Several places report 6.4 Billon Gallons per year by Google alone in 2023. Even if we assume this has icreased across all companies, the 163 Billion Gallons per year seems overblown by quite a bit.
I hate it when people lie to make a point that would have stood well on it’s own without lying. Even an estimated 13 Billion Gallons per company and year (so assuming it doubled since 2023) is fuckton of water.
The extremely dumb thing here is that the water use is totally fine. California alone uses ~11 TRILLION gallons of water per year for farming. And so what, that water cycle returns via precipitation (assuming we don’t go so hard to fuck up the aquifers, but you know what I mean). The water is fine. Plus that farm water runoff is even kinda hazardous, with pesticides etc. It’s still fine
This is a totally recyclable resource. You can probably use it to water plants after it’s been through the data center, or it may have just evaporated away as part of the cooling process
Meanwhile, the obvious dart to throw is the fact that the power need is absolutely ridiculous and only growing, leading to every major tech company investing extensively in energy tech. Eventually they will become a new generation of utilities that supply power (and compute) to everyone. So the opportunity is to force them to reinvent energy in a clean way rather than, say, burning an utter shitton of oil to do it
Most of that water is used for animals or their feed so if you really cared about water you could just offset a year of prompting by eating a single vegan burger.
https://www.aitooldiscovery.com/ai-infra/how-much-water-does-ai-use
Several places report 6.4 Billon Gallons per year by Google alone in 2023. Even if we assume this has icreased across all companies, the 163 Billion Gallons per year seems overblown by quite a bit.
I hate it when people lie to make a point that would have stood well on it’s own without lying. Even an estimated 13 Billion Gallons per company and year (so assuming it doubled since 2023) is fuckton of water.
The extremely dumb thing here is that the water use is totally fine. California alone uses ~11 TRILLION gallons of water per year for farming. And so what, that water cycle returns via precipitation (assuming we don’t go so hard to fuck up the aquifers, but you know what I mean). The water is fine. Plus that farm water runoff is even kinda hazardous, with pesticides etc. It’s still fine
This is a totally recyclable resource. You can probably use it to water plants after it’s been through the data center, or it may have just evaporated away as part of the cooling process
Meanwhile, the obvious dart to throw is the fact that the power need is absolutely ridiculous and only growing, leading to every major tech company investing extensively in energy tech. Eventually they will become a new generation of utilities that supply power (and compute) to everyone. So the opportunity is to force them to reinvent energy in a clean way rather than, say, burning an utter shitton of oil to do it
FARMING vs stupid pictures
Most of that water is used for animals or their feed so if you really cared about water you could just offset a year of prompting by eating a single vegan burger.
Or we could stop generating stupid pictures.
Or both. We could do both.
Mainly stop pitting a process to create a basic necessity against something incredibly superfluous.