> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.
I do not understand how that is even possible.
If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.
I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.
I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.
It's probably because directives have to be read into law at the country level.
(Directives are binding on states. They transpose them into national law, possibly adding additional clauses as it goes past (EU directives set a minimum standard, not a maximum) at which point they're binding on people.)
Nobody ever said the EU was efficient. Look for a deadline for that transposition on the original directive.
You make a very good point. However, in this case, the deadline is two years in the past. From Article 12:
> 1. By 15 May 2024 and every year thereafter, Member States shall require owners and operators of data centres in their territory with a power demand of the installed information technology (IT) of at least 500kW, to make the information set out in Annex VII publicly available, except for information subject to Union and national law protecting trade and business secrets and confidentiality.
> 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to data centres used for, or providing their services exclusively with the final aim of, defence and civil protection.
National governments kind of suck at enforcing these. In some cases, like the notorious Ireland Apple tax shelter, they may not want to enforce the rules because they feel they are benefiting from the evasion.
This kind of basic regulatory work is pretty thankless even when it's important. But I suspect the toxic politics of data centers will kick up some enforcement action sooner or later.
The EU is in effect much closer to a confederation than a federation. A lot of the problematic aspects of how the EU is set up are attempts to work around the limitations imposed by not having sufficient public support to reform it into a more federal structure. To some that's a feature, of course, to others it's a significant nuisance.
And the practical effect of this is you get a race to the bottom: countries compete on how lax they are going to be in enforcing GDPR so as to attract American tech companies.
The Data Protection Commission in Ireland are remarkably lax about enforcing it because the government quite likes the tax revenue that Google, Apple and Meta brings them.
Perhaps this article is one step in the process of forcing disclosure. The Dutch parliament has recently (April 2026) clarified its law implementing the EED.
My account is banned, so for whomever having [showdead] on:
European directive is not a law, it's a directive.
It's up to the national governments to create applicable laws that are to the letter and to the spirit of a European directive. Then national bodies will start applying the law and govern its implementation/adherence.
An by "up to" I mean they are obliged... eventually.
And I wouldn't be so sure on being 'eventually' obliged, someone has to enforce it for that to happen and it's not looking like anyone has profit in it
The purpose of these laws is to give the state the option to crack down on anyone they feel like at any time. They are not meant to be obeyed, and that is obvious to anyone with eyes.
Playing the devil’s advocate: don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies? If so, why would a private company provide this information?
I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that.
Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
> the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry
Data centers tend to concentrate their water usage within urban areas, causing a strain on local resources. The value of their output is much less tangible. Their water consumption scales up around tenfold if you consider the indirect usage from generating the electricity.
But on the other hand; yes, it would also help enormously if people ate less meat.
By “strain on local resources” are you just stating the fact that they use resources? Or are you trying to imply that it causes problems for those resources?
Companies don’t just buy land, connect to water and power, and then the utilities get caught off guard when the water system is suddenly strained by water going somewhere. There are processes for approving this before connection.
If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.
I agree that utility planners have their work cut out to plan for data centers. It's a different paradigm than what they're used to. I think they are being caught off-guard, but it's a matter of process and infrastructure. They typically plan around averaged or linear trends, but data centers can have volatile usage spikes, and supply can depend on e.g. seasonal rainfall which is challenging to predict.
> we demonstrate that data centers are an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon, with 97.5% of facilities situated in metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas
“Metropolitan area” is doing a lot of work. Every metropolitan area I’ve lived or worked in has had industrial areas, too. Those industrial areas have buildings that use a lot of electricity, water, or natural gas and produce a lot of noise.
This isn’t some unusual outcome. It’s like one of those maps that purports to show one thing but really just shows population density.
Essentially, telling people to go vegan and get rid of their golf courses is going to piss them off, hence the reaction people have to being told that datacenters are more important than their comfort.
I'm personally willing to change my life to help the planet and nature in general to the point it doesn't affect my wellbeing (as in health and safety). For me, personally, the problem is not changing per se, but people finding no amount of change enough, always moving the goalposts with "but, what if" clauses.
The problem with datacenter water use is the state of the water leaving the data center. Agriculture and meat industry can reuse the water multiple times from cleaner to dirtier processes and return it to the nature with reasonable processing.
The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
> The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
Why would any water be returned?
Datacenters (and literally every industrial process that requires cooling) use water for evaporative cooling. The water evaporates, then returns as rain elsewhere.
The only water being "returned" I can think of would be from the intermittent or continuous blowdown systems to maintain TDS levels; but blowdown is a small fraction of the water consumed and is typically returned back via the city sewer system.
Roughly 80% of the water evaporates into the atmosphere. The remaining 20% is flushed out of the system to remove mineral build-ups and sent to local treatment plants.
We're talking about water that's released in general use, right? I would expect a closed cooling loop to have some biocides but have almost none of that leave the system.
And one datacenter had a weird bacteria that one time.
> But on the other hand; yes, it would also help enormously if people ate less meat.
At first you had me, but then I realised it's not true if the price is building more data centres! That was just a trick to make the climate worse! Grr /s
Actually your premise is already wrong, although to be fair I'm not sure what bearing that has on the conclusion.
Here in France at least, companies can also be subject to FOIA requests for information pertaining to contracts they have with public entities. E.g. if a city publishes a tender to run tye local bike share program, then the company that gets the contract may have to directly answer (some) requests about that program.
But like I said, not sure if this applies to data centers which are, iiuc, mostly private ventures.
These are resources acquired from the governments in most places. You have to be able to plan and expand capacity which requires public funds.
I live right next to a waste valorisation plant[1]. They have to exactly specify what amount of water they use and what amount of water they then send out to the waste water treatment facility. It also has to be clean to a very specific standard before it leaves which is also checked.
We have datacenters in Switzerland too, but very little outrage or debate because there are strict rules in place in most places. They can build all they want but it costs significantly more to meet environmental requirements.
The valorisation plant next to my home has water cooling tower/fans significantly oversized just to make sure the noise is keep under the required level.
> And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
This is a Dutch website and here in the Netherlands we have demand issues. In these same areas where issues exist, data centres are being planned and built. There are waiting lists now for normal businesses who want a new connection to the net, or connections with more capacity. These are lists waiting for capacity to become available: The demand on the current net is already too high.
This is something that certain AI advocates are refusing to acknowledge. The concerns are legitimate and can only be alleviated with open access to information by companies and the state. Then it can be clear that the project is doable or not, and let the people decide, as they are the ones that will have to live near it.
Not sure why you think your finger-in-the-wind wind understanding of future AI compute demand should trump the projections of companies who actually operate in this area?
But if you do end up being correct, then the data centers in question will just sit partially or fully idle, using no / a tiny fraction of the electricity and water they could use (which as others have said on this forum, water usage concerns are massively overblown in most data center builds anyway)
People keep comparing datacenter water use to agricultural water use, and it doesn't make sense to me. I can't tell if it's a bad-faith comparison or if people really know that little about how water is used in these industries.
The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.
That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.
It doesn't make sense to me either, but in a different way...
We need the food, we'll die without food, telling people to eat less of whatever food, so a few "tech bros" can build a new datacenter is outright evil.
If the numbers would make them look good they would publish their numbers.
> Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution.
Belittling criticisms that way is childish and doesn't address a single one. Literally nobody on the whole planet, at least in public discourse, is using "I am angry" as an argument in any of this. Yet it's the first thing that is always brought up. It's just a cheap, thought-terminating stereotype.
You are totally right to point this out, and I apologize for the whiplash. Let's clarify exactly how overblown data centre water usages is compared to the agriculture industry.
In data centres all that water is so that some wimpy cunt gets to hit return after spending no more than 5 minutes in an half baked prompt so he can insert the answer into his pitch deck, or PR review — and now with pacing the frontier models, he actually doesn't need to insert it, it's inserted automatically wherever it might fit. When it comes to agriculture, that is to produce things like food. This requires obviously much more water, which means that's what we really should be cutting down. Agents don't need food so the solution is just to replace humans with agents.
If you have any other stubborn question resisting clarification just hit me up, and I'll explain it to you immediately and clearly.
> why would a private company provide this information?
Because there's a building populist push against these developments.
Presumably they still want to build these things. If I was trying to convince people who hate me to let me do what I want, I would not play so secretive as it may look suspicious. Especially if, ostensibly, the data is in my favor.
Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
> Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
This is extremely inappropriate on HN. Or anywhere, really.
I can think of a few reasons that companies might not share data. A big one is that people have no idea what a responsible amount of water usage is, so your information will be weaponized no matter what.
They refuse it because if they would say "1 million liters a year!" the knee-jerk reaction will be completely predictable even though that's just tiny compared to a small swimming pool or industrial or agricultural site.
The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.
Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).
Most of it comes from concerns about water and electricity rates sky rocketing and also simply not being available when humans need it. At least at the local level.
>Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way.
In the Netherlands it is not just about AI datacenters, even before the rise of AI pushback against Meta's planned datacenter made them cancel it. There has been a lot of criticism of the municipality that allowed Microsoft to expand its datacenters.
The argument is that this is a small country that already has to make tradeoffs to get to its desired energy mix (wind turbines near cities on land) and then these datacenters are built that consume the power that is generated by sacrificing the little remaining open space.
In the last few years there is actually a electricity shortage in some regions so "we can hook up this 200 MW datacenter but not your house" is a bad look.
It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.
From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.
If they are taking reasonable steps to mitigate consumption and pollution then they should be able to clearly explain that to the public. The fact they won't suggests they aren't.
Just because people haven't cared about the environment before doesn't mean they shouldn't start now. And just because there are worse existing polluters doesn't mean we shouldn't resist new ones.
A new golf course used to be seen as a great thing to have in your back yard and now we know their pesticide use increases the risk of Parkinson's. People are waking up and caring more. We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
HN has never been friendly to comments like this, have you ever tried explaining something clearly to an emotionally triggered crowd? There are many examples, masks, vaccines, gun laws...
Why is the crowd emotionally triggered? I posit it's because of all the secrecy and bad faith. Data center builders and their supporters in government brought this opposition on themselves.
One cubic metre of water is 1000 liters. A typical 25m swimming pool ("short course" / half of olympic size) is 20-25m wide. That's at least 500 m^2 surface area. At an average depth of only 1m (very conservative even for a recreational pool), that is 500,000 liters just to cycle the water once a year. Estimates I can find suggests 3-7 times as much as that on a yearly basis for a typical recreational pool.
So unless you're talking about a tiny private residential pool you're at least an order of magnitude off.
And besides that: news sites love comparing water usage to things like bathtubs, the average household or swimming pools. The headline would likely be "datacenter uses 100 swimming pools of water per year!" and not "datacenter uses 6 million liters of water per year!"
But they should be made to report this. AND their use of water should be regulated - they don't need to use any water at all, it's just cheaper for them - and they should be contributing enough to mitigate negative effects on energy prices.
The problem isn't data centres. The problem is not pricing in and regulating externalities, whether caused by data centres or other things.
It would also quickly show us who actually cares about the environmental effects and who are using it as an excuse.
The people who don’t care about environmental impact and resource use are the same people pushing for more and faster datacenter deployment. The Republican Party is the one getting rid of environmental protection rules, it’s the party most financed by fossil fuel companies, and the party that was/is against solar and windmill development. The party that gutted all the regulatory agencies and is colluding with the AI industry.
> According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030.
Yeah, so 2030 sounds like a long way off. It's 3 years away. We are not going to be meeting any climate targets.
I think it would be helpful for people in this thread to understand the differences between EU Regulations and Directives :
• EU Regulation: A binding legal act that applies immediately and identically in all EU countries as soon as it takes effect, without needing national laws.
• EU Directive: A legislative act that sets a mandatory goal that all EU countries must achieve, but allows each nation to pass its own laws to implement it.
It takes time for directives to take effect, unless a member state's national law already implements them.
Can someone explain the data center water usage? Data center don't drink water. It cools down the machine.
What's preventing them getting cool water from a lake and draining to it again to cool down? Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
>What's preventing them getting cool water from a lake and draining to it again to cool down?
Some do, but most don't since the requirements for using cooling water are relatively strict due to the pipes, equipment, and heat exchangers the water flows through. The water used needs to be free of any biological contaminants (such as bacteria and algae), maintain proper pH levels, and are often then treated with other chemicals such as biocides.
Lake water certainly can be treated to the level needed and used, it's just often cheaper to buy domestic water from the local utility than to construct and operate a small scale water treatment system along side the industrial process.
> Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
Most of the water is "consumed" via open loop evaporative cooling systems, so the water is never really "used" as in destroyed or anything. The majority of it is evaporated and returns to the land as rain and the rest is returned via sanitary drains, to city sewer systems.
Evaporation losses will move the water to a different locality. DC's not only cool servers, but control humidity by adding or removing water to the air.
Warm water fed back into the ecosystem will (relatively) quickly cause unwanted changes to the lake's biosphere.
Unless it's properly filtered, returned water will be contaminated by material in the cooling system.
It puts local demand on the water system competing with human need.
It cools down the machines by evaporating, and is then released into the atmosphere. That also means the water needs to be clean, pretty much drinking water, because otherwise the evaporation would deposit minerals and stuff.
Turning water into steam uses much more energy than heating water, which means it's a much more effective means of cooling.
EU is in such a weird position. They are realizing that software, robotics, and generally automation through AI is the industrial future, but they seem to be paralyzed to actually start the build-up that will feed that frontier industry and economy.
Assuming you are right, the "build-up" of more physical datacenters isn't really the difficult part, training frontier models is. The open-weight Chinese models are several months behind frontier models at this stage and as long as you're not interested in burning cash to stay in the lead you can just wait it out. Many signs (upcoming ridiculous IPO figures and benchmarks) point to the current LLM paradigm reaching a plateau.
I think that currently the EU is focusing on strengthening itself from a military perspective due to US policy shifts, so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people, thus prioritizing safety and perhaps energy production, as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China. If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
> so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people
The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
> as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China
Yes, there are government policy reasons behind why this is the case. Some would argue that these policy decisions are a net negative for the EU.
> If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
Fair point, these are good things to focus on. However, EU citizens are going to love it when there are no frontier-tech opportunities left in their countries, with everything in this area having to be imported from the US and China (note that just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons).
> just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons
China is not providing "open weight" models just because they think it's good for humanity. It is a competitive strategy to stay relevant at the forefront of the industry. The reality is that China is severely compute-constrained mostly due to Nvidia chip and ASML embargo. Nearly all available compute capacity has to go toward training, leaving very little for inference. It is why they release their models openly allowing third parties in EU and USA to host inference for them.
This will change when China reaches a critical scale of domestic AI chip production, which is inevitable.
The EU already has several hyperscaler data centers and many more colo-style data centers. Plenty of compute power exists in EU; this new generation is about purely inference capacity.
In the US, the political backlash against data centers is also about the inability of government to be transparent about these buildouts (eg. City councils signing NDAs and building commissions quietly approving development plans without community input), the inability for utilities/regulators to actually hold data center developers to promises made (usually regarding resource/ utility usage), more complaints about affordability (cost of utility bills rising), additional hate against the unlikable tech CEOs (who aren't charismatic and whom have a long list of previous violations), fear of what AI will bring (the promised white collar revolution, promises of "infinite AI immigrants" in an age where immigration has been demonized), etc.
Only a few of these are about the "factory" itself. Lots of them are about the people trying to retain some control of their communities. Some of them are about the speed of the buildout (eg. compromises in water use / plumbing and noise / pollution created by the ad hoc on site electrical generation).
The data center CEOs are starting to admit that their NDA-blitzscale strategy may have backfired because communities are pissed and the NDAs prevented anyone from making a positive case for the buildouts while the rage was boiling over.
In the US, the rhetorical trick is to include the 3.4T* gallons of water utilized for power generation along with cooling (160B) to make this number super scary when water was utilized for power generation because it's a good cheap relatively clean power source so the datacenters were built near hydroelectric plants.
We can't do much about the 160B, but we could do a lot to build more power generation and storage. As just one example, in west Texas, natural gas is flared into the sky en masse from depleted oil wells because methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Some sites could be tapped to hit hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt of power generation. And any power you don't need can be exported to the Texas power grid so it can make money the day you turn it on. And if you're willing to spend a little more, you can sequester the CO2 and make the power generation mostly green.
Cue crickets from Silicon Valley on this one because it's neither nuclear nor renewable, but the crypto people love it so I would guess they'll eventually come around. That they haven't already is one facet of my disenchantment with tech culture. Their absurd belief in Star Trek Voyager-like scenarios playing out with AI in the next decade the other major one.
*Which is slightly more than the 3.3T gallons of water Americans used to water their lawns. So, ya know, where's the outrage?
This figure is about the water consumption only. The estimate about the electricity consumption, in that same article, is much higher than that.
The main problem is, in my opinion, that those are just estimates. If we are supposed to accommodate the current and potential future needs, we need real data. Not estimates.
Less than they do if there were people living on that same land, and way less than they use in China. Get over it, data centers and progress is the future.
> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.
I do not understand how that is even possible.
If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.
I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.
I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.
(Directives are binding on states. They transpose them into national law, possibly adding additional clauses as it goes past (EU directives set a minimum standard, not a maximum) at which point they're binding on people.)
Nobody ever said the EU was efficient. Look for a deadline for that transposition on the original directive.
> 1. By 15 May 2024 and every year thereafter, Member States shall require owners and operators of data centres in their territory with a power demand of the installed information technology (IT) of at least 500kW, to make the information set out in Annex VII publicly available, except for information subject to Union and national law protecting trade and business secrets and confidentiality. > 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to data centres used for, or providing their services exclusively with the final aim of, defence and civil protection.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ%3AJOL...
This kind of basic regulatory work is pretty thankless even when it's important. But I suspect the toxic politics of data centers will kick up some enforcement action sooner or later.
(Why is it so toxic? Well, the explicit promise from AI companies of mass unemployment combined with higher electricity prices, and maybe even destroy the world https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/anthropic... is why.)
Directives are not the same as regulations .
Directives are goals that must be achieved by adapting existing national laws or introducing new ones, and that takes time.
The EU is not as federal as the US and has basically no "federales" law enforcement of its own.
The Data Protection Commission in Ireland are remarkably lax about enforcing it because the government quite likes the tax revenue that Google, Apple and Meta brings them.
European directive is not a law, it's a directive.
It's up to the national governments to create applicable laws that are to the letter and to the spirit of a European directive. Then national bodies will start applying the law and govern its implementation/adherence.
An by "up to" I mean they are obliged... eventually.
And I wouldn't be so sure on being 'eventually' obliged, someone has to enforce it for that to happen and it's not looking like anyone has profit in it
I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that.
Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
Data centers tend to concentrate their water usage within urban areas, causing a strain on local resources. The value of their output is much less tangible. Their water consumption scales up around tenfold if you consider the indirect usage from generating the electricity.
But on the other hand; yes, it would also help enormously if people ate less meat.
By “strain on local resources” are you just stating the fact that they use resources? Or are you trying to imply that it causes problems for those resources?
Companies don’t just buy land, connect to water and power, and then the utilities get caught off guard when the water system is suddenly strained by water going somewhere. There are processes for approving this before connection.
If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00487-z
This isn’t some unusual outcome. It’s like one of those maps that purports to show one thing but really just shows population density.
I'm personally willing to change my life to help the planet and nature in general to the point it doesn't affect my wellbeing (as in health and safety). For me, personally, the problem is not changing per se, but people finding no amount of change enough, always moving the goalposts with "but, what if" clauses.
The problem with datacenter water use is the state of the water leaving the data center. Agriculture and meat industry can reuse the water multiple times from cleaner to dirtier processes and return it to the nature with reasonable processing.
The additives used by datacenters in some cases can't be filtered or processed out practically or in economically viable ways, so the water returns back as unusable, esp. if they get water from a body of water and return it with added chemicals the process gets very damaging.
Why would any water be returned? Datacenters (and literally every industrial process that requires cooling) use water for evaporative cooling. The water evaporates, then returns as rain elsewhere.
The only water being "returned" I can think of would be from the intermittent or continuous blowdown systems to maintain TDS levels; but blowdown is a small fraction of the water consumed and is typically returned back via the city sewer system.
We're talking about water that's released in general use, right? I would expect a closed cooling loop to have some biocides but have almost none of that leave the system.
And one datacenter had a weird bacteria that one time.
At first you had me, but then I realised it's not true if the price is building more data centres! That was just a trick to make the climate worse! Grr /s
Here in France at least, companies can also be subject to FOIA requests for information pertaining to contracts they have with public entities. E.g. if a city publishes a tender to run tye local bike share program, then the company that gets the contract may have to directly answer (some) requests about that program.
But like I said, not sure if this applies to data centers which are, iiuc, mostly private ventures.
I live right next to a waste valorisation plant[1]. They have to exactly specify what amount of water they use and what amount of water they then send out to the waste water treatment facility. It also has to be clean to a very specific standard before it leaves which is also checked.
We have datacenters in Switzerland too, but very little outrage or debate because there are strict rules in place in most places. They can build all they want but it costs significantly more to meet environmental requirements.
The valorisation plant next to my home has water cooling tower/fans significantly oversized just to make sure the noise is keep under the required level.
[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/
Definitely not the Netherlands then
This is a Dutch website and here in the Netherlands we have demand issues. In these same areas where issues exist, data centres are being planned and built. There are waiting lists now for normal businesses who want a new connection to the net, or connections with more capacity. These are lists waiting for capacity to become available: The demand on the current net is already too high.
They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.
But if you do end up being correct, then the data centers in question will just sit partially or fully idle, using no / a tiny fraction of the electricity and water they could use (which as others have said on this forum, water usage concerns are massively overblown in most data center builds anyway)
According to whom and by what metric? The companies investing vast amounts of capital into them seem to disagree.
The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.
That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.
We need the food, we'll die without food, telling people to eat less of whatever food, so a few "tech bros" can build a new datacenter is outright evil.
People need to eat, it's non negotiable. We do not need data centres.
Providing a fully vegetarian diet for everyone is kind of non-starter.
> Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution.
Belittling criticisms that way is childish and doesn't address a single one. Literally nobody on the whole planet, at least in public discourse, is using "I am angry" as an argument in any of this. Yet it's the first thing that is always brought up. It's just a cheap, thought-terminating stereotype.
In data centres all that water is so that some wimpy cunt gets to hit return after spending no more than 5 minutes in an half baked prompt so he can insert the answer into his pitch deck, or PR review — and now with pacing the frontier models, he actually doesn't need to insert it, it's inserted automatically wherever it might fit. When it comes to agriculture, that is to produce things like food. This requires obviously much more water, which means that's what we really should be cutting down. Agents don't need food so the solution is just to replace humans with agents.
If you have any other stubborn question resisting clarification just hit me up, and I'll explain it to you immediately and clearly.
Because there's a building populist push against these developments.
Presumably they still want to build these things. If I was trying to convince people who hate me to let me do what I want, I would not play so secretive as it may look suspicious. Especially if, ostensibly, the data is in my favor.
Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward
This is extremely inappropriate on HN. Or anywhere, really.
I can think of a few reasons that companies might not share data. A big one is that people have no idea what a responsible amount of water usage is, so your information will be weaponized no matter what.
The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.
Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).
In the Netherlands it is not just about AI datacenters, even before the rise of AI pushback against Meta's planned datacenter made them cancel it. There has been a lot of criticism of the municipality that allowed Microsoft to expand its datacenters. The argument is that this is a small country that already has to make tradeoffs to get to its desired energy mix (wind turbines near cities on land) and then these datacenters are built that consume the power that is generated by sacrificing the little remaining open space. In the last few years there is actually a electricity shortage in some regions so "we can hook up this 200 MW datacenter but not your house" is a bad look.
It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.
From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.
That is not corrective. There is an EU directive, but it would have to be adopted as local law to become actual law.
The datacenters are following the laws in their jurisdiction.
Just because people haven't cared about the environment before doesn't mean they shouldn't start now. And just because there are worse existing polluters doesn't mean we shouldn't resist new ones.
A new golf course used to be seen as a great thing to have in your back yard and now we know their pesticide use increases the risk of Parkinson's. People are waking up and caring more. We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
So unless you're talking about a tiny private residential pool you're at least an order of magnitude off.
But they should be made to report this. AND their use of water should be regulated - they don't need to use any water at all, it's just cheaper for them - and they should be contributing enough to mitigate negative effects on energy prices.
The problem isn't data centres. The problem is not pricing in and regulating externalities, whether caused by data centres or other things.
It would also quickly show us who actually cares about the environmental effects and who are using it as an excuse.
There is a very obvious pattern here
> According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030.
Yeah, so 2030 sounds like a long way off. It's 3 years away. We are not going to be meeting any climate targets.
• EU Regulation: A binding legal act that applies immediately and identically in all EU countries as soon as it takes effect, without needing national laws.
• EU Directive: A legislative act that sets a mandatory goal that all EU countries must achieve, but allows each nation to pass its own laws to implement it.
It takes time for directives to take effect, unless a member state's national law already implements them.
Can someone explain the data center water usage? Data center don't drink water. It cools down the machine.
What's preventing them getting cool water from a lake and draining to it again to cool down? Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
Some do, but most don't since the requirements for using cooling water are relatively strict due to the pipes, equipment, and heat exchangers the water flows through. The water used needs to be free of any biological contaminants (such as bacteria and algae), maintain proper pH levels, and are often then treated with other chemicals such as biocides.
Lake water certainly can be treated to the level needed and used, it's just often cheaper to buy domestic water from the local utility than to construct and operate a small scale water treatment system along side the industrial process.
> Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?
Most of the water is "consumed" via open loop evaporative cooling systems, so the water is never really "used" as in destroyed or anything. The majority of it is evaporated and returns to the land as rain and the rest is returned via sanitary drains, to city sewer systems.
Warm water fed back into the ecosystem will (relatively) quickly cause unwanted changes to the lake's biosphere.
Unless it's properly filtered, returned water will be contaminated by material in the cooling system.
It puts local demand on the water system competing with human need.
Turning water into steam uses much more energy than heating water, which means it's a much more effective means of cooling.
What you describe is the type of cooling used in certain power plants. That heats the lake though, which has its own environmental effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution
Some smaller data centers have a cool solution where they deposit extra heat into the municipal hot water grid, which is pretty neat https://www.techradar.com/pro/finally-some-good-usage-this-d...
I think that currently the EU is focusing on strengthening itself from a military perspective due to US policy shifts, so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people, thus prioritizing safety and perhaps energy production, as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China. If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
> as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China
Yes, there are government policy reasons behind why this is the case. Some would argue that these policy decisions are a net negative for the EU.
> If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
Fair point, these are good things to focus on. However, EU citizens are going to love it when there are no frontier-tech opportunities left in their countries, with everything in this area having to be imported from the US and China (note that just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons).
China is not providing "open weight" models just because they think it's good for humanity. It is a competitive strategy to stay relevant at the forefront of the industry. The reality is that China is severely compute-constrained mostly due to Nvidia chip and ASML embargo. Nearly all available compute capacity has to go toward training, leaving very little for inference. It is why they release their models openly allowing third parties in EU and USA to host inference for them.
This will change when China reaches a critical scale of domestic AI chip production, which is inevitable.
It's kind of sad that the only European LLM lab of significance is not even setting their model as a default one any longer.
Realizing something is not the same as acting on it and Europe is falling further and further behind.
If the EU does not build their own factories, then they will be reliant on factories built elsewhere.
In the US, the political backlash against data centers is also about the inability of government to be transparent about these buildouts (eg. City councils signing NDAs and building commissions quietly approving development plans without community input), the inability for utilities/regulators to actually hold data center developers to promises made (usually regarding resource/ utility usage), more complaints about affordability (cost of utility bills rising), additional hate against the unlikable tech CEOs (who aren't charismatic and whom have a long list of previous violations), fear of what AI will bring (the promised white collar revolution, promises of "infinite AI immigrants" in an age where immigration has been demonized), etc.
Only a few of these are about the "factory" itself. Lots of them are about the people trying to retain some control of their communities. Some of them are about the speed of the buildout (eg. compromises in water use / plumbing and noise / pollution created by the ad hoc on site electrical generation).
The data center CEOs are starting to admit that their NDA-blitzscale strategy may have backfired because communities are pissed and the NDAs prevented anyone from making a positive case for the buildouts while the rage was boiling over.
Continuing a conversation is often just a slow-drip Streisand effect.
We can't do much about the 160B, but we could do a lot to build more power generation and storage. As just one example, in west Texas, natural gas is flared into the sky en masse from depleted oil wells because methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Some sites could be tapped to hit hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt of power generation. And any power you don't need can be exported to the Texas power grid so it can make money the day you turn it on. And if you're willing to spend a little more, you can sequester the CO2 and make the power generation mostly green.
Cue crickets from Silicon Valley on this one because it's neither nuclear nor renewable, but the crypto people love it so I would guess they'll eventually come around. That they haven't already is one facet of my disenchantment with tech culture. Their absurd belief in Star Trek Voyager-like scenarios playing out with AI in the next decade the other major one.
*Which is slightly more than the 3.3T gallons of water Americans used to water their lawns. So, ya know, where's the outrage?
> In the Netherlands, it is estimated that they account for about 0.1 percent of total consumption.
If that's true, what's the problem?
The main problem is, in my opinion, that those are just estimates. If we are supposed to accommodate the current and potential future needs, we need real data. Not estimates.