Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because it is an EU-DIRECTIVE.

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.

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.

(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.)

It's probably because that 500kw number is too arbitrary. I work in a single warehouse with robotics based logistics that uses 500kw. Nobody is asking us how much water we use.

Reality is if a regulation is too broad it tends to get overwhelmed and dies when it requires 100 people to enforce.

Even a basic in house data center can push 100kw with a few servers.

500kW is basically 0kW when it comes to data centers. That’s only 600A at 480V three-phase, a McDonalds restaurant has a larger electrical service than that, lol.

I have more than one customer with a single motor that uses that much power.

All sorts of laws are not being actively enforced, sometimes for good reasons like "It's relatively unimportant" or "it's important but enforcement is costly" ; sometimes because the law is controversial and the people who don't want it to exist at all weren't able to prevent it from being passed but are able to stimy effective enforcement.

> where electricity is abundant and/or cheap

Definitely not the Netherlands then

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/

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.

>And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.

They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.

> don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies?

As others (including TFA) have noted, this is false because there's an EU directive requiring "private companies" to disclose this.

In any case, the "it's a private company" defense is as tired now as it was when it was about blocking people from social media, or debanking etc. Just because the legal system hasn't yet caught up to regulating companies in a certain way, doesn't mean that it's not in everyone's best interest (except perhaps the owners of the companies in question) to have such regulation.

> I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry.

The important distinction being that agriculture provides food, while data centers provide AI slop and advertising.

> water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry

Are you suggesting we should stop using water to grow food for humans?

> If so, why would a private company provide this information?

Because the law says they have to.

Water usage in terms of total volume is meaningless and certainly an overblown concern on a global scale. In fact, it is not a concern at all on a global scale, but it can be a local problem. If a datacenter uses water normally intended for households and the infrastructure is not designed for this, it is definitely a problem. And that's a good reason for having to report water usage, not just to punish them, but also to plan distribution accordingly.

> I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry.

Apples and oranges comparison. We eat the direct products of water usage in the agriculture industry. It keeps people alive. It’s fallacious to compare that with water usage that goes to serving ads.

Yes, a single hamburger takes 620 gallons(!) of water to produce. Eat plants. Plenty of great plant protein alternatives available, plus they are healthier and don't depend on killing living beings.

"California could solve its water shortage if every household ate sixteen less almonds per day." -- I said this [edit] A DECADE AGO at the conclusion of an all-day water resources hackathon to illustrate the fact that ag water and urban water are not the same.

Conflating them is category confusion. Lying about water usage is part of CA culture.

A swimming pool requires maybe 60k liters a year...

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.

Well, water usage is usually metered in cubic meters. A thousand m^3 per year sounds much less than a million litres.

>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.

> They refuse it because ...

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.

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.

There is a very obvious pattern here

I'm all for data centres.

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.

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.

> the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment

And here you have people seemingly caring about the environment, even if it's only as you say a "green-washing" (that's not what that term means, normally) of AI fears. And you're telling them to stop it?

Also, the claim of "people would misinterpret the information, so better not release the info at all" is just some sort of elitist "the average person is dumb" sentiment. If you take that to its logical conclusion, nobody should tell the public anything at all. Reminiscent of a lot of the public debate during the covid times.

    > the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment

Is this specific to data centers? If yes, no one complained about data centers for the last thirty years before the AI/LLM building boom (say, last 3-5 years).

If more general, I completely disagree. All rich countries have much cleaner environments since the 1940s, thanks to a wave of environmentalism and new regulations that started in the 1960s and 1970s.

Well, even if you're right, try proposing those bills and then reckon with the deafening wails of the "free-market-big-government-taxation-is-theft" crowd. And the politicians that are in the pockets of BigCo that will say that kind of stuff.

Policies are simple a lot of times. Politics against the interest of big money isn't.

If they pay market rate, the clearing price will go up making things more expensive for everyone. If they go off-grid they make the machines needed to produce water or electricity or whatever more expensive. If they borrow money, they make government bond yields go up and cause governments to start thinking about cutting pensions and stuff, not to mention increased mortgage rates for whoever wants to buy a home or is on a variable rate mortgage. There's no world in which this AI stuff doesn't increase costs for the rest of us.

The main thing is evaporative cooling is incredibly wasteful. The water should be returned to the system, if it's going to be used, and not sent into the atmosphere. This is especially important in regions with limited access to water, which, ironically, is where many data centers seem to be located.

They need to pay for the infrastructure upgrades to water and electric when it inevitably exceeds capacity

I am not sure why people believe that data centers are the future. I did not down vote you, btw.

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.

I just learned yesterday that the default model on Mistral monthly plan is GLM 5.3 (an open weight Chinese model)

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.

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.

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.

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...

Some data centers use evaporative cooling instead of a closed loop.

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.

>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.

Didn't you know? Once you heat up water that's it, you can't use that water ever again. It's even worse if you make it evaporate, not just useless but GONE.

If you don’t cool the water down before putting it back, you’re just creating heat pollution.

North Dakota made it expensive to flare, so companies had to capture the gas or face production limits.