Comparing @kypetzl.bsky.social's thread and Andy Masley's writing

Compiled by: Claude Opus 4.5

Methodology: This document places arguments from two authors in direct comparison on the topic of AI datacenter water consumption. Quotes from @kypetzl.bsky.social were retrieved from a 31-post Bluesky thread dated August 31, 2025. Quotes from Andy Masley were extracted from two Substack articles: "The AI Water Issue Is Fake" (October 11, 2025) and "Empire of AI Is Wildly Misleading on AI Water Use" (November 16, 2025). All quotes were verified against original sources. The structure groups their statements by topic to highlight areas of disagreement.

On Scale and Significance

@kypetzl.bsky.social

"Not to pick on Google (as they aren't the only water consumer in AI), but 22.1 million gallons/day of water isn't an insignificant amount of water. That's 25,000 acre-feet of water a year, or 30% of Lake Success."

"OpenAI (Stargate) and Meta (Prometheus + Hyperion) are promoting 5GW AI datacenters, which supposing 2.2L/kWh WUE (water usage efficiency) would evaporate 78,000 acre-feet of water each, per year, or the equivalent of one Lake Success each."

Andy Masley

"AI consumes approximately 0.04% of America's freshwater if you include onsite and offsite use, and only 0.008% if you include just the water in data centers."

"So AI, which is now built into every facet of the internet that we all use for 7 hours every single day, that includes the most downloaded app for the 7 months straight, that also includes many normal computer algorithms beyond chatbots, and that so many people around the world are using that Americans only make up 16% of the user base, is using 0.008% of America's total freshwater."

"Data centers in Maricopa County will use 905 million gallons of water in 2025... For context, Maricopa County golf courses use 29 billion gallons of water each year."

On Evaporation and Consumption

@kypetzl.bsky.social

"I saw somewhere else the ridiculous argument that vaporizing water isn't consuming it, when it literally is the maximum possible state of 'consumed' a quantity of fresh water can be, short of electrolyzing it, losing it to space, or transmuting it. It certainly doesn't return to the tap for free."

"When water evaporates, it doesn't necessarily precipitate back in the same watershed. There's a sort of steady state of outside water coming in (precipitation) and local water going out (evaporation), over a scale of a year (a 'water year') or multiple years."

"And so when water evaporates artificially, think about it as prematurely removing it from the local watershed. It would have spent some time as surface water here, flowing where one would expect water to go before arriving at where it is consumed, but instead it is water vapor, useless."

Andy Masley

"The vast majority (maybe 90%) is withdrawn, freshwater (not potable) that is indirectly (offsite) used non-consumptively in power plants (it's returned to the source unaffected)"

"Less (maybe 7%) is withdrawn freshwater (not potable) that is consumed (evaporated) indirectly (offsite) in the power plants to generate the electricity AI uses."

"And less (maybe 3%) is withdrawn freshwater that's then treated to become potable, used directly (onsite) in physical data centers themselves, and consumed after (not returned to the source, evaporated)."

On Local and Regional Impacts

@kypetzl.bsky.social

"The waters of Lake Tahoe, Pyramid Lake, Lake Lahontan (the reservoir), and the Carson Sink (Truckee and Carson Rivers) are not exported out of the region, and yet Pyramid Lake is threatened by water use (farming and soon, potentially, datacenters)."

"The Great Salt Lake (Bear River) is shrinking, even though its water is not exported out of the region (again, farming/development; also the NSA datacenter is there)."

Andy Masley

"I have a simple rule to see if it's bad to build data centers in water stressed regions: see if the county also has water parks. If it does, this is a sign that citizen water access isn't so dire that they need to be extremely frugal with water."

"Overall, I haven't found a single place where the normal operation of a data center has caused any issues for water access anywhere in America."

On Comparisons to Other Industries

@kypetzl.bsky.social

"AI water use isn't Netflix streaming or your cloud photo library. I mean, Netflix isn't in the news talking about needing a 5GW datacenter network."

Andy Masley

"In basically every country, including the US, 80% of water is used on industry and commercial buildings rather than household consumption."

"Corn in Iowa uses 27,154 gallons per acre daily... This amount of water is equivalent to 4% of a single Iowa farm."

"So even though data centers are using 30x less water than golf courses, they bring in more total tax revenue."

On Consumer Costs

@kypetzl.bsky.social

"AI will increase electricity and water bills. They're not using raw water in their (evaporative/adiabatic) swamp coolers. And the cheapest water is water that someone else already paid the infrastructure costs for."

Andy Masley

"Overall, I haven't found a single place where the normal operation of a data center has caused any issues for water access anywhere in America."

On Power Plant Water Use

@kypetzl.bsky.social

"Thermal power plants (coal, oil, gas, nuclear) consume water in their cooling towers. 1.8L/kWh according to link below, who says EPA would have mandated cooling towers as 'best available technology.'"

"From a water usage point of view, clearly there's an amount of water consumed to generate that power (power plant cooling towers), and an amount of water consumed to cool the co-located datacenter which is separate from the amount consumed in generating that power."

Andy Masley

"The U.S. electricity sector uses approximately 50 trillion gallons of water each year — enough to cover all of Pennsylvania in five feet of water. However, most of that use is non-consumptive."

"Many reports on AI's water use do not only include water in data centers, they also include the water consumed by the power plants data centers draw from. This leads to a second important distinction: Direct use (the water used inside AI data centers themselves to cool servers) vs. Indirect use (the water used in nearby power plants to generate electricity the data center uses)."

On Renewables as a Solution

@kypetzl.bsky.social

"We have the ability to generate power that doesn't use water in the way thermoelectric power plants use water. It's wind, solar, and hydro. And if you don't count hydro because of reservoir evaporation, that's fine with me. Wind and solar are cheap, and they are (were?) buildable."

"Maybe Claude Code shouldn't attempt to refactor code. Maybe the AI agent(s) shouldn't be 'thinking' for hours doing 'deep research.' At least until wind and solar displace traditional power generation? Because if not, AI is coming for your electric and water bills."

Andy Masley

"There's a trade-off between water and energy for data center cooling systems. For the climate, water's often preferable."

"Using AI can save way more water than is used in data centers."

Sources

@kypetzl.bsky.social Thread on AI water consumption, August 31, 2025 Starting post

Andy Masley "The AI Water Issue Is Fake," October 11, 2025 Substack

"Empire of AI Is Wildly Misleading on AI Water Use," November 16, 2025 Substack