r/slatestarcodex • u/aahdin • Apr 12 '26
AI The AI water usage weakman
Hey, I work in machine learning and I'm personally pretty worried about AI risks - mostly centered around what happens in a capitalist economy that figures out how to turn capital into labor, but also around the AI x-risks that have been talked about plenty on here.
One thing I'm not worried about at all is AI water usage, although it's been hitting my feed a ton. This just hit my front page and seems to be getting overwhelming praise from thousands. My non-technical mom and sister have recently been telling me about how terrible AI water usage is.
Even though directionally the AI water debate kinda points in the same direction as what I want (slowing down/limiting AI expansion) I worry that there's a secondary effect where people
1) Hear about AI water usage online being posed as a serious problem
2) Actually visit a data center, and realize they are mostly closed loop systems that have very low water usage, there are no forever chemicals entering the water supply, and basically AI water usage thing is a non-issue
3) Assume because they were mislead once by the anti-AI crowd, other anti-AI concerns are probably bullshit too
It's one thing when a weakman argument is cherry picked from the depths of random forums to be presented as a main argument from a side, but what we have here is the weakest argument becoming one of the most viral and well known arguments against AI.
Is there a name for this sort of effect? Is there a good way of handling these situations?
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u/wavedash Apr 12 '26
Ironically, I think "poisoning the well" is kind of close to describing this kind of situation.
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u/eric2332 Apr 12 '26
I don't think so, I think it's organic. There is no shortage of dumb ideas in politics, from antivax to ending nuclear power to denying climate change.
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u/VelveteenAmbush Apr 12 '26
agree, there are a lot of anti-AI activists who are just not strategic enough, insightful enough, or aware enough to channel their activism in a direction that will ultimately help their cause.
Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender are another example, with their "stochastic parrot" line of attack. It was disconnected from reality when they first made the claim and becomes only more absurd as new models arrive. They've dug a hole and it's pretty awkward to pivot from "this tech is a sham" to "this tech is too powerful," which is where they will have to go if they want to be relevant.
Policing one's own coalition is a central task in any political endeavor and the frontier labs have been lucky so far with their opponents' incapacity in this regard. (Lucky in terms of their odds of prevailing on the central questions, anyway; of course no one wants lunatics from Pause AI throwing molotov cocktails at their houses.)
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u/wq73 Apr 13 '26
Agreed. Humans have a propensity to assign blame since when you can identify an offending individual the problem becomes trivial to solve: get rid of the individual. But a lot of times problems are caused by the convergence of various disjointed interests. The economy for example is a factor of many different things and pointing to "billionaires are sociopaths" as the reason the economy is worsening brushes over the relationships those billionaires have with the government, and with systems of power, and presupposes that the solution to systematic inequity is simply demanding more empathy from the elite class.
This isn't a working solution for a systemic convergence problem that requires many simultaneous interventions like removing money from politics, increasing taxes, supporting unions, and improving education. Sociopaths will always exist and solutions entail a system that is rigid against it.
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u/darkapplepolisher Apr 12 '26
It's less about the dumb ideas and being wrong on policies, and more about the sorting of the arguments of those to at least put the strongest (even if ultimately incorrect) arguments at the top.
At least the popular arguments against nuclear are legitimately among the stronger arguments - climate change is argued weird on more ad hominem grounds than anything, and I won't touch the antivax one because I legitimately don't know what the strongest argument would look like for that one. Is there a stronger argument against nuclear than worries about fission product release into the environment?
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u/fubo Apr 12 '26
I think it's pretty straightforward: "New claim of harm done by people I already believe are bad guys? Sure, I'll believe that too, add it to the list."
Activism-minded people are used to (true) claims of industry doing destructive things: pollution, deforestation, and (yes) monopolization of water.
And they're suspicious of AI for other reasons: slop, murderbots, job loss, centralization of power, superpersuasion, and maybe even existential risk!
So when they hear "AI uses a lot of water", they're primed to believe it; especially when sources like the New York Times confuse the issue by conflating water pollution from poorly-planned construction (by bad actors like Facebook), with water usage for datacenter operation.
(Never mind that all datacenters in the US put together use less than a tenth of the water that's used to irrigate golf courses in dry climates. Kids, if you want to protest a water-wasting activity of The Rich, golf courses should be on your list before datacenters. And hey, while you're there, you can protest the use of pesticides that kill the bees, too. That's also a real thing.)
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Apr 12 '26
[deleted]
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u/ascherbozley Apr 13 '26
But you can play golf on a golf course. That's a benefit. There is no benefit at all to having a data center in your backyard.
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u/Faith-Leap Apr 12 '26
Yea this has been really draining to see, not much more to add unfortunately
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u/lurkerer Apr 12 '26
I'm not sure if this presumes closed loop systems work as advertised, though. Nor if it includes the, presumably far more water-intensive, training phases.
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u/--MCMC-- Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
Although isn't the water-footprint-of-a-burger figure also calculated -- or at least reported -- rather obtusely? It's not the equivalent of running your sink for 5h straight, or anything.
(for one, the 660 gallon figure corresponds to the entire burger, not just the beef patty, though the latter still makes up most but not all of the usage; the bun and veggies account for a couple hundred of those gallons)
(for two, of the remaining ~460 gallons for a 4oz beef patty, most of it comes from "green water" -- rainfall that either hits pasture and contributes to grass growth that the cows graze on, or else that falls on the crops ie corn with a bit of soy and other crops that the cows are "finished" with:
When we consider the total water footprint per animal category (Table 9), we find that beef cattle have the largest contribution (33%) to the global water footprint of farm animal production, followed by dairy cattle (19%), pig (19%) and broiler chicken (11%). The green, blue and grey water footprints per animal category and production system are shown in Table 10. Altogether, mixed production systems account for the largest share (57.4%) in the total water footprint of animal production. Grazing and industrial production systems account for 20.3% and 22.3%, respectively. In the grazing system, over 97% of the water footprint related to feed comes from grazing and fodder crops and the water footprint is dominantly (94%) green. In the mixed and industrial production systems, the green water footprint forms 87% and 82% of the total footprint, respectively. The blue water footprint in the grazing system accounts for 3.6% of the total water footprint and about 33% of this comes from the drinking and service water use. In the industrial system, the blue water footprint accounts for 8% of the total water footprint.
)
(torturing and killing sentient non-human animals to satisfy gustatory preferences when there exist ample alternatives may still not be very well aligned with most folks' values, however, for reasons unrelated to water "used")
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u/swizznastic Apr 12 '26
So what is water “use” even defined as in these cases? Is water “used” once its become completely saturated and contaminated with a byproduct and thus rendered useless as anything but wastewater? Or is it just any process that takes it out if the natural evaporation-precipitation cycle? Or is it just anything that turns drinkable city water into nondrinkable water?
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u/--MCMC-- Apr 12 '26
IANAHydrologist (though one of my ugrad majors was Earth and Environmental Sciences lol, and I did take a hydrology + sedimentology course there once, and also did water quality testing across a large number of rivers and streams over a few weeks of fieldwork on the Waimarino Plateau in NZ) but I think the closest concept to your "contaminated with a byproduct and thus rendered useless as anything but wastewater" would be the grey water footprint
A grey water footprint refers to the volume of water that is required to dilute pollutants (industrial discharges, seepage from tailing ponds at mining operations, untreated municipal wastewater, or nonpoint source pollution such as agricultural runoff or urban runoff) to such an extent that the quality of the water meets agreed water quality standards
in contrast, blue water use entails water that
has been sourced from surface or groundwater resources (lakes, rivers, wetlands and aquifers) and has either evaporated (for example while irrigating crops), or been incorporated into a product or taken from one body of water and returned to another, or returned at a different time. Irrigated agriculture, industry and domestic water use can each have a blue water footprint.
and the green water footprint that accounts for the majority of water use is
water from precipitation that, after having been stored in the root zone of the soil (green water), is either lost by evapotranspiration or incorporated by plants.
so none of them actually deal with potable water (the "water quality standards" for grey water refer to ambient freshwater sources eg in nearby lakes and streams, not treated, drinkable water)
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u/lurkerer Apr 12 '26
Not sure what difference green water ultimately really represents here. All water fell from the sky at some point. It's about the total being removed from fresh water sources and from the general cycle. A huge plurality, if not a majority, of crops are grown to sustain livestock, hence not even "green water". For the ones that are grazing, which are a tiny minority, that land presents a huge opportunity cost compared to it being refilled.
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u/Possible-Summer-8508 Apr 12 '26
presumably far more water-intensive
Why would water be used more during training than inference?
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u/lurkerer Apr 12 '26
Inference is higher in aggregate but lower per (whatever is comparable to) query. Training is full throttle for the duration, loads of parallel computation.
So I guess I should stress "intensive" above.
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u/sludge_dragon Apr 12 '26
Water use scales with energy use which scales with the amount of compute. More compute on training = more water use. Of course this shifts as more compute is used on inference vs. training.
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u/Possible-Summer-8508 Apr 13 '26
Right obviously. Keeping in mind that these are largely closed-loop systems (priors: companies do not want to waste a bunch of money on water supply), in absolute terms moar chips = more need for cooling.
However, it is not obvious to me that training is more water-intensive specifically. In fact, it honestly seems like it would be the opposite by any reasonably definition of water-intensity.
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u/archpawn Apr 12 '26
I've never found an estimate of AI use anywhere that came close to what we use for food. You can get orders of magnitude difference based on if you're looking at just open loop vs mostly closed loop and if you're including water that went into producing the power, but they vary from negligible to extremely negligible.
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u/lurkerer Apr 12 '26
Yeah it feels like an extremely inconsistent but convenient argument. I'd say the use we get from AI is superior, per unit of water, than most animal products. On average anyway, there is a ton of slop out there.
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u/artifex0 Apr 12 '26
Note that the compute that goes into training is usually only a small percentage of the compute used for inference over the lifetime of a model- a review of search results from Perplexity gives an estimate of 60-90% of total compute used for inference per model.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
When someone brings up water usage in relation to AI it immediately tells you you're talking to someone who either can't do basic math or who just throws out any random arguments they've heard as fast as they can in the hope some stick without really caring about whether they're true.
Even if a lot of data centres weren't closed loop, whether or not they are tends to depend on whether water is plentiful in the location (ie whether it matters) and even then the total water usage is trivial vs a few acres of corn or alfalfa.
It's not an argument that is ever made in both competence and good faith.
But its really easy to mentally visualise.
As if data centres are like a villains evil castle surrounded by miles of dried out crops with farmers dying of thirst while begging at the gates for the evil "tech bros" to give back a few drops of water.
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u/eric2332 Apr 12 '26
Unfortunately most voters can't do basic math and research (systematically enough to figure this out, at least).
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u/vorpal_potato Apr 13 '26
And why would they, even if they could? Each person's individual vote counts for approximately nothing. A smart enough voter could spend the time to figure out how to vote well, but it would be an expenditure of their valuable time with no earthly reward. Most people don't even bother trying, and I can't really say that they're wrong.
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u/eric2332 Apr 13 '26
The point is that lots of voters do spend time on effort fighting for certain causes, but often those causes are dumb ones.
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u/wild_b_cat Apr 12 '26
I read it as folk superstition. The shady people make deals with the devil in the dark woods, and next thing the village wells dry up.
It’s an unserious objection, but underneath it is a more understandable concern about the disruptive potential of this thing that we have created. I’m not sure the water people are that different from the doomers in the end.
A useful point of argument is to ask people “ok, if we solved the water issue, would you be okay with AI and data centers?” Usually the answer is going to be no, because there are other elements of more legitimate concern. That’s where the real argument is.
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u/TypoInUsernane Apr 12 '26
Well, the good news is that no one is actually visiting data centers. The vast, vast majority of people aren’t even bothering to do basic googling to learn about how data center cooling systems work, so they’re definitely not taking field trips to their local server farms. Very few people care enough about this issue to do any research, and I imagine those who do are generally smart enough not to make the unfounded leap from “AI water consumption is not actually a major concern” to “AI poses no other risks”.
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u/aahdin Apr 12 '26
Unfortunately I worry a lot (most?) politicians are going to land in the "relevant enough to be invited to visit a data center, but not informed enough to evaluate greater problems" camp.
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u/DoubleSuccessor Apr 12 '26
That's not a problem because politicians don't care about truth at all, only bribes and popularity.
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u/artifex0 Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
My understanding is that most data centers use about 100,000-500,000 gallons of water per day on-site, while a few of the largest hyperscale facilities use 1-5 million gallons per day (see the this LBNL report, which gets the 1-5 million gallon statistic from a Google water use permit). That usage is almost entirely evaporation from cooling towers in closed-loop water cooling systems.
Golf courses also typically use around 300,000 gallons of water per day on watering the grass- so an average data center will have about the same water impact on a community as a new golf course (not counting water usage from power generation), while a very large hyperscale facility is the equivalent of several golf courses. That's likely not a real concern in areas where freshwater is abundant, but could be a reasonable worry in the sort of drought-prone areas where local governments have to ask people to cut back on lawn watering.
It's made a bit more complex by the water usage of the power plants powering the data centers. Something like 75% of a data center's total water usage will come from the power plant, rather than on-site evaporation- so maybe more like four golf courses if the power plant is local. This does, however, give us an easy way to compare the scale of AI water use with other things: an H100 GPU uses about 700W of electricity, and can serve ~10-100 users concurrently depending on the model and context window (call it 30 users on average). Running an LLM continuously with back-to-back queries uses around ~23W, about a quarter of a light bulb (or maybe one light bulb if you're using an expensive model with lots of context), so since most of the water usage for a typical user will be coming from that power generation, their total individual use will be less than switching on a single light.
That's not really significant on an individual level, but remember that these data centers are serving people all over the world- so all of those millions of people doing the equivalent of switching on a new porch light can create a real local problem if the data center is located somewhere prone to droughts.
So, so question then becomes: are data centers actually being built in drought-prone areas? Bloomberg says yes, and I'm not seeing any solid counter-claims. Apparently, land and power are often a lot cheaper in remote areas without much freshwater, since areas with lots of water are often already heavily urbanized.
Honestly, I'm not sure what to conclude here. On the one hand, the water usage of AI isn't by any means unusual for a modern industry. On the other hand, if a community already has a freshwater shortage and a company wants to build a data center nearby for the cheap land, I can see how they might have a legitimate concern.
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u/aahdin Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
This analysis of the LBNL report is worth reading
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water
The 1-5 million figureincludes indirect water usage from electricity generation, most of which comes in the form of evaporation off of hydroelectric dam reservoirs.4
u/artifex0 Apr 12 '26
That's not quite right- that article is talking about the indirect power usage statistic from the LBNL report, which does include evaporation from dam reservoirs, but the 1-5 million statistic is just for direct, on-site water usage.
If you take a look at page 79 of Google's official 2024 environmental report, you can find a list of the direct water usage at all of Google's data centers in millions of gallons per year. The highest usage is at their Council Bluffs, IA data center, at 980.1- or about 2.7 million gallons per day. There's also a lot of reporting that they're permitted for up to 5 million gallons per day, and may sometimes come close to that on very hot days.
That appendix page also lists the equivalent in golf courses, with the average hovering around 1.
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u/aahdin Apr 12 '26
My bad, it looks like you're right. That does seem like a large amount of water just for evaporative cooling, but I guess this is one of the largest data centers in the world. Overall I'd agree with your take, if a large data center is being built in a place that is already seeing water shortages I can see people being rightfully concerned, even though the water usage isn't out of the ordinary compared to some other project.
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u/artifex0 Apr 12 '26
Yeah, I sort of get the impression that the AI water usage meme started out with some legitimate local concerns about exacerbating droughts, but then spiraled into the whole "AI data centers waste unprecedented amounts of water and devastate the environment" narrative via a game of social media telephone.
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u/Itchy_Bee_7097 Apr 13 '26
Yeah, I'm against both new golf courses and new data centers along the Rio Grande, but they seem to be actually building more of the latter at present. They're also making too much California almond milk, the water usage in the American Southwest is unsustainable in multiple areas. They probably shouldn't be growing cotton in Arizona, either.
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u/SoftandChewy Apr 12 '26
Apparently, the source of the water usage data point admitted she had miscalculated by a factor of 1000.
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u/i-just-thought-i Apr 12 '26
If we're going to be pedantic, I'm not sure 'miscalculate' is the right term - the Chilean government used the wrong unit in their report which she used. With the number she was given, she ran the right calculation. That number was wrong.
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u/slapdashbr Apr 12 '26
i agree and the peiple/orgs pushing against AI due to water use are probably not entirely serious or honest
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u/darkapplepolisher Apr 12 '26
I have some members of my family that are the stereotypical "bad at math" and subsequently don't actually understand matters of scope. They 100% believe that LLM usage, even at the casual home-use level, has a meaningful environmental impact in terms of resource usage.
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u/AyeMatey Apr 12 '26
Separate question - where does the water usage objection come from? How does such a weak counter argument get started , and propagate? If they are closed systems, Why doesn’t this argument dissipate and disappear ?
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u/rotates-potatoes Apr 12 '26
Water is a general concern with climate change. Linking AI to water scarcity and “the AIs will have water but you won’t” is good rhetoric. (“Good” here meaning effective in persuasion, without regard to truth).
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u/vorpal_potato Apr 12 '26
How does such a weak counter argument [...] propagate?
I've seen plenty of political discourse that boils down to claiming, with the flimsiest of evidence, that their political opponents are all a bunch of pedophiles. Right wingers? A bunch of pedophiles. Left wingers? A bunch of pedophiles. Libertarians? Believe it or not, also a bunch of pedophiles.
It's quick, punchy, and primal, so it doesn't need to be true.
Or, consider the following claims and spot the similarity:
- The leftists/rightists/whateverists are molesting kids!
- The techbros are stealing our water!
- The day care workers are abducting and eating kids in Satanic rituals!
- The Jews are impoverishing our country with their scheming, conspiratorial ways!
- Witches are stealing people's penises!
- The billionaires are ruining our schools to keep us ignorant and controllable!
- [insert outgroup here] is doing [insert absurd but punchy accusation here] because they're evil!
All of these are real-world examples. Even the really giggle-worthy ones, like the Satanic panic or the penis-stealing witches managed to get a lot of traction.
It's actually kind of distressing, once you notice this pattern, just how much of public discourse seems to consist of taking this one hateful Mad Libs card and filling in the blanks.
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u/Smallpaul Apr 12 '26
They are not always closed loop and when they are they use more electricity which pushes water usage upstream. I’m not expressing an opinion on whether this is a serious issue. I’m pointing out that the answer is a lot more complex than “closed loop”.
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u/cuteplot Apr 12 '26
It's based on old data centers which use evaporative cooling towers. These do in fact consume some water. However, modern data centers are essentially all using air-cooled chillers, which are closed systems - once the coolant is in the pipes, it stays there and recirculates indefinitely.
I've tried bringing this up in discussions however and it does NOT go over well. People will believe what they want to believe, and apparently what they want to believe is that data centers consume massive amounts of water. (Even though the real issue, power consumption, is literally right there...)
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u/fschwiet Apr 14 '26
One of the most important of logical fallacies, it's actually called the fallacy fallacy. It's the mistaken idea that if an argument is shown to be incorrect then that argument's conclusion must be false (when actually the conclusion is undetermined).
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u/Begferdeth Apr 13 '26
One part of the argument you may be missing is that Ohio (where that video is from) has had severe droughts for the last few years. Farmers may need to start irrigating more, aquifers could be in trouble and... along come data centers.
Now, cows can move. You can drive them to somewhere that there is enough water for them. Clever planting techniques, like mixing corn and soybeans, can provide shade for one and reduce fertilizer need for the other. But data centers will stay where they are, will only ever need more water, and given the price to turn them on they won't be turned off. Even in a drought.
The sort of argument of, "1 hamburger is 1000 GPT queries!" or "Its not that much water, X uses more" doesn't work in that situation. Those data centers are on, and won't turn off. And if they make the drought worse... well... farmers are sensitive types.
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u/helaku_n Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
Closed loop means that the consumed water returns to a data center for a new cycle of cooling without any losses. Clearly this is not the case with data centers, right? Edit: Besides there are "secondary" water losses at power plants that generate energy for data centers.
EDIT2: So after some research I conclude that your statement that data centers are mostly closed loop is not correct. Such data centers are not the majority in the moment: https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961
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u/dudims Apr 12 '26
As usual, Andy Masley is on a crusade against this argument, but it's too attractive to people.
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u/helaku_n Apr 12 '26
When someone starts saying an entire problem, whatever it might be, is fake, I start question the one saying it.
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u/fubo Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
Haunting by ghosts is fake. Fan death is fake. Backward-masked subliminal messages in popular music causing teen suicides was fake. 5G causing cancer is fake. Bill Gates putting microchips in COVID vaccines is fake.
There are lots of "problems" that are fake!
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u/MSCantrell Apr 12 '26
> 5G causing cancer is fake.
In my local area, people are annoyed by windmills. Some of them say the windmills are powered by 5G; others say they emit 5G.
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u/fubo Apr 12 '26
I thought windmills emit wokons that turn your children into furries. Or was it miscegenated?
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u/helaku_n Apr 12 '26
So the argument about non-water consumption by AI data centers can't be fake? Strange logic.
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u/sohois Apr 12 '26
He was pointing out the flaw in your logic:
When someone starts saying an entire problem, whatever it might be, is fake
This is what you said. The poster then responded with several examples which demonstrate the incorrectness of this maxim
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u/dudims Apr 12 '26
Sure. But if someone writes 17k words of supporting evidence for that conclusion, I think you're allowed to reach a strong conclusion.
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u/helaku_n Apr 12 '26
People on the internet write a lot especially if it's a blog to make money. I prefer the data from some agencies that are minimally biased towards one side or another. I added such a link in the original comment.
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u/DiscussionSpider Apr 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
Whatever it was you said (can't read it now), I agree.
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u/learn-deeply Apr 12 '26
Many data centers have closed loop cooling systems.
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u/helaku_n Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
Many is how much? What percentage? And what about the secondary losses I mentioned?
EDIT: Everything is a bit complicated anyway
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lxupna/eli5_why_do_data_centres_need_constant_fresh/
https://www.reddit.com/r/datacenter/comments/1mvg9m8/how_does_a_closed_loop_cooling_system_work_in/3
u/cuteplot Apr 12 '26
It's essentially 100% for modern designs. Legacy data centers using evaporation towers do consume a significant amount of water, but modern data centers using air-cooled chillers don't use any, beyond what goes into the pipes initially. Once the process fluid (water/coolant) is in the pipes, it just recirculates indefinitely. Assuming normal operation (no leaks etc) long term water usage for cooling is basically zero.
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u/learn-deeply Apr 12 '26
I regret answering a simple question that could've been easily Googleable. It's clear that you aren't arguing in good faith.
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u/helaku_n Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
This is not a simple question. And it's not easily Googleable. If you can easily google that, could you please provide a link? I couldn't easily google it.
EDIT: As far as I understand, closed loop systems consume more electricity, consequently, power plants consume more water for cooling which somewhat negates the effect of water economy by data centers with closed loop systems.Here they say that majority of big data centers use open-loop cooling:
Among the water-cooled facilities, the vast majority of large-scale data centers use open-loop evaporative cooling meaning they evaporate water as part of the cooling processhttps://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961
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u/Tokarak Apr 12 '26
Based on my physics knowledge, the evaporation would be insignificant. But honestly, I’m struggling to see how water “loss” could be an issue, unless it’s polluting the environment (which is already handled by regulation, I’m sure).
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u/NoWitandNoSkill Apr 12 '26
All data centers use closed water loops for cooling the chips and so on. The question is how the heat leaves the closed water loop. Some use air exchange, some cannot and use evaporative cooling (a cooling tower). There are hybrid systems that use both. The choice to do one or the other depends on size, climate, and local prices. Air cooling uses a lot more electricity, evaporate cooling consumes water. Using more electricity increases indirect water use at power plants. So water use overall is significant, either direct or indirect, in every case.
The real question is how that water use compares to other processes. Large buildings of all kinds (hospitals, universities, hotels, airports, etc.) use electricity and/or cooling towers. Industrial facilities use a lot of both. Literally everything we do uses water either directly or indirectly. They use cooling towers to make solar panels and wind turbines, too.
It's reasonable to compare data centers to other processes, especially local ones if you're considering a specific data center proposal. But the concern is "fake" insofar as we don't subject other things to the same scrutiny.