Untersuchungen ergaben, dass das Rechenzentrum 30 Millionen Gallonen Wasser abgelassen hat, ohne dies zu melden oder dafür zu bezahlen
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/data-center-drained-30-million-002000882.html
Untersuchungen ergaben, dass das Rechenzentrum 30 Millionen Gallonen Wasser abgelassen hat, ohne dies zu melden oder dafür zu bezahlen
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/data-center-drained-30-million-002000882.html
34 Kommentare
Georgia residents recently learned that a massive data center used nearly 30 million gallons of water without proper billing, deepening concerns about how large computing facilities — and especially those powering operations like artificial intelligence — can strain local resources.
What happened?
Residents of the Annelise Park subdivision in Fayetteville, Georgia, began complaining last year about unusually low water pressure, according to Politico. When Fayette County officials looked into the issue, they discovered „two industrial-scale water hookups“ serving a nearby Quality Technology Services data center campus.
Officials reportedly determined one hookup had been connected without notice to the water utility, and the other, which had been left off the QTS company account, was not being billed.
Sure is cool we’re letting all these tech bros ruin the planet even faster than the fossil fuel industry.
So cut them off. Disallow them service going forward. They clearly can’t be trusted with water, so they don’t get any. Don’t notify them, just cut their fucking pipes. Let their system run dry while they panic to figure out why.
We make power stations build on rivers, lakes, or build reservoirs. And yet the guys can just take ground water….
Even oil refineries who need cooling water loops dont take ground water..
Why do data centers get a pass?
So they stole 30 million gallons. Sounds like they should be prosecuted as such.
If I stole 30 *thousand* gallons I’d see the inside of a cell.
They declared a state of emergency in April for wildfires and had a data center draining millions of gallons of water? Should be heavy fines.
Damn crazy ass lies 🙈😂
30 million gallons sounds like a lot, but in a grand scheme of things it is not. It’s enough for around 30 acres of farmland per year.
lol I see nobody cares to actually read and just rather have outrage. The company said it corrected the issue and paid for the usage and fees associated with it. They indicated the smart meter rollout was to blame.
The city said staffing shortages caused this to be missed and they have made changes so it doesn’t happen again.
I get we want to have outrage because data centers are bad, but this happens a lot with water utility companies, a lot.
Literally nobody here actually read the article. They read the headline and come to the comments angry.
They didn’t steal any water. They had a meter. Utilities fucked up and didnt charge them initially, when they eventually sent the bill, it was immediately paid. I’m scared for humanity lol
Before we haul Mrs. Tech Girl off to the gallows, our 100% competent government had a fun role in this one:
>County officials said the oversight has been righted and that the hookups are now being monitored. The utility director described the issue as an operational misunderstanding and said staffing shortages may have contributed to the problem.
Water cools and then is recycled. It doesn’t disappear, you know.
I wonder how many times this exact story will get posted, each time with different data.
The water consumption was for construction. It was also the construction company, not the data center owners.
Further, the error has been addressed and the construction company paid.
Further further, if 30m gallons of water sounds crazy for a data center, wait until you find out how much water is consumed for construction in general every single day.
Honestly, if the argument behind these articles is that datacenter bad, they should probably use literally any other argument except standard construction materials.
Even funnier is how many people are against data centers yet continue to use Facebook, Reddit, streaming, etc which use what? Data centers. Don’t like it? Stop using it.
>The company said that it paid the back charges after being notified and suggested that the problem may have been due to the county’s smart-meter rollout.
County officials said the oversight has been righted and that the hookups are now being monitored. The utility director described the issue as an operational misunderstanding and said staffing shortages may have contributed to the problem.
saved you a click. also shitty misleading title. seems the water was used for construction rather than the datacenter cooling loop, which is a closed loop too. lol
Living on bottled water, coming to a town near you.
> In a 2025 letter to QTS, the county said the company owed $147,474 for more than 29 million gallons of water. According to Politico, the utility director estimated roughly four months of unpaid use, while **QTS put the span at about nine to 15 months.**
So the company actually estimated that they were not being billed correctly for longer than the county says.
> **The company said that it paid the back charges** after being notified and suggested that the problem may have been due to the county’s smart-meter rollout.
The company paid for the water.
>County officials said the oversight has been righted and that the hookups are now being monitored. **The utility director described the issue as an operational misunderstanding and said staffing shortages may have contributed to the problem.**
The county fucked up. Other articles explain that the county was transitioning to a cloud based billing system and that was why the connections weren’t being billed correctly.
An average 18-hole golf course in the U.S. typically uses between 90 million and 200 million gallons.
Maybe we are targeting the wrong industry.
Where does the water go? Does it get turned to steam? How does it leave the town’s water cycle? I am very ignorant on the subject and would like to learn.
what the fuck is going on with the world right now?
When you hear a story like this, it’s worth contextualizing the numbers. Ask yourself. What do you think George’s annual industrial water consumption is? Do you have any idea? Do you know what 30 million gallons is in relation?
This report suggests that industrial water usage in George in 2018 was 460 millions gallons of water PER DAY, meaning 167 billions used per year ([https://waterplanning.georgia.gov/forecasting/industrial-water-use](https://waterplanning.georgia.gov/forecasting/industrial-water-use)). So this billing error caused .02% of Georgia’s annual industrial water usage go unpaid for a short period of time.
Is that a serious issue that the water utility didn’t charge the data center? sure. Should it be fixed? Sure. But have you ever heard another industry cited in international media for a billing error that caused .02% of costs to go unpaid?
I would encourage people to remember that just as tech companies are incentivized to minimize the harms and maximize the benefits of their technology when they discussed it, so too do reporters have the incentive to do the opposite given the interest in anti-AI populism right now. It is absolutely terrible journalistic practice to not even try to contextualize the numbers around water usage. 30 million gallons of water sounds like a lot, but in the context of industrial water usage it’s literally a drop in the bucket.
You absolutely do not need to buy into the AGI hype that OpenAI and Anthropic are selling. You don’t need to trust them that they’ll behave responsibly or that they’ll willingly sign up for regulations or a token tax or whatever. You don’t need to roll over and accept or even subsidize data centers so we can “beat china” or whatever. There are legitimate concerns with electricity bills & costs, and noise pollution for data centers. But you owe it to yourself to not get lied to or manipulated by people using big scary numbers. Outrage isn’t free, and the more you can focus your efforts on the real problems the greater chance you have of actually making positive change.
Lol. What until you see what happens in Utah
But forcing me to quit eating meat will „definitely“ stop climate change and water waste
See this is the problem. These guys act like monsters and the government backs them. Don’t be nakedly evil guys. Or at the very least get a lot better about hiding it.
How can Nestle keep up with their production when someone else is stealing the water
I wonder how long it will take Reddit to figure out the almond milk industry uses 30,000,000,000 gallons of water per year
jk, no one actually cares about industrial water use
How many times is this going to be reported? Being pushed so hard.
The water company screwed up. The data center folks said they would pay without issue once made aware of the issue. No one was trying h to sneak anything. 30 million sounds like a lot. Depending on which side you ask on the time frame they did the equivalent of leaving a garden hose running and didnt set up thr meter riggt for it. 30 million gallons over 15 months is under 5 gallons per minute. Also, this is construction use not operations. It doesn’t matter what you are building the water was going to be used. Data center, office, warehouse, school, or whatever. They all need water during construction. We can debate the issues of data centers but this is NOT the one to hang your hat on.
So we’re getting angry about utility oversight for a couple months and then the company paid for the usage as soon as the county notified their smart meters weren’t working properly???
They paid the bill. The business is paying millions in tax revenue to Georgia and it is Georgias responsibility to use those tax dollars to upgrade any utilities that are required to to maintain service levels to residents.
For all of history, industry requires infrastructure improvements to accommodate operations.
This is silly to be angry about and it’s basically rage baiting people who don’t understand how the gap between industry and government works.
Where is Captain Planet when we need him?
Go planet!
Again, this is a Politico story that had been poorly rewritten. Google these things before posting them.
Make them put 30million gallons of clean drinking water back in the ground where they got it from. These companies can take a multi million dollar fine and not even bat an eye lid, let’s see them flail around when they are asked to replace what they’ve stolen.
Like so many said on the past… technology is going to destroy our planet, and we’re letting it happen, just so we can make videos of cats playing the piano… depressing state of humanity we’re living in.
Dang but if I collect rain water in a 55 gallon drum I’m a criminal
God I hate AI
Why the fuck don’t we make these data centers use cooling towers so they can reuse a portion of the water? Is there something contaminating the water that prevents it reuse?