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Malaysia's Johor Bans Low-Tier Data Centers Over Water Strain (thestar.com.my) 26

Posted by msmash from the drawing-the-line dept.
Malaysia's Johor, one of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing data center hubs, has announced it will no longer approve applications for Tier 1 and Tier 2 data centers because of their enormous water consumption -- up to 50 million liters daily, or roughly 200 times what higher-tier facilities require.

The Malaysian state has approved 51 data center projects as of November 2025. 17 centers are already operational, 11 are under construction and 23 received approval this year. The announcement follows concerns raised by a local politician who pointed to water supply disruptions in Georgia in the US after a data center began operations and protests in Uruguay over fears that data centers could affect farms.
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Malaysia's Johor Bans Low-Tier Data Centers Over Water Strain More

Malaysia's Johor Bans Low-Tier Data Centers Over Water Strain

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  • They never heard of direct to air cooling? There is no need to evaporate clean water.
    • At least for new builds/major conversions; it's often a matter of incentives.

      There's certainly some room for shenanigans with power prices; but unless it's an outright subsidy in-kind you normally end up paying something resembling the price an industrial customer would. Water prices, though, vary wildly from basically-free/plunder-the-aquifer-and-keep-what-you-find stuff that was probably a bad idea even when they were farming there a century or two ago; to something that might at least resemble a comme

    • They never heard of direct to air cooling? There is no need to evaporate clean water.

      Air cooling is quite inefficient compared to water cooling. The heat of vaporization of water, 2260 kJ/kg, is remarkable. It will remove a lot of heat. Even the thermal mass of water, with a specific heat of about 4.2 kJ K/kg, is pretty impressive.

    • Are they evaporating it? That would seem to be unnecessarily wasteful. I have a water cooler on my PC, and it just circulates water through a radiator.
      No, I'm not saying the centers can use closed loops, but they sure don't need to waste clean water by boiling it off.

      Here's where this ceases to make any sense - why does anyone think the water comes out dirty? Clean water goes in, warm clean water comes out. It just went through a bunch of pipes. Just like it does in everyone's house, and the main

  • Georgia on my mind (Score:3)

    by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @10:30AM (#65819063) Journal

    I live in Georgia, hadn't heard about the data center issue here, and TFA doesn't source the claim. Believable, but where, when, who? Anybody have that story?

      • Except that story doesn't describe a county-wide water crisis, it describes one household whose well needs to be re-dug, and then says there's a potential problem in the future. That's not much to base conclusions on, let alone public policy.

        I still don't see where there's a problem. It's not like a mine or chemical plant. Clean water in, warmer clean water out. Just put it back in the potable water supply.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      You never thought to Google for the answer? There are several sources.

      • Were they written by AI?

      • It's almost impossible to find good sources. Most don't even tell you what sort of cooling is being used and are just shouting vaguely. Finding an article that actually tells you where the water is drawn from and where it goes is rare, because that would take actual effort to report and might take away from the currently popular "Big Tech BAD" narrative.

  • AI as a sacred prestige competition (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @10:38AM (#65819081)
    A theocratic sunk cost trap can push a society into a subsistence sacrifice spiral, where ordinary people steadily give up food, rest, and local security to sustain ever growing ritual commitments, producing a chronic pious infrastructure gap in which roads, storage, and irrigation lag far behind temples and shrines. Through ritual resource diversion and ritualized inequality, elites justify extracting labor and surplus for sacred projects, while sacred prestige competition among factions drives each group to sponsor bigger monuments, feasts, and pilgrimages than its rivals.

    Over time, ideological rigidity and cosmological lock in make it politically dangerous to question these priorities, even as devotional self exhaustion thins the community’s reserves and eschatological neglect encourages people to discount long term environmental or infrastructural risks. When shocks such as drought, war, or trade disruption finally hit, the result can be monumental overextension.

    A landscape dominated by impressive sacred architecture but lacking the resilience to cope, leaving behind a sacred shell civilization where the structures remain imposing while the society that built them has fragmented, shrunk, or transformed beyond recognition.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      AI Slop, all of it. "A theocratic sunk cost trap"? I admit religions are a cost trap, but they are not connected to data centers.....unless.....could it be.....God just announced he'll be acquiring land for data centers to handle the rush of prayers from people asking for divine intervention for their troubles.

      • I think the parent commenter was proposing an analogy to the various temples-overtaken-by-jungle and cathedrals-and-hovels societies; where the competing c-suites of the magnificent seven and aspirants suck our society dry to propitiate the promised machine god.

        I have to say; datacenters will not make for terribly impressive ruins compared to historical theological white elephant projects. Truly, the future archeologists will say, this culture placed great value in cost engineered sheds for the shed god.
        • When temples (really entire cities) have been overtaken by jungle, it was usually because everyone died or fled due to war, famine or disease. Not because of religious obligations.

          I'm not familiar with any historical example that supports this "theocratic sunk cost" argument. I can think of counter-examples, like the 18th Egyptian dynasty, or the bulk of Jewish history, but none where the people allowed a state religion's rituals to consume the economy. That usually brings revolutions, not continued d

      • AI Slop, all of it. "A theocratic sunk cost trap"?

        Not sure why you think this is AI slop. It's an interesting argument. Not sure I agree, but it's a different take.

        I admit religions are a cost trap, but they are not connected to data centers

        The connection is right in the subject line: it is comparing AI to a "sacred prestige competition." The central idea is that AI is like religion in that it promises great and wonderful rewards in the future if we make sacrifices in the present, and if we don't see any of these great and wonderful rewards: that's because we're not sacrificing enough. It becomes a death spiral: the worse things ge

    • You're describing a collapse process with which I am unfamiliar. In what societies has this happened?
      • > You're describing a collapse process with which I am unfamiliar. In what societies has this happened?

        Hittite Empire 1200–1180BCE
        Mycenaean kingdoms 1200BCE
        Egypt (Pyramid age: 4th dynasty) 2498–2494 BCE

  • Just use sea water. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @11:10AM (#65819131) Journal

    In Portugal we have a $10 billion datacenter being built by Microsoft where a large thermal power plant used to be... it uses sea water for cooling just like the power plant used to. Beachgoers love the warm water. Sea water is not exactly scarce and there's no shortage of shoreline in Malaysia...

    • The idea of people bathing in the effluent of a datacenter is peak dystopian. I love it.

    • I don't know why, perhaps seawater costs more to use because of salt. It is pretty clear from the article, they are using drinking water resources, which people use.

  • Have they considered just throwing the poor into furnaces to power the AI?

  • What's wrong with the water coming out? (Score:3)

    by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @02:33PM (#65819615)
    I'm trying to figure out why anyone looks at this as water being used up. The water comes from the municipality's source and runs through pipes to get to your home or place of business. Who cares if some of those pipes are in a datacenter? What could it possibly be picking up from those pipes that would make it unsafe to drink straight from the data center's outflow? Temperature?

    Please, someone tell me why the water used by a data center can't go back into the potable water supply.

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