31
Water and the hidden cost of AI data centres (aussie.zone)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/australia@aussie.zone
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Sydney Water is preparing for data centres to consume 25% of Sydney’s water by 2035.

No data centre operating in Australia is required to disclose how much water it consumes, nor is there a law currently requiring any of them to recycle it. And even if they do, the cooling process generates toxins hard to get rid of.

The water that passes through data centre cooling systems does not come out the same as it went in. Biocides, heavy metals, corrosion inhibitors and PFAS — forever chemicals that do not break down in the environment — accumulate in cooling water and are discharged into municipal water systems. Once in the supply, those chemicals cannot be removed by standard treatment.

This is already an issue in the US.

The peak industry body, Data Centre Australia, confirmed this year that questions about chemical waste from its members’ facilities were the first it had received on the subject. When those facilities eventually decommission their hardware, the environmental and financial cost of safe disposal will fall somewhere — on industry, on government, or on the public.

No Australian government has said which.

https://michaelwest.com.au/waste-tsunami-water-and-the-hidden-cost-of-ai-data-centres/

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

I am of the opinion that water use of datacenters is very misleading and difficult to accurately account for/compare so not that useful.

It's easy enough for the industry to propose regenerative loops, or point to the enormous utility of datacenters (they're not all serving slop, some are things that matter). You can also point to stuff like water useage of coke (literally poison), animal ag, or rich people's stupid non native vanity gardens which are huge to muddy the waters.

Sydney should not host datacenters for reasons like: land use and noise pollution, enormous power consumption and grid destabilisation (which also uses water btw), low economic benefit (few jobs, untaxable multinationals, strain on infrastructure).

Ireland, a much wetter, flatter, and less on fire nation previously tried to leverage hosting datacenters for economic benefit. It was been an unmitigated disaster and new connections to the grid were banned till this year.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    propose regenerative loops

    Does Australia have free electricity? Because otherwise, evaporative cooling is way cheaper. Assuming it's hot and dry at least.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    So here's how getting approvals works:

    1. promise something you have no intention of doing
    2. get approval
    3. Start building
    4. "Discover" that the financials of the thing proposed just won't work out and you need to do the thing you wanted to do all along
    5. Go to MPs and explain how unless they adapt to these unforseen circumstances they'll not have any of the promised jobs and have to clean up a half built contruction site
    6. Get the approval to do what you want to do.
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    Why does that sound familiar...

    Oh right, Telia did this in my country when contracted to build out a national fiber network. Oops, accidentally didn't build enough bandwidth, competition will have to build their own! Was originally supposed to be publicly owned in the first place before Telia got their dicks in the pie.

    Such "accidental" discoveries need to start having penalties tbh

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent