Tech companies defeat bill as AI drains local water supplies

I think it's super cool that Olympia HS has a student run newspaper, but I don't think this is something that should be posted to HN. The only source quoted on the water issue is an EE professor from a school in California, who I am guessing is not a subject matter expert on water in Washington state.

FWIW, as a Washington resident, I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages. We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water. Obviously, we need to manage it responsibly, but I haven't seen any evidence of looming issues here (please feel free to correct me, though).

How much higher would the energy cost be without evaporative cooling? It doesn’t seem that hard to use water-air heat pumps to get rid of the heat without any water use, so the reasons it’s not used are probably economic. I suppose you could just make water more expensive?

> Despite efforts to enforce clean energy, the bill died in committee

I wish it was easy to force issues like this into ballot measures. The citizenry should be able to rip control out of the hands of their representatives when so motivated.

Has anyone looked at using greywater for evaporative cooling? I couldn’t find much after a quick Google, aside from small scale domestic usage.

The amount of water mentioned in the article is completely inconsequential. Per the article, across 126 data centers they consume several foot-acres of water per day. That is incredibly efficient!

Annualized, that is 0.0001% of the water used to produce subsidized corn ethanol. If we can afford to waste that much water on corn ethanol subsidies then we can definitely afford the water for data centers.

HB 2125 was killed by the Democrats because it was a deeply unserious bill unrelated to this. For example, it required data centers to turn off their power during ordinary periods of high electricity usage. Because, you know, we can just randomly turn off the Internet during the day and there will be no bad consequences.

Why are they using blue water? Can't they just use grey water?

It's funny that in movies like the matrix they imagine that humanity would fight back against the machines. In reality the first thing ai will do, which it has already done, is capture our governments through the application of money, and then the humans would first have to defeat their own institutions before they can even begin to fight the machines. Neoliberalism is profoundly unable to deal with threats if the threats produce short term profits. That goes for housing shortages, global warming, health care costs, falling birth rates, across the board if it produces short term profits that can be used to bribe politicians its impossible to address. AI is no different.