Senators Demand to Know How Much Energy Data Centers Use (wired.com) 51
Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley are pressing the Energy Information Administration (EIA) to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use. In a joint letter sent to the EIA on Thursday, the two senators press the agency to publicly collect "comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures" on data centers, saying it's "essential for accurate grid planning and will support policymaking to prevent large companies from increasing electricity costs for American families." Wired reports: In December, EIA administrator Tristan Abbey said at a roundtable that he expects the EIA "is going to be an essential player in providing objective data and analysis to policymakers" with respect to data centers. The agency announced on Wednesday that it would be conducting a voluntary pilot program to collect energy consumption information from nearly 200 companies operating data centers in Texas, Washington, and Virginia, which will cover "energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server metrics, and cooling systems."
While the senators praise the EIA pilot program, their letter includes several questions about how the agency plans to move forward with more data collection, such as whether or not the energy surveys will be mandatory and whether or not the EIA will collect information on behind-the-meter power. This information will be especially crucial, the senators say, to make sure that big tech companies that signed the agreement at the White House earlier this month pledging that consumers won't bear the costs of data center electricity use will stick to their promises. "Without this data, policymakers, utility companies, and local communities are operating in the dark," the senators write.
The EIA mandates that other industries, including oil and gas and manufacturing, provide regular data to the agency; Hawley and Warren assert that the EIA should be able to collect similar information from data centers under the same provision. The provision is broad enough, Peskoe says, that it could absolutely be interpreted to encompass data centers. Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced a bill that would "enact a reasonable pause to the development of AI to ensure the safety of humanity." It calls for a federal moratorium on AI data centers until stronger national safeguards are in place around safety, jobs, privacy, energy costs, and environmental impact.
While the senators praise the EIA pilot program, their letter includes several questions about how the agency plans to move forward with more data collection, such as whether or not the energy surveys will be mandatory and whether or not the EIA will collect information on behind-the-meter power. This information will be especially crucial, the senators say, to make sure that big tech companies that signed the agreement at the White House earlier this month pledging that consumers won't bear the costs of data center electricity use will stick to their promises. "Without this data, policymakers, utility companies, and local communities are operating in the dark," the senators write.
The EIA mandates that other industries, including oil and gas and manufacturing, provide regular data to the agency; Hawley and Warren assert that the EIA should be able to collect similar information from data centers under the same provision. The provision is broad enough, Peskoe says, that it could absolutely be interpreted to encompass data centers. Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced a bill that would "enact a reasonable pause to the development of AI to ensure the safety of humanity." It calls for a federal moratorium on AI data centers until stronger national safeguards are in place around safety, jobs, privacy, energy costs, and environmental impact.
Cue Carl Sagan: (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Which is too quickly becoming: trillions and trillions!
Re: (Score:2)
Billions and billions, but of what? Electron-volts? Ergs? Joules? Horse powers per dog year?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Water is what scares me (Score:5, Insightful)
But you can't magic water out of the sky. Climate change is fucking up the water cycle. So we are in a drought and that is probably going to continue.
Data centers want fresh clean drinkable water and they want to fill it with deadly chemicals because that's the cheapest way to cool their data centers. The chemicals are necessary to prevent the water from gunking Up their cooling systems however it means you can't recycle the water. The data center could recycle that water but that costs money and they are already blowing through it like crazy.
Even if individual people still have water in their pipes, which is by no means a guarantee anymore, farms are going to be short on water and that means food prices are going to go up. And that means the price of everything goes up because you have to pay people enough money that they can eat enough calories to at least survive or they start to get violent.
And yeah I'm sure there's a bunch of people who own guns looking forward to occasionally getting to shoot somebody in cold blood. Most people I know who own a lot of guns think that sounds awesome.
But when it's not just the occasional punk kid but is a systemic problem what you're going to find is was hungry people find themselves a demagogue and organize themselves into a military and they come at you. And your stash of knock off AK-47s isn't going to stand up against a organized military force of any size.
Remember you have to shoot every single one of them but they only have to shoot you once.
Listen right wing extremist troll in case you (Score:1)
Haven't noticed everything is collapsing including clean water supply. You have to be conditioned by the right wing not to see it and unable of any critical thinking. Collapsing before our eyes. But nobody at all notice but me because people can't see clearly because people are unable of critical thinking. It's like how we blame cell phones on everything wrong with kids and not the ludicrous amounts of pressure we're putting on them because we know the entire economy and job market is collapsing and there a
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Water is what scares me (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Could you go off in a wild tangent any further?
There's nothing "wild tangent" when we're discussing the resource requirements of datacentre. It's literally those two, and both are important.
Re: (Score:3)
Those heat records were set during the Dust Bowl era.
Re:Water is what scares me (Score:4, Interesting)
The water use for AI seems to be greatly exaggerated. Estimating water use complicated. Different data centers use different amounts of water. Also, systems need more water use for cooling when the weather is hot, so centers may use more water in summer. A data center will use more water when the center is at close to maximum usage, so data centers will use less water if they are handling queries when few users are using the system. Complicating things even further, some people are counting not just data cooling water but also counting the indirect water use from the needed electricity production (fossil fuel and nuclear plants use a fair bit of water for their steam turbines). There's a good article here discussing the difficulties in making water estimates https://theconversation.com/ai-has-a-hidden-water-cost-heres-how-to-calculate-yours-263252 [theconversation.com] However, all things considered. they estimate that all things considered it takes about 39 milliliters of water per a typical query. Now, for comparison, a high efficiency shower uses about 1.5 gallons of water a minute, which is about 95 ml of water a second. So making a query to an LLM AI system costs less than a second of water. If this estimate is off even by a factor of 3, this is equivalent to taking 1 second longer on a shower. The water use is just not hat high. The total water use is also not very high. If for example you use estimates for how much water is used by golf courses in the US https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf [usga.org], the largest estimates of AI use put the water use as about a tenth of the water use by golf courses, and golf course water estimates put it at most about 1% of total US water use. So even if one is concerned, just getting rid of some of the gigantic water hungry golf courses in California and Arizona (seriously who the heck puts a golf course in Arizona) would largely offset this. Now, it is true that as data centers grow, more water will likely get used. But as we switch to more wind and solar power, the indirect water use will go down, and data center builders are working hard on reducing water use since it is such a hotbutton issue.
There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI. Water use should not be high on the list.
AI data centers guzzle water (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember it's not just about how much water an individual data center uses it's about how much water is available to that specific community.
Never mind the fact that we are seeing dozens of these data centers built. A large city might use 100 million gallons a day so the 10 data centers you might easily see near a large city could guzzle 50% of the water.
All of this because the rich don't want to have to pay people and they don't like to have to pretend to be civil to consumers or employees
Re: (Score:2)
A quick search shows 5 million gallons daily. The Southwest states are currently fighting over the Colorado River or what's left of it and everyone wants to build data centers there because they get very few natural disasters
In order to get numbers like 5 million gallons one has to be looking at the very largest data centers, counting all water use as single use, even though water used for cooling is often reusable, and counting all the water used not by the center directly but used for power plants also as discussed earlier. Typical data center consumption is much lower. For example, see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/ [brookings.edu] which has one of the high-end estimates for what a typical data center consumes
Re:AI data centers guzzle water (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, building some of the largest data centers, making them all near one city, would take up a lot of water. However, that would be silly; the people building these are not idiots and aren't going to go shove all their centers in a region they know they then won't have enough water for all of them.
Please have a look at Loudon County, Virginia. There are at least 6 more datacenters being constructed along a single highway that I saw last fall, in addition to all of the DC's they already had (basically anyone that sells any capacity at all to the US Government, including AWS us-east-1, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc.). You can bet that everyone's bills are going up due to the sudden switching on of needing several million gallons of water per day. That means they have to expand municipal treatment capacity - at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And they aren't doing that without a ratepayer hike, which is essentially a giant off-the-books taxpayer subsidy for a private business water hog.
In Prineville, Oregon the government made requirements for permitting, so Apple uses groundwater + an injection system to put their cooling water back into the ground when done. They also operated on treated outflow water from the city wastewater treatment while getting the groundwater system in place. Meta has paid millions of dollars in local water restoration projects in addition to the usage fees, so that they can offset the increased consumption. Remember, Prineville is over on the "hot side" of the state, so water is indeed an issue, but they're managing it well: not allowing unlimited growth, and what growth you get pays for it's footprint.
Water can indeed be an issue, if your local regulators are essentially captured by industry. But we have a solution for that: elections. Bad regulators can be swayed through political pressure - the entire city / county / state of voters has far more leverage than fucking Meta when the next local election comes around; Meta isn't on the ballot, but the asshole who is letting Meta not pay their way - their name is.
We open 3,000 of those last year (Score:2)
I think you're having a hard time with the scale of what's going on because it's numbers that aren't normal for human beings
Re: (Score:3)
There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI. Water use should not be high on the list.
Are you sure? I don't know about the effects on bodies of fresh water, but the effects of data centres using ocean water for cooling are pretty concerning: https://planetarypl.com/the-ar... [planetarypl.com] .
I'd be surprised if there aren't similarly bad effects from similarly heating bodies of fresh water.
Re:Water is what scares me (Score:5, Interesting)
Most environmental quality regulators monitor the heat of the discharge because it causes algae blooms, etc.
A small town close to where I live was constantly getting fined by the state regulator because the discharge from the sewage treatment plant into the river was too warm for the volume of the river. A dairy farm about a mile downriver established a pipeline from the sewage treatment plant to their pump house, so they could spray the water on their fields that they were pumping out of the river anyway. They were able to lower the discharge volume under the regulator limit, and the dairy had more available water than their pumping permit from the same regulator.
As it turns out, neighbors working together can really work out.
Re: (Score:2)
Cool!
Re: (Score:2)
Water use should not be high on the list.
Water use should absolutely be high on the list since much of the world's population is increasingly water starved. Even in places known for endless rain we are experiencing droughts, river level variation not seen previously, and water table droppage.
We can't stop pouring water on farms. That provides food to eat. But we can absolutely mandate the end of the use of evaporative cooling for datacentres which is not only a significant water consumer, but something we do largely only for cost avoidance rather
What I see (Score:2)
We have 5000 US data centers now, with 40
Re:Water is what scares me (Score:5, Informative)
But the governments still encourage sprawl. And they still allow water hunger industries to move in and expand.
It’s going to get ugly. It’s just a matter of when.
more party of person or responsibility nonsense (Score:2)
Second of all it is perfectly fucking reasonable that you should be able to move to any major city or town and not have to worry about whether or not you have water. Having water is one of the most basic elements of functioning civilization.
I am so sick of the absurd length and excuses people come up with to blame individuals for systemic problems just so they can preserve some kind of weird libert
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No one knows for sure when it will first happen and where, b
Re: (Score:2)
After decades of decreasing water supplies coupled with irresponsible explosive growth in the Great Basin, Front Range, and SW in particular.its just asking for trouble.
Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to
Re: (Score:2)
The [no longer] Great Salt Lake is very low.
I live in Utah and get to witness this first-hand. Just yesterday it was windy enough that unpleasant dust clouds were coming off the dried parts of the lake bed. Utah snowpack is at a record low [weather.gov] this year and peaked for the 2026 water year earlier in March. We broke several high temperature records this month (along with a bunch of other states in the west / mountain west). It's looking pretty bad.
Right now it's a lot like watching a slow-moving train derailment. Everyone knows what's coming, but 80%
Re: (Score:2)
No, they make it easier but that can be dealt with. A couple of legal changes and the data centers could be trading higher maintenance costs for lower water bills (because they don't have to be charged as much if they return potable water to the system).
I think (Score:2)
Even the idea of restarting old decommissioned nuclear plants like Three Mile Island is silly. The idea of using 1960's nuc technology, managed by profit driven people who will demand that profit over safety is thing one - that's a bit chilling.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Talk about non-starterz ! The only research you want to do with "data-centers/LLM/*.ai" is ... how much C4 ....'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX' deleted for the obvious national security reasons ....
My friend, you have an overactive imagination. How you pulled that out what I wrote is quite creative, but silly and wrong.
My point, and my only point, is that the present concept of huge power sources dedicated to AI data centers is premature. Effective AI is a couple generations early. At present, the paradigm sucks up too much power.
Re:I think (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk about non-starterz ! The only research you want to do with "data-centers/LLM/*.ai" is ... how much C4 ....'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX' deleted for the obvious national security reasons ....
My friend, you have an overactive imagination. How you pulled that out what I wrote is quite creative, but silly and wrong.
My point, and my only point, is that the present concept of huge power sources dedicated to AI data centers is premature. Effective AI is a couple generations early. At present, the paradigm sucks up too much power.
Yes it does. And as much as the AI prophets want us to believe that AI will solve that problem, the only solution they've proposed thus far to the "sucks up too much power" problem is build ever bigger datacenters sucking up still more power. That's not a solution so much as a goalpost transplant on a nearly astronomical scale. There's a reason people are concerned about it, because we just keep hearing that if we pour enough resources into AI, AI will solve every problem we've ever had. Yet, at the moment, it can't even solve the problems it itself is creating. I don't think building ever larger datacenters using ever more resources is going to pay off nearly as well as the pushers are trying to convince us it will, and we need to start looking at the situation with a little tiny modicum of that ever encroaching thing called reality.
Re: (Score:1)
Growing opposition (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Like the George Washington SNL Skit Goes... (Score:4, Funny)
"No one knows..."
Re: (Score:3)
How unfair. (Score:2)
You can't collect data on datacenters being built to collect data on people! HOW DARE THEY SUGGEST COLLECTING DATA ON BIG DATA IS OK!
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe automate that, and have a datacenter collect all that data about datacenters, and then add 1 to include itself? Then spit these numbers out to Senators Holley and Warren
Josh Hawley... (Score:1)
...has found something to run *on* for a change.
It's (Score:1)