Der Wasserstand in den Großen Seen sinkt – gerade als US-Rechenzentren einziehen

The sign outside Tom Hermes’s farmyard in Perkins Township in Ohio, a short drive south of the shores of Lake Erie, proudly claims that his family have farmed the land here since 1900. Today, he raises 130 head of cattle and grows corn, wheat, grass and soybeans on 1,200 acres of land.

For his family, his animals and wider business, water is life.

So when, in May 2024, the Texas-based Aligned Data Centers broke ground on its NEO-01, four-building, 200,000 sq ft data center on a brownfield site that abuts farmland that Hermes rents, he was concerned.

“We have city water here. That’s going to reduce the pressure if they are sucking all the water,” he says of the data center.

“They’re not good, I know that.”

Two years ago, the company said it would invest about $202m on a “hyperscale” data center that would employ 18 people and dozens more in the construction process. Although the company claims it uses a closed-loop, air-cooled system for cooling its computers that can reduce the need for water, artificial intelligence, machine-learning and other high power-demand processes do rely on water as a cooling agent.

All the while, a 10-minute drive north, the shoreline of Lake Erie hasn’t been this low in years.

Water levels across all five Great Lakes have begun to drop in recent months as part of a long-term fall. Since 2019, the Great Lakes have seen water-level decreases of two to four feet. While experts say this is a natural decrease given the record highs the lakes have experienced since 2020, it’s happening at a time when a huge new consumer of water has appeared on the horizon: data centers.

The source of the largest single deposit of freshwater on the planet, the Great Lakes, in particular Lake Erie, are already struggling with the fallout of drought and warmer water temperatures that, at this time of year, fuel major lake-effect snowstorms, and greater than normal levels of evaporation due to the absence of ice cover.

With major cities such as Chicago, Toronto, Detroit and Pittsburgh all within a few hundred miles of each other, small, under-resourced communities around the Great Lakes have become hugely attractive for data-center companies.

In Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, Microsoft is building what it calls the “world’s most-powerful AI data center” that is set to open early next year and expected to use up to 8.4bn gallons of municipal water from the city of Racine every year. Racine gets its water from Lake Michigan. Similar stories are playing out in Hobart, Indiana, where AWS is planning to build a data center two miles from Lake Michigan’s shoreline, and in Port Washington, Wisconsin.

In Benton Harbor, Michigan, locals are concerned that a proposed $3bn data center would contribute to environmental pollution and traffic.

Forty miles west of Aligned’s under-construction data center in Ohio, in Woodville Township, hundreds of people showed up to a public meeting last October to voice concern about another proposed data center project in their rural community.

They can use the water in a closed loop system. They really do not give a fuck and need to be forced to pay for their own infrastructure and degradation of resources.

good thing donald prevented states from regulating AI. They are above the law. Soon they will use humans as batteries. Not because it is efficient, but because tech bro oligarchs like to see people suffer.

There are places that need to upgrade their infrastructure to make these data centers work. Instead of making them pay for it, the power companies raising the prices for the regular people. Which is complete bullshit. I am so sick of the corporate welfare going on in the US.

The amount of water these data centers use is absolutely tiny compared to the water in even a cm of drop in the Great Lakes. The title paints it as though the Great Lakes are going to drop because of datacenters. That’s not true. They won’t help it most certainly, but the reason the lakes are dropping are due to changes in the climate (including human caused ones). 

I’m not going to speculate about the impacts of these data centers on water levels. What I will say, is that the Great Lakes have experienced record low water levels in the 2010s and recently had a record high (in 2020 according to the article). So saying water levels are lower than in 2019 isn’t exactly shocking and it’s much more complicated than the article makes it seem. There are a lot of factors that impact this, one of the most notable is ice coverage, since more evaporation occurs in winters where the lakes don’t freeze over. Unlike many other large water systems, water is a very big part of the surface area of the Great Lakes Basin, making this pretty impactful. Additionally, these large shifts in water level are expected to be more common with climate change.

And there it is billionaires coming for our largest freshwater supply…. Surely this won’t have any issues whatsoever on humanity…. Right?

can we at least keep the data centers from using the limited freshwater?there’s a whole ocean of water that they can use. The amount of money being poured into these data centers. They can afford to desalinate, transport and work out the kinks using ocean water.

Peter Thiel isnt the Antichrist and he cares about the lakes /s

Are we really going to let these companies waste all the water on their greedy ambitions?

There are massive protests brewing towards these AI data centers all across the US. In the North East, energy prices have almost tripled in the last one year due to data center sprawl and is projected to get even worse.

Man, can AI fuck off already.

We don’t need these artificial spam AI video clips that are lying to our eyes and brains.

I hate scrolling through AI posts on Instagram or TikTok of fake nonsense.

This AI bubble will burst at our expense of real nature being destroyed for fake and gross and mostly unneeded content.

For example: I asked Google AI why I found a steel ball bearing in my Amazon packaging of my 304 stainless steel coffee cups (no mechanical parts on a coffee mug), and Google AI said my coffee mug “had internal ball bearing that had broke and to send the coffee mug back”. Thanks A.I.