The AI cost of water isn’t really a big deal in comparison to the consumption of water through crops and other means worldwide.
I heard the cost of water for AI worldwide is 1/80 the water consumption of corn in America alone.
What is a big deal is the money invested towards it is holding up our economy, (when it could be spent on making society better) creating fake news and impersonating humans at a rapid rate.
What drives me crazy about the use of water for datacenters is that it isn’t necessary. Unlike growing crops where the water is a non-negotiable requirement of the endeavor just by its very nature, you can cool a datacentre without continuously consuming water.
It just so happens that by a completely insane series of circumstances it’s the cheapest way to do so. You could run the servers in the datacenters at a lower power limit. You could use non-evaporative cooling. You could build the datacentre in a colder or less arid climate. But no, all of those options either cost slightly more or generate slightly less money, so they aren’t even considered. Couple that with the fact that a significant proportion of that consumption is in service of prompts that no end user ever actively asked for, like the LLMs responses being generated many thousands of times per second by Google searches. It’s just this utterly pointless pissing away of resources.
Most of the water use for corn isn’t necessary either, because nearly half the corn we grow gets burned in engines in the form of corn ethanol mixed into gasoline.
I’ll say that again because it is an unfathomable stat. Nearly half the corn the US grows gets burned to make cars go. That represents 40x the water use of AI if OP is to be believed about the 1/80th stat.
Well I think the perspective on water is that a lot of these data centers aren’t paying market price for water, and are leaving residents in the area with less water available
The AI cost of water isn’t really a big deal in comparison to the consumption of water through crops and other means worldwide.
I heard the cost of water for AI worldwide is 1/80 the water consumption of corn in America alone.
What is a big deal is the money invested towards it is holding up our economy, (when it could be spent on making society better) creating fake news and impersonating humans at a rapid rate.
What drives me crazy about the use of water for datacenters is that it isn’t necessary. Unlike growing crops where the water is a non-negotiable requirement of the endeavor just by its very nature, you can cool a datacentre without continuously consuming water.
It just so happens that by a completely insane series of circumstances it’s the cheapest way to do so. You could run the servers in the datacenters at a lower power limit. You could use non-evaporative cooling. You could build the datacentre in a colder or less arid climate. But no, all of those options either cost slightly more or generate slightly less money, so they aren’t even considered. Couple that with the fact that a significant proportion of that consumption is in service of prompts that no end user ever actively asked for, like the LLMs responses being generated many thousands of times per second by Google searches. It’s just this utterly pointless pissing away of resources.
Most of the water use for corn isn’t necessary either, because nearly half the corn we grow gets burned in engines in the form of corn ethanol mixed into gasoline.
I’ll say that again because it is an unfathomable stat. Nearly half the corn the US grows gets burned to make cars go. That represents 40x the water use of AI if OP is to be believed about the 1/80th stat.
Well I think the perspective on water is that a lot of these data centers aren’t paying market price for water, and are leaving residents in the area with less water available
Repurposing the water would be good. Have the heated water heat people’s homes for example, give something back to the community.
Instead they heat up the fish.
I also agree that water isnt the biggest issue. Power is dedinetly a genuine concern. AI uses so much power.