Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?
Edit: Links provided in the comments…
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=1264
- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_cooling_towers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
Notable comments:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/23672269
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25288634
- https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25294655
Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.
To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.
The rate that water returns to aquifers it was drawn from is very slow. Rainfall from the evaporation is only the first step of a long process. So it’s not contamination, just being used up faster than is reasonable.