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Comment by bix6 | Hacker News Reader

Two things jumped out to me.

1. No accounting for other countries or externalities such as large corporation leveraging to get what it wants at the expense of community members.

2. > Put another way, almost all (80%) the reported water used by AI occurs during the generation of electricity

Well that sure seems like a problem to me cuz that’s water that now needs to be used for generation that wasn’t prior and it’s a significant amount. And that impacts my water and electricity prices now.

Edit for 3: > Consumptive use can harm total access to freshwater, but freshwater sources are also regularly being replenished.

Yeah I don’t think so when Mexico City is sinking because its aquifer was depleted.

All in all he’s got some interesting points but I think he’s hyper focused on numbers and ignoring broader things.

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Plus semiconductor manufacturing et al which are also heavy users of water.

The entire global semiconductor industry, source of vast benefits, only uses about 50000 acre-feet of water per year, which is essentially nothing. As a point of comparison this is half a percent of what the paper industry consumes.

Where is the source for that? I am only familiar with one site, the STMicro one in the Alps, which already used 4000 acre-feet / 5 million m³ per year in 2023 [1], and it's been at least doubled since then. This is a huge chunk of the total water consumption of the region, and there are NIMBY demonstrations frequently because of that [2]. It's also surprisingly polluting. Whether you think the value is worth or not is a different story (I worked there, so guess).

[1] https://www.st.com/content/dam/aboutus/sustainability/report...

[2] https://stopmicro38.noblogs.org/post/2026/03/17/rando-pas-de...

50000 for the entire industry is bullshit, even if you limit it to the US.

The figures in that report are consistent with what I said. This is because the usage we're talking about is evaporation. This should not be confused with withdrawals. Semiconductor industry mainly withdraws water and then discharges it as effluent. Evaporation is a minor component of their withdrawals.

No, the report is already not counting whatever can be reused. It's the point of it.

I'm not talking about the recycling rate. Even if that goes to zero it doesn't change the story here. The point is they aren't boiling the water, for the most part. They discharge it in a pipe.

And? I really do not think anyone is complaining here about the water disappearing into thin air or its atomic components or whether it goes in a pipe or into the moon. The definition of using water is quite clear (you can no longer drink it) and unless I am misreading you are totally distorting it.

Yeah I think you are misreading it. The manner in which a data center (or a thermal power station, or any highly energetic industry) "uses water" is literally the water disappears into thin air, and doesn't come down again until it's thousands of kilometers downwind.

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