AI’s water problem is worse than we thought
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Flint water crisis
12 min read
The article explicitly compares the Oregon data center contamination to 'the next Flint, Michigan.' Understanding the original Flint water crisis provides essential context for the severity of this comparison and the public health implications of nitrate-contaminated drinking water.
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Blue baby syndrome
11 min read
The article mentions this condition as a consequence of high nitrate levels in drinking water. Understanding the medical mechanism of methemoglobinemia helps readers grasp why nitrate contamination is so dangerous, especially for infants.
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Data center
13 min read
While readers know data centers exist, understanding their technical infrastructure—particularly cooling systems and water requirements—provides crucial context for why these facilities consume massive amounts of water and how the contamination cycle described in the article occurs.
Everyone knows data centers use a lot of water. What’s less known is how they can poison the drinking water that remains.
It’s already happening in eastern Oregon, according to a new bombshell investigation from Rolling Stone and the Food and Environment Reporting Network. (FERN is an independent, nonprofit news organization that seeks to make the food system more sustainable and equitable).
Here’s the gist: At its data centers in Morrow County, Amazon is using water that’s already contaminated with industrial agriculture fertilizer runoff to cool down its ultra-hot servers. When that contaminated water hits Amazon’s sizzling equipment, it partially evaporates—but all the nitrate pollution stays behind. That means the water leaving Amazon’s data centers is even more concentrated with pollutants than what went in.
After that extra-contaminated water leaves Amazon’s data center, it then gets dumped and sprayed across local farmland in Oregon. From there, the contaminated water soaks straight into the aquifer that 45,000 people drink from.
The result is that people in Morrow County are now drinking from taps loaded with nitrates, with some testing at 40, 50, even 70 parts per million. (For context: the federal safety limit is 10 ppm. Anything above that is linked to miscarriages, kidney failure, cancers, and “blue baby syndrome.”)
FERN and Rolling Stone’s new investigation thoroughly explains that process of contamination, follows the people living with that fallout, and exposes the political machinery that enabled all this: namely, a decades-old network of local power brokers who residents literally referred to as “the mafia.”
It’s a remarkable piece of public service journalism that gives a preview of what could happen as data centers multiply across rural America to fuel the artificial intelligence boom, often in places with scarce water, weak oversight, and political systems easily overpowered by Big Tech money. I highly recommend setting aside some time to give it a read.
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