Do farms collectively use more water than data centres collectively, or does the average farm use more water than the average data centre?
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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why do people hate al so much
(added note: no, i do not piss on the poor. look closer)
Several reasons.
- It's not even AI. It's machine-learning based word predictor. Which gets us to:
- It's an absolute example of corporate bullshit made to:
- Throw money back and forth in an economy, making it look like it's healthy and booming, while:
- Actually tanking the economy,
- Making governments sacrifice everything for "AI dominance",
- Making management lay off thousands of people under the premise of "automatization", while really it just increases the workload on the rest, all while:
- Guzzling tons of water,
- Electricity,
- Raw materials,
- Producing never-before-seen amounts of e-waste,
- And leaving residents endangered
- All to generate unreliable results
- That take tons of human labor to correct
- While making others believe the batshit output
- And destroying critical and independent thinking.
But yes, you can get some text output or a quick image draft.
yup, uhuh, correct, i get the problems with ai, but i still don't get why people hate al
pictured (source):
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Got it now lol
That al is just weird, man
“But surviving uses more resources than generating value for the shareholders. Why are you so selfish?”
Many farms are owned by corporations not families. Shit, which one is more profitable?
We can shut down 90% of datacenters today, suffer a slight inconvinience to our lives and keep living.
We have a farm failure...
I mean, assuming we are discussing the US where almost all datacenters are being built -
the real thing to realize is not that datacenters are bad (I'm kinda ambivalent), nor that meat is bad, but that poorly written water rights laws are bad. Which is why we grow some of our most water-intensive crops in some of our driest areas and some farmers end up just flooding the desert with water for no reason each year. Restructuring water rights would massively reduce water usage while maintaining food production for the simple reason that then we would stop growing alfalfa in Pheonix
Nuanced discussion? What are you, a European?
I keep seeing this argument and it stinks of astroturfing. Probably to portray data centers the same as farms: a resource-intensive but necessary infrastructure. If they wanted to make a good faith argument, it would be good courses, not farms. And I could also go without golf.
Focusing solely on water consumption with these arguments is another red flag. Its easy to find false equivalencies with water, but no other project demands double the power output of the entire state it's in, and not many other projects have as bad a ratio of taxpayer dollars spent to revenue or services generated.
Not all farms are required.
Farmers like to claim they are 'growing your food' while exporting grain and selling corn for ethanol or shipping alfalfa to Saudi Arabia for cattle feed.
They are incredibly unsympathetic.
It is well known that meat based food, especially beef, is a bad use of water ressources vs the nutritional value, probably worse than those ai datacentres for water.
I keep seeing this argument about "meat vs ai" and I think it's just a way to divert the blame and the anti-ai/anti-meat people's attention. We should be doing both, reducing meat/beef consumption and heavily regulating AI datacenters in regards to water and electricity use (regulated in all aspects but that's beyond the scope of this post).
There is zero nutritional value in AI slop
Yes, but does you eating food generate as much value for the share holders as AI? /s
I agree, but despite all the shit AI waifu generators and the "let's shove it in everything just like we did with blockchain and metaverse" there are legitimate uses (medical, scientific) for AI I think where it has the potential to add value and improve life. AI in the current regulatory, financial, fiscal and moral landscape is a bunch of trouble waiting to happen.
That is why I think it's just rage baiting comparison to say "Your food uses more water than AI". It plays to the "we're replacing you with AI" sentiment.
The more nuanced message is that yes AI datacenters use a lot of water but still a lot less than meat production. I have read a while ago about how with AI they are looking to better target irrigation of crops to reduce the amount of water needed while giving the optimal amount of water for each plants. We'll see if it ends up being a net positive for water consumption vs the water used by the AI to do this...
We have a county reservoir and our idiot leaders have made a deal with Amazon to give them 40% of the reservoir capacity. That is a big problem, especially now what we are in a drought in the springtime.
Some datacenters are still built with cooling towers instead of chillers. I know for a fact Amazon does this. They are slightly cheaper, but massively wasteful. I think we need better laws for the irresponsible companies, but this is not most datacenter companies. If I heard a Google datacenter was going up near me, I would not care. If I heard an Amazon one was, I would be organizing against it as hard as possible.
The point you are DELIBERATELY missing is that farms use so much water than AI data centres that the amount data centres use is irrelevant. The water usage claims are so ridiculously overblown and so obviously stupid that it's appalling that people believe them! I have seen people genuinely claim that water used in data centres is destroyed and can never be recovered, or that it's polluted so badly it can never be cleaned. Farms not only use multiple orders of magnitude more water, they also pollute it a hell of a lot more so it's far more difficult to clean and more damaging to the environment. A lot of the claimed numbers come from one person who got gallons and megalitres confused! Just stop spreading this utter nonsense! <haters will not respond with downvotes for calling them out, and more repeatedly debunked nonsense, because they always do, they're really dull as well as annoying!>
What powers data centers ?
oh that's right. Power plants.
Power plants that now use 10x the water and produce 10x the pollution than previous levels.
It's not just direct pollution and water use. They use way more water than they report through their demand on local power plants.
And what they can't get from power plants they make up for by burning natural gas or diesel in generators.
I think there is some nuance here. Data centers are being put in cities that cannot support them at the expense of their citizens, this is a corruption problem in my opinion. Data centers could also be much more water conservant than they are, and significantly less polluting and I appreciate the public pressure they are on to improve here. The warm water being released can damage the local ecosystem as well.
I have definitely seen some absurd claims about water usage, but it also isnt totally unconcerning either.
Imo its a pr strategy, water usage is a much more solvable issue than the immense energy usage, and the ai companies would rather actovists attack them for that than for the significant power consumption.
I think the power usage is also going to go down, either because they make ai more efficient, or because they can't make it more efficient and it continues to make no economic sense and mostly goes away. Hopefully that latter scenario leads to a lot of excess green energy to be constructed which would make electrifying the world a little easier. But that is probably wishful thinking.
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