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.
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.
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
Thats a choice the local government is making and doesnt apply to every data center.
So? It’s still impactful to human lives and is more directly tangible than abstract food costs