I keep reading pieces which dismiss concerns about the environmental impact of AI data centers. They typically couple a description of the best-possible data center practices (regardless of whether these are actually being followed) with simplified comparisons of power and water usage of data centers and urban areas.
What bugs me is that these justifications are synthetic. They are analytical rather than experiential.
The typical AI data center is not being built in “a medium-sized town (population of 25,000 to 100,000 people)”. Hell, they couldn’t be – many of them are substantially larger than a town. They’re being built in rural areas, many of which use well water from local aquifers. This means we shouldn’t be asking “what percentage of city residential water usage does a data center use”, but “can the local aquifer and other water sources sustain the additional consumption?”
In many regions (particularly in the west), persistent drought conditions mean that residential and agricultural water users are already under severe pressure to reduce consumption. And yet these areas are attractive sites for data centers because of access to relatively cheap hydroelectric power.
With a rational (nationwide) planning and permitting process, it’s probably feasible to build out a reasonable amount of data center capacity. But that’s not happening. States and communities are competing for the economic benefits (or simply being bribed), and they are fast-tracking the kind of environmental assessments needed to avoid the problems that we’re seeing. Ironically, they are often offering data center developers tax breaks which mean that they cannot afford the infrastructure mitigation that might alleviate these problems.
The result: YouTube is full of stories from local news sources in which families show off the very real impacts of local data center developments. And the most visually compelling images in these stories are polluted water coming from the faucets. And they’re not faked.
And finally, these stories are part of a broad swath of American history, going back to Love Canal in NY, cancer alley in Louisiana, and Erin Brokovich. The vast majority of protests about AI data centers are coming from working class districts, not from Greenpeace and environmental activists. See https://arstechnica.com/…/we-pissed-off-a-lot-of…/