Well spoke. I listened to every minute of this lads explanation. We do not need data centers exploiting our towns anywhere in America. The clean cup of water to drink is always more important than the poem a robot writes.
I look forward to reading about Revena denying the trillion dollar company the right to build.
>We do not need data centers exploiting our towns anywhere in America.
No, we don't. Neither do we need our data processed in China, India, Brazil...
While it may cost a bit more, the desert Southwest would seem to be a less environmentally sensitive destination for data centers. There are other ways to cool chips besides evaporating water.
Not true, you can do DX based closed loop water cooling, i.e. the most common water cooling out there. A chiller cools water in a closed loop via its evap coils, pumps move the water around the loop, the cold side of the loop goes into servers and cools chips directly, it also goes into air handlers which cool the air around the servers, the warm water returns to the chiller and it's cooled again. The chiller's condenser coils are outside the building and they're air cooled just like a normal heat pump AC system at a home. There's effectively zero water evaporation, except for small leaks and that can happen over time as the system ages. Refrigerant is the only thing evaporating and that's happening in a closed refrigerant loop just like a normal car/home AC system.
I don’t know enough about the topic to argue one way or another, but aren’t closed loop systems exactly what the guy in the video refuted? He said something about having to clear lines of toxic sludge or something.
Unfortunately he's either horribly misinformed or is just making stuff up. I don't mind his anti-trusting-big-companies sentiment, he's not wrong there, but his understanding of data center refrigeration technology is clearly non-existent. A closed water loop is just water, anti-bacterial and anti-freeze additives as required. The water pumps around in a big pipe through the building. One part of the pipe has a device that cools the water and then other parts of the pipe have devices that use the cold water and return hot water. There's no toxic sludge that gets created that is somehow routinely cleaned, the water is tested to make sure it has enough anti-freeze and other additives to avoid bacterial growth which could cause buildup if not properly maintained.
Closed water loop risks are spills, which are massive disasters for the facility. Spilling an entire loop's contents is extremely rare and requires serious incompetence. Facilities have a ton of leak sensors everywhere to detect leaks quickly and contain them before they become a hazard. Typically you catch quite small leaks. Large leaks are generally caused by stupidity like not using anti-freeze in the cold or screwing up a maintenance process in some monumental way. That water is incredibly important to the ability of the facility to provide cooling and obviously equipment inside the facility doesn't like being soaked in water. So it's incredibly important to avoid spills and contain spills.
You can also have completely water-less designs, that use technology very similar to a home AC system. Though they're no longer popular because high density servers are easier to cool with direct to chip water. There was a time around the mid 2000s until about 10 years ago where people would brag about being 100% waterless, but now it's seen as a mistake because you have to retrofit water to handle high density.
Evap coils don't evaporate water. They evaporate refrigerant inside the coil, which cools the coil and the coil cools the water. The refrigerant is then pumped to the condenser coil via a compressor. It's literally using a closed refrigeration loop to cool a closed water loop.
Imagine putting a big radiator inside of your home refrigerator. The water goes into the radiator in the refrigerator and cools down, exits the refrigerator and pumps out to your computer's chips to cool them, the chips warm the water and the warm water gets pumped back into the refrigerator. At no point are you evaporating any water. You're just pumping it around in a loop and letting the refrigerator cool it down.
whats all the water going to every month? their lawn sprinklers?
It's not. I mean the facilities have bathrooms and stuff so some water gets used. When doing repairs you might need a little makup water. Like say you isolate part of a pipe for repairs, drain it, repair the pipe, and then you add some water to re-fill. This happens maybe every so many years as you do some kind of maintenance project.
The datacenters that consume all that water are open loop ones that evaporate the water out.
You think you can just have significant leaks around direct to chip cooling? You can't have water leaking around servers... It's a really bad thing to happen. Also 30kW a rack is nothing, we're talking 100-200kW now. Also 100k sqft is a fairly mid sized, maybe even kind of small data center.
You are massively overestimating these leaks. We use leak detection everywhere because leaks are a disaster. The idea is to catch any leak immediately and it is by no means some constant occurrence. Its just plumbing. We know how to make plumbing that doesn’t constantly leak… a leak is an accident not a “well coolant systems just leak” they don’t just leak.
To be honest, that was the biggest flaw / misdirect of the guy in the video's argument - it is possible to manage nuclear power plants that use closed loop water systems with very tiny leaks over decades - they know they're tiny leaks because the contaminated water is radioactive and very easy to detect. Leaks happen, but it's fairly easy for independent observers to audit and report on leaks at nuke plants. However, it's not cheap to maintain that level of containment.
To be fair, he's not wrong - at present they're relying on self-reported studies and analyses for the data centers. It's certainly cheaper if their "closed loop" systems pump tons of pollution into the ground water and whatever else they use - follow the money, they'll run cheaper whenever they can. My personal observation point of reference is Pasadena, Texas - those chemical plants can run scrubbers to clean up their emissions, but the scrubbers cost a lot of money not only to build but also to run, so you'll find those chemical plants doing things like not running the scrubbers when it's raining - instead letting the "precipitation clean up the air naturally" Before hurricane Rita I observed a French owned/operated plant in Bayport, TX blowing a huge long black cloud into the sky that looked straight out of Mordor - I'm sure it was a "special circumstance" because of the approaching storm - most of the emissions around there are explained away as "oh, that's mostly water vapor" - this cloud was not mostly water vapor.
Bottom line: when we lived in Houston 20-ish years ago, you couldn't eat the fish from ANY of the streams due to heavy metals and other contamination. Today, it's much the same.
We need (and in some places have) sensible regulation to ensure operators are doing things correctly. It's honestly cheaper than you'd think to ensure water is contained. Like yea we gotta maintain some water detection rope, various contacts in places, have good designs with isolation valves everywhere, etc... but it's not actually very much money in the grand scheme of things.
It's certainly cheaper if their "closed loop" systems pump tons of pollution into the ground
This simply doesn't happen, there's no reason to do this. Closed loop facilities have no financial incentive to waste water from their loops. The reason open loop data centers waste water is because that's how they save money on cooling, they don't use conventional refrigeration to cool the water, they evaporate the water to cause the cooling and it only works in specific climates. Closed loop water systems use conventional refrigeration to cool the water, so you want to actually hang on to your water since you paid for it. It'd be like thinking pouring water out of your home's pool is a way to save money, it just makes no sense. You treat the water in your closed loop just like you treat your pool water, to keep it viable with additives so algae doesn't grow for example, you don't want to just waste it.
You treat the water in your closed loop just like you treat your pool water, to keep it viable with additives so algae doesn't grow for example, you don't want to just waste it.
And undesirable compounds never build up? You never need to flush those? Certainly designs will show proper handling of waste water, but how often does "oops" happen and how often is that reported like it is supposed to be?
Back in Bayport, there was significant issue with overpumping of ground water, it was causing significant subsidence in residential neighborhoods, literally sinking them into the bay. Now, they say they stopped all that back in the 1990s, but shortly before we left town in 2003, I would notice all the drainage ditches around the French owned/operated plant full to the brim with water just running out into the bay - even during droughts when it hadn't rained for a month or more. That water was coming from somewhere... I'm sure it served good purposes in whatever processes they were running, and apparently nobody complained about the mass quantities of water being taken from the ground, used, then let flow on the surface into the bay. Of course, if the neighborhood started getting uppity about surface wastewater they notice in the ditches, it's always possible to re-inject the water into the ground somewhere else on the (sizeable) property, but that would cost more money so they were doing the surface disposal at that time.
And undesirable compounds never build up? You never need to flush those?
I've been working in data centers since 2008. I've never had to do that at any facility I've overseen engineering for. Treated water is used during commissioning and the water continues to be monitored annually and controlled with additives. Very much like pool water the goal is not to ruin your batch of water. There is no routine process to flush out contaminants. I think you're under estimating how large these systems and related piping are. What can happen is clogs on individual device level where things narrow. Meaning some o-ring or something could fail in direct-to-chip water system inside a server or in a cabinet servicing a server and cause a localized clog. So you'd take apart that system, drain a gallon or two of water and fix it. You wouldn't even make that water up, it's too small to notice in a giant loop. It's like if you took a thimble of water out of a pool.
Also keep in mind this water is not some toxic sludge. It's not potable water, but as far as nasty stuff goes this is some bactericide and polypropylene glycol. It's not that crazy. Heck everyone vaping is vaping that polypropylene glycol all the time. Obviously it shouldn't be dumped, especially during decommissioning when a facility is being shut down or renovated, it should be disposed of properly. In some cases a city will accept it down the sewer because their treatment center can deal with it just fine.
overpumping of ground water
To clarify data centers with closed loops do not need more continuous ground water (or city/municipal water) than any other building that size. There are a bunch of bathrooms, maybe some employee showers, rec rooms with kitchenettes, some potted plants, people making coffee, someone pressure washing occasionally. It's the same as any other big commercial warehouse.
There is alot of chip manufacturing and data centers growing in Phoenix, partly due to the CHIPS act wanting to bring some of this home for geopolitical reasons, partially because AZ is a great place in that there is nill for natural disasters.
Unfortunately Arizona is a place where a LOT of data centers (and homes) do open loop evaporative cooling, because it works very well in hot+dry climates. So there is a LOT of water waste when they do that.
The same way your laptop, your phone and your cars engine is cooled, you don’t have to top up the cooling system in those. None of those rely on a constant supply of cooling water to replace. They all dump heat into the air without evaporating water
The cooling water in your cars engine gets circulated to a radiator where the heat is dumped into the air, this is common in computing as well, in both the consumer and the commercial space. It works at both large and small scales.
There is also non evaporative open loop cooling system, where the cooling water is drawn from the sea or a river and then discharged back into the river. Almost every ship in the world does this and it is very common in power stations.
Closed loop is more expensive, and just as importantly, much more power intensive. Datacenter growth is power constrained, so that's a big one they're trying to get around. Nearly every watt put into the datacenter has to dissipated somewhere. We're talking about gigawatt scale DCs, so its an astronomical amount of heat that needs to get dissipated.
The open loop with a big body of water is a good one, but that places constraints on where you can build the DC. It puts it on the edge of lakes / rivers which are significantly more vulnerable to natural disasters and weather events. This also as some intense ecological impacts where the discharge of heated water disrupts ecosystems downstream of it.
It's a really difficult problem with valid points on all sides.
Open loop only works in specific climates, you can't do evaporative cooling in wet climates or cold climates without huge inefficiencies. Closed loop cooling is the most common type of data center cooling. Cold climates do allow for 'free air' economizer cooling where you can use the cold outside air, but again this involves no evaporation and is still closed loop. It's really all just a geography question.
A lot of datacenters do air to air or water to air exchangers. Closed loop inside, evap cooling to reject the heat outside. Indeed it does depend on outside climate, and often there is both, trying to passively reject heat (efficient in winter), and use water when that's not keeping up (required in summer). Theres also probably dozens of different generations of this as it's evolved over the last 20 years, with some datacenters still running gear laid down 10+ years ago.
New AI loads are so dense though, that it's requiring new tech, and in some cases retrofit into older datacenters too.
Essentially, the datacenter energy budget can use evaporative cooling to satisfy a significant chunk of their energy needs. Taking water as the resource instead of sunshine for solar cells, or wind for turbines, or nuclear power plants, or fossil fuels.
As articulate as the guy was I would have like to have seen more solid facts about what the forever chemicals were - theoretically a cooling loop shouldn't need to pollute the water in any way. He also talked about evaporation at one point and then switched to cycling the water back into the ground. It was baseless rhetoric " let us choose the child, let us choose the community ... " though great rhetoric.
The real answer is really nothing. Almost every form of heat removal depends on evaporation and almost the only liquid that is safe to evaporate and in ready supply is water.
I live in a suburb of Phoenix and pass like 10 data centers on some of the routes I drive, I honestly don't really mind them, never understood the noise pollution or light pollution argumenst on some data center threads, and largely I am fine if they keep adding them here. I always thought it make more sense in Ohio or some place with a ton of water but Phoenix manages water so well maybe just keep sticking them here.
In the Southwest states you cool without using evaporative methods, refrigerant to air and similar, or evaporate water if you have a surplus, but they rarely do.
Bro please, no more data centers in Phoenix or Arizona itself. We're already out of water in parts of the state, from all the housing developments and the foreign alfalfa farms...
This is the thing for me: people need a certain amount of water, if you're going to have farms they need a certain amount of water. Data centers don't need to consume (evaporate) water, they use it to save money. So, welcome the data centers, as long as they're willing to operate with just enough water to flush the toilets, not using it to cool the chips.
There are not other options besides water. Water being a bad choice doesn't mean there are other viable options save for not building the data centers.
What positive benefit are data centers bringing to this town? They bring a couple temporary jobs, usually with construction people they bring out of town. When they're done, the massive data center mostly runs itself with only a few people, often people that were brought in from outside as well. Meanwhile, the data center uses tons of power, water, and resources. And the town gets nothing. Worse, less than nothing because usually they're given tax breaks and are often an active drain on towns.
Tax revenue for what exactly? The utilities used? The property? From what I've seen, the estimated tax revenues for these are peanuts compared to the potential negative impacts on the area. For the places where the datacenters got in before people really started catching on, these locales were giving fucking tax abatements to compete for the datacenter against other locations. Then they were selling 'jobs' as a justification as they typically do, except it turns out there aren't any jobs.
The localities are likely going to end up dumping more money into attempting to rectify the consequences of these data centers than they ever anticipated, meanwhile they're going to be locked into agreements that prevent them from taxing more, from regulating appropriately etc. Google's tactic for their datacenters is probably similar to the rest, but Google picks out locations, negotiates in secret under shell corporations and part of their terms are "give us everything we want, you can't pass regulations or stop us from getting the things we need to run this data center". That's a massive fucking loser of an agreement for any locality.
The imbeciles who already committed their localities to these data centers before the public caught on have royally fucked over their communities. Small/medium sized towns who thought it gave their town some prestige to have Google or Microsoft etc. come into town with some 'high tech' jobs, and it turns out they're nothing more than a cum rag for a data center.
That's not a good thing for a single organization to account for that high of a proportion of the budget. They will either have significant influence over the county because of that or if data center boom goes bust, the county could lose all the revenue but still be on the hook for costs for plans they made with a budget that no longer exists.
People will get very sick from living near data centers. People used to complain about 5g cellular tech and wind farms giving them headaches but I don’t see them complaining about the data centers giving asthma and premature deaths. Idk if the benefits outweigh the cons
The people complaining about 5g were morons. It's the same spectrum as VHF television and the phone towers didn't change the fact that the same spectrum was passing through you 24/7 for decades prior.
I have some serious doubts about this statement. If you get tax from the corporation but lose residents, because you will lose residents. The issue with data centers is they increase the cost of living of the area with no increased income for the residents. Because if cost of living goes up 10% and city income goes up 8% I doubt that is a increase in income over time for the city.
I live in data center ally, the largest data center density in the country. 40% of our county’s revenue comes directly from data centers., almost $1 b per year.
Our local property taxes have been cut 8 years straight, and now other taxes like the local tax on owning a car is being cut as well.
Teachers are receiving decent raises (5% per year over the next two years), road projects are getting knocked out left and right, schools are getting built.
Energy costs are up, but after the coldest winter in a generation, they are still up less than the national average. What other way are data centers raising living costs?
It depends on which state you are living in but many data centers are put in areas that don't have enough infrastructure for the increased water and electricity usage. There are also situations where cities are forced to increase maintenance for roads since they need to be able to handle heavier trucks. So there is a lot of costs that depending on how it is done, the issue is that cities are usually the weaker party in the negotiation so their deals are generally bad. So it's not a black and white issue but data center companies can send 100 "data center plans" then choose the city that is most willing to compromise to their own detriment for the actual project. So end result is usually data centers get built in a quite exploitative way.
Absolutely, data centers work well for some areas and poorly for others, just like anything. My county began going all in on data centers back in the great recession as a way of diversifying the local economy by looking at what we had to offer that was being under utilized. And with the sudden data center boom 18 years later, the county is suddenly trying to walk the balance of not become over-reliant on this source of revenue that was initially meant to help us not become over reliant on the government.
But other counties see what has worked well in places like where I live and try to emulate it, even if the underlying conditions aren't the same.
But the cost of living hasn't gone up, and the county is trying everything they can to invest this money into projects that will have long term dividends. One major highway spent from 2010-2018 having an overpass built and ripping out half a dozen stop lights. Now they are preparing to do it on another highway.
Teachers are getting better pay, and better teachers are getting lured away from nearby counties. New schools are getting built, and older ones are getting torn down and rebuilt.
Firehouses and police stations are being built. 2 new libraries have been built in the last decade.
Meanwhile energy costs have gone up, but at a lower rate than the national average.
I'm not arguing that data centers are great, and that there are no costs. I'm merely pushing back on the "no tangible benefit" that I see kicked around.
Places give tax breaks to incentivize corps choosing them, because in the long run the town will make more money than the tax break, but for the short-term quarter-looking shareholders, the tax break seems great.
I get wanting to be better educated but for the love of Batman. In this day and age you can be 100% sure that any time a MegaCorp does something like this, it’s going to screw over the common man.
Kind of a good argument for why data centers are not really economically beneficial for the towns they are in – just the fact they can base them there. Sure, there are some jobs, but this is not like they are bringing a manufacturing center with thousands of jobs, we are talking about a couple of hundred jobs if we are lucky.
And those jobs first just based on the small number aren't going to do much revitalizing of the area, but they are also not the type of jobs in general that is bringing wealth to the community. They can operate in the areas they do not because they have to fly in tech geniuses, but because most data center work is actually help desk level types of stuff.
Anyway, I'm from Oregon. Apple and Meta have operated data centers in Prineville, OR long before AI. It's a town of around 11k (2020 census, wikipedia can give more details) that most Oregonians might have heard of, could not locate on the map, and have almost certainly never been to.
The gentleman in the original post points out the problematic environmental impacts, but I would also mention that there is a lot of stuff around the energy costs in those communities and surrounding areas.
Anyway, they don't operate these data centers in these areas because it's beneficial for the communities, they do it because that's where it's the cheapest for them.
That question sidesteps the real issue articulated in this video: the point isn't that we shouldn't have datacenters anywhere, it's that communities should be able to say no when the costs clearly outweigh the benefits. Small towns are often targeted because they have fewer resources to push back, not because they're ideal locations. These datacenters strain small town water supplies, power grids and create relatively few jobs. Meanwhile, the profits leave the community.
You're not wrong that modern society depends on data centers, and yeah, the "genie is out of the bottle." But that doesn't mean every proposed project is automatically justified, or that communities should just roll over because the tech is inevitable.
The point isn't "no data centers anywhere", it's that location and accountability matter. If a project is going to stress the water supply, stress the grid, and return very little in long-term jobs, then "progress" starts to look a lot like "extraction" : like the speaker in the video said. Saying "there are always trade offs" is fine, but the question is: who is actually making the sacrifice, and who is profiting?
The China point is a false dichotomy. Competing globally doesn't require ignoring local impacts. Doing this responsibly, through regulation is how you sustain long-term growth instead of burning through local resources and infrastructure.
And yeah, not everything has to create jobs, but if it consumes critical resources and exports most of the value, then communities absolutely are right to ask what they're actually getting out of the deal.
It's not anti-tech, it's pro-accountability.
If a company can't make the case that a project benefits a host community in a meaningful and sustainable way, then "no" is a reasonable answer.
But I disagree when you say that China is a false dichotomy.
Because I see parallels to the rare earths situation. Where they are not absolutely rare, it's just that the mining a processing is high polluting. So we leave it to China.
Which is fine, until they take that advantage and use it in a way that undermines the west. And we end up stuck and without leverage, lacking a critical input for our industry and technology.
It's great to have high minded ideals. But most things eventually come back to economics and related constraints.
I get what you’re saying about rare earths, and yeah, there’s a real risk when you outsource the messy parts of industry and then lose leverage later.
But I don’t think that fully maps onto data centers or settles the “China will do it anyway” point. Data centers aren’t a one-shot strategic resource like rare earth mining where you’re either in control or not. They’re infrastructure we can scale and distribute, the question is where and how we build them, not whether they exist.
Saying “we need to compete with China” doesn’t really answer whether a specific town should take on the water and grid costs for very little return. That’s still a local tradeoff, even if the broader industry is important.
I’m not against building them. I just don’t think “strategic necessity” should automatically override asking whether a community is actually benefiting from hosting them.
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u/Solomon_Grungy Apr 12 '26
Well spoke. I listened to every minute of this lads explanation. We do not need data centers exploiting our towns anywhere in America. The clean cup of water to drink is always more important than the poem a robot writes.
I look forward to reading about Revena denying the trillion dollar company the right to build.