weather event, it cannot possibly help to be adding heat to that situation.
I defer to the meteorologists to say what happens to the local weather and climate, and biologists on what happens to humans and wildlife. But I can’t see it being good, no.
I doubt that it has meaningful impact on climate. Evaporation from plants and oceans is many orders of magnitude greater. The issue is pretty always about fresh water availability in the given region.