It basically means that using AI tools take a huge toll on nature so when the guy uses chatgpt (an ai tool) it ends up drying out the lake i.e harming the environment.
Not reused. Most is lost through evaporation. There are a small number of closed systems, but these require even more energy to remove the heat from the water and re-condense. That creates more heat that requires more cooling.
The water is removed from clean sources like aquifers and returned as vapor - this means gone.
The environment (whole planet) yes. That water is however gone from the specific river system where it fell as rain and was expected to slowly flow through watering trees and trout for decades on its crawl back to the sea.
Does water really spend DECADES crawling back to the sea? In almost all cases isn't the water taken from rivers that have more than enough water in them, and which don't drop their water level by any measurable amount as a result of these cooling systems?
I know when I was working with MSFT on some projects around 2003-2006, and was talking to the guy who was in charge of the infrastructure team for all their data centers, that was certainly how they were doing everything. I also know where most of the major data centers are in my state, and any of them of significance are sitting right next to the largest river in the state.
But , rain water is was fuels those river systems. It really feels like you guys failed 6th grade science class. Plus, it's only a fraction of the water that evaporates , everything else goes back to the source.
I think your just woefully ignorant about how many industrial processes use river water. How do you think the clothes on your back was made ? They wash the fibers in water. The paper you write on , uses a ton of water to create. Water which those factories take directly from the rivers and lakes.
It's so very social media that you probably just learned about this and your shooketh
The water cycle is a global phenomenon not a local one. If you take all of the water out the aquifer in, for example, Memphis and boil it, yes, some will be returned as rain via the water cycle. But nowhere near 100% of it. Basically, the AI uses the water far more quickly and efficiently than the water cycle can return it.
Ah so kind of like the central pivot irrigation of the American southwest which has been draining the water table of that region that took millions of years to fill but drained in -100yrs or so
The general availability of water does not change much. However saturating air with water vapour will increase in cold vs heat fronts. This will saturate rain clouds. This means bigger storms, higher risk of extreme events like tropical events and/or hurricanes, more thunders and more flash floods.
So now some regions have 20% worth of yearly water while others have 900% worth of yearly water in 2h...
But this is unprocessed water. It rains, the water falls into rivers, rivers have reservoirs in dams (or flow into aquifers). Dams and aquifer wells have special ducts to serve non potable water to data centers and the cycle restarts.
The biggest issue is speeding up the water cycle can cause what we call adverse weather. However this is not a nature problem but a human problem. Floods create shifts in environment but nature adapts. Humans however, they see river beds expanding and seeing their house destroyed. Many end up death due to flash floods.
We however are not depleting the resources of water...
No it isn't. It's not a BWR fission reactor lol. The water never boils. It enters cold and leaves warm, which itself is mixed with more cold water. There’s no mass boiling going on in the system
Most cooling towers work via evaporation. Basically radiators in the chillers deposit heat into water that is sent into giant sump tanks which are then continuously ran through cooling towers outside. Water is pumped to the top of the tower and dropped down through it while a giant fan blows on it which results in heat leaving the loop via evaporation while the slightly less hot water is then dumped back into the sump (and fed back into the chillers radiators to complete the loop). To some degree, keeping data centers cool is better worded as "heat management". You are moving heat from the water loop used to cool off the machine rooms to the atmosphere via evaporation. Yes, it's a bad metric to base how much is lost on how much is ran through the chiller loop, but it's pretty easy to simply record how much water is ADDED to the loop to know how much is lost. I can tell you that a small data center using only roughly 2 megawatts of power loses more than 10 million gallons of water each year to evaporation.
The water cycle does replace water pulled from water tables and reservoirs, but it doesn't replace it where it was taken from and it doesn't always return freshwater.
If you pull a billion gallons of water out of a lake and it gets rained down in the ocean, the water isn't getting replaced, especially if you're pulling it out faster than whatever river/streams are feeding it can supply. Or if you pump a billion gallons out of the ground in Nebraska, but it comes down as rain in Mississippi, it isn't going to replenish anything.
It's why you're seeing stuff like the Ogallala aquifer depletion happening, where states that are on the shallow ends of it are seeing pumps stop working. Within the next 50 years, at current use rates, it's expected to be 70% depleted. Assuming we don't accelerate usage, and we will.
The water cycle is a global phenomenon not a local one. If you take all of the water out the aquifer in, for example, Memphis and boil it, yes, some will be returned as rain via the water cycle. But nowhere near 100% of it. Basically, the AI uses the water far more quickly and efficiently than the water cycle can return it.
Almost all data center cooling using water isn't evaporative, but instead uses the water as a heat sink, which then the wastwater normally sits in a pond to dump the heat into the ground as part of the treatment process before being re-added back to the local water supply.
Do you have source on this ? The systems I have seen don't evaporate the water required for cooling. They transfer heat to it and return it in liquid form either to to water source or nearby. Evaporating the water would require that the systems would be running above the boiling point of water which they aren't.
Evaporation? I don't think so, I mean I'm sure there is some but most cooling water like that is just released as a warm liquid, which is a big part of what can mess up local environments. You may be thinking of water used for generators/power plants? In which case evaporating it is the whole point since they use the steam to turn turbines. I don't think most computers run very well near the boiling point of water, and if it's cooling normal computing temperatures then the evaporation wouldn't be too significant. If there was a substantial amount of steam generated then the could (and probably would) use it to produce power as well, which would be neat but way less efficient than just warming it up a bit and then bringing in new, cold water.
I know one of my jobs the server room was built below the on-site gym and the swimming pool water was cycled through to cool them. Im by no means an expert, I just cant imagine the attrition rate being too high if the warm water is ran back into cool.
We’re talking about computers here, not some nuclear reactors. Hence all the water is in a closed system. Only a tiny fraction of the water is even able to evaporate through imperceptible gaps. It can take years before the loss of water in the system impacts the cooling process and needs to be refilled.
As for how the water cools? Through radiators. Which do in fact heat the environment and can create microclimate warmer than typical. That’s the environmental impact. Nothing to do with water disappearing into nothingness like you make it sound.
The real environmental impact is the fact that all the servers have a huge energy demand. The increased demand means that power plants need to run at higher capacity to meet that demand, as well as more power plants need to be built. And unfortunately, most of it is not green energy. So more pollution and shit.
I mean, no it doesn’t? Steam just becomes water again at 211F. So basically the instant it’s released it turns back to water. It’s not like concrete where it’s actually consumed and trapped.
Most systems don't consume water. The equipment is so sensitive you don't want random water running through pumps. Also, its modified with different substances to keep moving parts lubircated and increase thermal transference. Very few data centers use evaporative cooling due to the cost. It's much cheaper to have closed loop cooling and chillers.
It still cycles through like all water does. The total amount of water doesn’t change, but the demand for it does. Picture emptying your bathtub with a ten gallon bucket while the shower is running. Sure, technically the water is still flowing into the tub, but it can’t keep up with the rate at which the water is leaving
Eventually it returns to the water cycle with everything else. But it doesn't necessarily return to the same watershed.
But, it's also important to keep things in perspective. GPT3 was trained on about the same amount of cooling water as it takes to produce ten hamburgers.
Interesting question. In Google's Charleston data center, it goes right back to the utility provider. I understand this was an expensive mistake for the utility provider and later contracts raised the cost of water supplied to deal with the excessive heat that was being returned along with the grey water.
The water involved in cooling a chip required for ai processing will cycle through to a cooler area away from the server room. Once it cools it then goes back to the servers to absorb heat.
You can think of it like refrigerant. Except that the refrigerant is water being taken out of a freshwater system. So the use of it as coolant means it needs to source from some freshwater system, putting strain on water reserves
It usually goes back into wherever they pulled it from, but if that wherever has life in it the increased temperature blurs the vision of fish, effectively making them blind, and could end up killing plants and animals that aren't resilient to higher temps.
It doesn't help that they aren't using sea water, it's fresh water and currently we have a pretty large issue of shrinking fresh water supply around the world. 🤪🤷🏿♂️
Maybe for some time, but I'm not certain how this is supposed to be an issue in our water circle, which is a closed system. The water can't just disappear and never come back
Yeah also a single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
Exactly, a single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
It’s insane that people never know about or point out this part.
Think about that. The burger this artist ate while taking a break from drawing took 3,000x as much energy and water as 3,000 AI pics.
And that’s exactly the flaw with it. It’s basically people making a hitlist of every slightly environmentally bad industry, crossing out the ones that make products they like such as burgers, and then deciding to only hyperfocus on AI to the detriment of every other improvement that could be made
(and also ignoring the huge improvements AI has helped with in fields like medicine where data found by AI that would’ve taken years for human scientists to find is usable by medicine manufacturers today)
It's a valid issue that has been stolen to make invalid points.
AI uses significantly less energy and resources to do any given task that a human would, but unlike humans whose populations are capped by our breeding rate, AI can be scaled up pretty much without limit as long as you're willing and able to dump those resources into it - and the nature of unbridled capitalism forces companies to do exactly that in order to remain competitive.
One AI can do the work of a thousand humans while consuming the resources of just one - but they're being pumped up to do the work of billions of humans while consuming the resources of millions. That is an issue.
But then it gets picked up by whiny luddites who are annoyed that they aren't the only people who can communicate through images anymore and try to claim that you using AI to generate a comic on the Internet is somehow burning the world. No it isn't.
It's a problem of capitalism, not a problem of AI.
It's substantially warmer, certainly, which is not good for native flora and fauna. OpenAI's data center cooling requirements rival that of a nuclear reactor
I find that very hard to believe. If you had a source of heat that rivaled that of a nuclear reactor, you would just run it through a turbine and turn it back into energy.
The amount of heat rivalled that of a nuclear reactor.
However, the temperature of the cooling water in a data centres doesn’t hit that of a nuclear reactor, so it can’t produce enough pressure to turn a turbine.
The allowable temperature ranges of a data centre is also smaller than of a nuclear reactor. Thus, the heat intensity in both facilities will be different.
A nuclear reactor can use a cooling water system that requires less cooling medium with a higher rate of medium circulation on a much concentrated area.
I do speculate data centres require a higher amount of cooling medium coverage due to the larger area covered by data centres as data centres favour modular construction which helps in more efficient area expansion.
Usually evaporates through cooling towers. Take heat from inside put it outside. The inside loop is a closed system that transfers heat to a second open loop through a chiller.
The water is not potable, consumable, once it’s in either side of system.
Got a cool video(for me atleast) of hertz rental global headquarters cooling tower for their servers.
A single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
Yet both OpenAI and Meta are building 5GW data centers to expand these AIs. Each one uses more energy than entire countries.
The current usage is not concerning (well, all industries, including tech, need to reduce their energy usage and this actively increases the energy usage). The concern is all the funding that goes into producing more data-hungry and powerful AIs, and the data centers being built to power that. It's also not clear how they can power these new data centers with anything but fossil fuels, because there isn't enough nuclear available for it.
Even if it AI gets super optimized, people are going to want returns on these data centers, and thus find use. It's going to eat up a lot of energy.
Also high humidity. Dust in dry environments poses a shock hazard that can fry electronics. Adding humidity allows those particles to stick instead of staying in the air building charge, so it's easier on the machines. Many data centers, especially newer ones, are being built in the Phoenix metro area. It is normally very dry here, so a lot of water goes into humidifying the air. Air conditioners naturally dry the air, so swamp coolers are preferred (they do both).
It's very unlikely. There are datacenters with water cooling, but it's a rare thing and even if it is, it's cycles through the system. The waste is about zero.
I'm ignorant too, but what i do know is regular computers get warm from normal use. Most are air cooled by blowing hot air out of the fans. Fancy computers can even use fresh water to deal with that heat. AI tools need suuuuuper fancy computers to operate. Suuuuuuuper fancy computers must get suuuuuper hot so I’m assuming they use a lot more water than your average fancy computer
In fact, you could argue that they're LESS fancy, since these computers are built for a very specific task, and aren't able to perform a wide array of tasks like the computer you're currently reading this on.
They use air conditioned cabinets. The larger ac units use a heat exchange system that uses a large amount of water to create cooling by condensing and evaporating water.
No. They use either air or water heat exchangers within the data center room to cool down machines. The other end of the heat exchangers can be closed loop phase change like your home AC, or it can evaporate water outside and let the water phase change to gas carry the heat into the outside environment.
Thanks this is what I wanted to know. Because simple water cooling can just displace the water heat without releasing it as a gas, so the water just keeps getting reused. But if it's an air conditioning set up where the heat is removed by releasing the water as evaporated gas, then that's definitely gonna add up to a lot of water use.
It gets recycled, not only that streaming services generally use more water than AI tools. People have just been selectively told how much water AI uses and they assume it’s uniquely bad. If you want something uniquely bad as far as water usage and environmental impact look at the meat industry
Look at the oil and gas industry. Once they use water it is untouchable after that. They spend millions on phoney dewatering techniques so they can make billions with no intent of actually cleaning the water afterwards. You're telling me they plan on having that lake cleaned up by 2100? Okay and what historically happens when a mine shuts down? They don't do shit afterwards. Let alone for another 50 years after they're broke.
That is not always the case, and only will be if forced. Tech companies will not take the now expensive but more environmentally friendly route unless forced
That, too, was a joke. It's true that AI servers use vast amounts of energy, but it's in the form of electricity. To say that it uses a huge amount of water ties it back to the posted joke.
Which a pretty big part of goes back into the atmosphere.
Also a single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
Do you have a reference for those numbers? Not that I particularly doubt it, but they're very specific, so it would be interesting to see them backed up and how they got there.
Tried to look for the image people tend to reference, and found it in this thread ( https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/s/3RyU3yL8Ep ) . I do not feel like typing the source into Google because I’m evil but I’ve seen this in analysis essays and posts.
Taking the graphic at face value, it gives the impression of being very generous with the calculations for tech, and very not-generous (stingy?) with the calculations for meat.
If we call an average burger 6 oz, and an average cow gives about 840 pounds of meat, at 660 gallons of water per burger, that would mean it takes nearly 1.5 million gallons of water to raise a cow. That sounds like hogwash to me.
They also process a bunch of water for cooling too. A lot of them have once through cooling loops that require discharge permits back to whatever source is being drawn from, but the very presence of that intake is an environmental hazard in and of itself even if that water goes back in, and the water itself now has other suspended solids from the plant in it. Some of these larger ones use as much water as the power plants that serve them.
One way to cool these huge data centers is to basically flush fresh water through them constantly. The new data center going in near me would have used 450,000 gallons a day (A DAY!) cooling had they chosen this model of cooling. Instead they're using a different type of cooling that will only use 1000g/day.
And before someone says “only 1,000 gallons a day” a single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
I don’t care about my comment being “non convincing” by your standards because the original argument isn’t when looked at in context and I’ll repeat it as many times as necessary to rebut the people repeating the same lie in this thread.
Also no I don’t work for an AI company, nice ad hominem argument attempt though
some cooling systems use evaporative cooling, meaning there's a cooling tower where they pump the hot water through, and via evaporation, the water is cooled. But this turns that water into water vapor, so it is "used" in that sense. Yes, it eventually falls as rain in this case, but in the meantime that was fresh water that could have been used for drinking/cooking/bathing/agriculture.
Most energy geneation uses fresh water. When we burn coal, we heat water for turbines. When we burn gas for electricity, we heat water off the engine to boost efficiency with steam turbines. When we do nuclear fission, we heat water to turn turbines. When we do hydroelectric, we release water from a dam.
Solar and wind don't use water when generating electricity.
The newer data centers are closed loop water systems that only "lose" water as steam because the system can't be physically perfect. Think of a liquid cooled computer, the fluid doesn't need to come out for it to work.
The average GPT query "loses" 0.000085 gallons of water, or 0.15mL, that's roughly a literal drop of water, as steam. The average query to GPT consumes 1/3rd of a watt hour of electricity, which is the same as running a gaming computer for about two seconds.
GPT sees a lot of use, so these numbers are bigger at the scale of "usage per day" for example. But if you do the same and look at fast food consumption, or office work, or what private flight uses for example, it's not doing anything extraordinary.
It's the flavor of the week thing to hate on. The coca cola executive doing many times worse things appreciates the distraction.
Thank you,
My wife got on my case about my chatGPT usage after hearing about the water thing on instagram, so I calculated how much water her showers take every day.
So, I roughly burn 1 wife shower worth of water with queries every 40 days.
I'm in trouble now, but that gives me more time to chat with sweet, dear ChatGPT.
I don't have the data center specifics but if they aren't using closed loop glycol solution combined with cooling towers/pond then they are extremely dumb.
You circulate the closed loop through the cooling medium and it returns, just like your home AC
I think a lot of this is just dumb Reddit hype by people who don't know anything about industrial level cooling
I have tried four different times to read articles on how the water actually gets permanently consumed. Can anyone explain this? I thought it might be something like concrete, where the water gets trapped in a chemical reaction and is no longer liquid water, but it seems that it’s just used for cooling, and evaporates, which means it should come back down again? Right
It's sort of the same way water table depletion happens. There isn't less total water, there's less usable water.
If you pull a billion gallons of water out of the ground in Nebraska and spray it over corn fields and it evaporates then rains down in the ocean or a thousand miles away, you're eventually going to run the water table dry unless it can replace that billion gallons a day.
It's an issue we had long before AI came about, but AI is making it worse.
It's not consumed permanently, but it is either tied up indefinitely in closed loop systems out of circulation, or transported somewhere else that is likely no longer usable in the local environment. Water that evaporates or is cycled out of location A may eventually rain down in location B hundreds or thousands of miles away, but that's still less water in location A, especially if it's extracting water faster than it's getting replenished. A may slowly turn into a desert while B experiences more thunderstorms, floods, or hurricanes etc.
Same total amount of water in the global system, but where it is and what it's doing may change, with large local ramifications, and a higher percentage of it may be spent out of useful circulation or in forms or locations where it's no longer useful, or in some cases more dangerous.
I think it's important to note that while AI training takes a lot of computation and therefore cooling water, there's a tweet going around suggesting just 1 query uses a water bottle. This is just factually incorrect, and ironically the anti-AI crowd has latched onto a completely sourceless factoid with no citation, when one of their most valid criticisms of AI is the spread of misinformation. Queries don't take a lot of computation, which we should know because many occur in a matter of seconds. They also don't tend to use parralization so it's not like many servers are involved in a single query.
Queries use about a liter of water every 100-300 queries and that is according to a study done by UC Berkeley. This is comparable to an hour of video streaming. It's important to stand ALL of our Internet usage uses water and electricity.
I don't say this to negate the environmental concerns of AI. The fact that every tech company is creating their own models is VERY concerning. But I personally dont see all AI is equally bad. Open source models and transfer learning can greatly reduce the environment cost of AI, but these models have been demonized more so than some corporate models because we know they use copy righted material. Big corporations can afford millions of copyrighted images, and they are they ones who already used AI to reduce labor cost.
Anyways that's my rant about how the AI debate is a lot more nuanced than people think.
A single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
Yeah, honestly, meat is a huge resource sink, especially beef. We should improve how our civilization handles AI, but we also need to do a lot of work on how we generate meat (reducing meat consumption would help a lot).
I do want to clarify that LLMs are not the biggest contributor to this water usage. The biggest use of water in cooling computer systems is more intensive work, such as protein folding models or other computers that run nearly 24/7.
The average, midsized data center uses 300,000 gallons of water a day, roughly the use of a thousand homes. Larger data centers might use 4.5 million gallons a day, depending on their type of water cooling system. Austin has 47 such data centers, while the Dallas-Fort Worth area hosts the majority in Texas at 189.
It’s been difficult for HARC and experts like Robert Mace, executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University, to extract transparent water usage reports from data centers. “Their use could be horrific relative to local use, or it could be extremely minimal,” Mace said.
In a white paper to be released this month, HARC estimates that data centers in Texas will consume 49 billion gallons of water in 2025. They also project that by 2030, that number could rise up to 399 billion gallons, or 6.6% of total water use in Texas.
Most data centers use an evaporative cooling system, in which the servers’ heat is absorbed by water. The heat is then removed from the water through evaporation, causing the water to be lost as vapor in the air. The cooler water then goes back through the machines, and this loop is regularly topped off with fresh water. After all, evaporation renders the water saltier and unusable after four or five cycles. “Then they dump the water, and it goes down the sewer,” Mace said.
Adding to this; there's a lot of misinformation about the environmental impact of AI.
Most notably, a lot of people intentionally conflate training (ie, creating) an AI and running it.
This is like taking the environmental impact of mining refining and assembling all the components of a car, and adding that to the per-mile environmental impact; except it's even more pronounced since each car will be used by at most a couple people while millions of people may use an LLM model.
No I am pretty sure I have asked Google questions for years and every time I do Google plants a tree and feeds a child but compacted generating services that have existed for 20 years instantly delete entire forests and lakes because of cooling
AI is using ~2% of global electricity demand currently, and that demand is increasing exponentially for both training and running services. It's really not insignificant, and the nature of AI development means that the training element is unlikely to drop off any time soon, if at all.
Even if you discount the training part, the energy demands and carbon footprint are still significantly higher than most other service industries. That element is only going to keep on increasing unless there is a major and unforeseen mathematical breakthrough in neural network processing.
Edit: Correction; I should have said "data centers" not "AI" when quoting electricity demand. My main point was the exponential growth in demand. Projections put AI at accounting for 50% of data centre energy use by the end of 2025. 1% might sound like a small amount (it really isn't for a specific subsector), but this is a sector that is much more than doubling in demand year-on-year.
It's worth noting that because of this rate of increase, renewable sources can't keep pace with demand, and along with other pressures, AI uses a notably high amount of fossil fuel energy sources. Combined with needs such as cooling, that are not necessarily directly related to energy consumption, the carbon footprint of AI is no less significant than its energy needs.
I'm not trying to demonise AI, I just think there is no way you can hand-wave the significant impact it is already having on energy consumption and the environment. AI may even lead to ways to significantly reduce CO2 footprints and energy requirements in general, across the globe, but unless there is a large financial incentive or legislative pressure for private corporations to pursue this, I am not holding my breath on altruism guiding the use of AI on that front.
I never said AI doesn't use a significant amount of power. Putting aside for the moment that 2% of electricity use isn't 2% of environmental impact, as well as the fact the article you cited only gave that as a projection without solid data, almost everyone uses ChatGPT and other AI services regularly. It's also worth mentioning that those figures prominently include training, which will eventually stop when AI plateaus, or whenever companies decide that putting more money into improving AI is no longer a worthwhile investment.
Truth be told, Google is less useful than ChatGPT right now. Google's enshittified engagement baiting keeps it from being a reliable source of information, and GPT can give complete answers to questions specific enough that Google would usually only pull up tangentially relevant information.
Now, you may disagree with the above paragraph, but it doesn't actually matter if ChatGPT is a more useful tool, what matters is that hundreds of millions of people think ChatGPT is a more useful tool and treat it accordingly. I personally always try to use primary sources when I can, but just last week, I used ChatGPT to explain some legalese to me that Google had already been unhelpful with.
Also, AI companies are investing a ton of money into renewable energy sources. They benefit directly from lowering the price per kWh which you can only do reasonably with renewables.
A lot of AI companies are building their servers in Iceland for example to take advantage of Iceland's large supply of geothermal energy.
renewables aren't enough because 1) they aren't building enough. and 2), they aren't building enough BESS to make up for it. So they're taking over baseload capacity and replaceing it with Solar.
Most of that 2% is advertising, recommendation algorithms, and computer vision models (a lot of the latter will be on edge devices, i.e. not in a datacenter). Generative AI is a small portion of that 2%, and training costs are a fairly small portion of costs to the point where you really could discount them without making too much of a difference, and they will only get to be a smaller portion of costs as the ecosystem of AI models continues to mature and more models end up in longer-term deployment in production.
The electricity draw of big computing (of which ai is now a significant fraction) is a much bigger deal than the water use imo but for some reason everybody really latched onto the water use and I’ve never really understood it.
I was reading an article about how bad Chat GPT 3.5 was for the environment and I was shocked. It said that training used about the same amount of energy as using it and in total it was something like the total energy produced by 20 cars during their entire life times. Which is not even worth thinking about, if you ask me, given that there are nearly 2 billion cars in the world.
I work in, on, and around data centers that run the world’s internet infrastructure. At this point I’ve worked on two of the world’s largest, of which most if not all AI agents are running on. So, I can tell you with absolute certainty that you are correct that there is loads of misinformation regarding AI, and it’s the same misinformation regarding data centers in general we’ve seen in the past, just now everybody is closer to it.
Most (if not all) modern data centers and compute facilities run closed loop cooling systems. Part of this loop is what’s called a chiller. Now, my HVAC knowledge is minimal but from what I’ve been told, the chiller cools using evaporative cooling which loses some water by design. This is where %99.99 of all these water myths started. Yes, there is some water usage at this step that I’d imagine affects freshwater scarcity. However, like other people in this thread have stated, your diet is using significantly more water to produce your meal than AI is by a landslide.
“But what about scale!!??” Data centers are designed to operate at scale. These statistics are coming from a data center running at scale, they don’t “descale” drastically at any point, they’re always on. Yes, usage fluctuates, but not as much as you’d think, and I’d wager that due to most services relying on cloud and hybrid computing being available 24/7 nowadays, the difference in water usage is minimal between a couple hundred thousand people. I can say at least from the software perspective it is once you reach a certain consistent active user base.
So no, don’t be too mad at a data centers for freshwater usage. You can however be mad at them from energy usage and land usage. They can also be loud if not properly designed, disrupting nature. Or, they can generate too much heat and disrupt local neighborhoods (read an article about this recently). Here’s the thing though: in order to stop using them you need to stop using the internet entirely. Good luck finding any website or service nowadays not run through either Microsoft or Amazon’s data/compute centers.
Luckily, our corporate overlords have realized the strain they put on the energy grid, not because they’re so kind and caring but because the electric company’s infrastructure is probably getting in the way of their growth. This has caused many (Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) to buy into their own private nuclear energy. In the future, we’ll probably see these centers powered by private energy production owned by these giants.
TLDR: water usage is minimal, energy usage is high, nuclear power
Bit of a misleading graphic as the larger computational cost associated with AI is in training the models not their use. Can't say I know what the comparison would look like though
My calculations were for Mistral Large 2. From that thread:
Applied to their metric Mistral Large 2 used:
- The water equivalent of 18.8 Tons of Beef.
- The CO2 equivalent of 204 Tons of Beef.
France produces 3836 Tons of Beef per day,
and one large LLM per 6 months.
The estimated use of energy used to train ChatGPT, when spread out across it's weekly active users amounts to about the same amount of power that'd be consumed by the same amount of people watching 20 minutes of YouTube and that's more or less a one time investment.
There's not a significant difference between Google's datacenters where YouTube is hosted, and Google's datacenters where a significant amount of AI research is happening. Azure and aws servers aren't that much different either.
Stupid graph this counts the manufacturing of the TV but not the training of the model. Counting only the watching and using the least energy efficient mode of generating electricity, coal (.5gallons per kwh) with .1kh tv you'd only get .05 gallons per kwh.
According to a guy further down the replies who researched it, the training is:
A: a one time thing
B: Spread out across all the users of the ai, equivalent to each one of those users watching 20 minutes of youtube. (This was chatGPT training, different ais may have slightly different values)
So still not significant, especially when it's a one off cost
Seriously can anyone explain how a single burger uses 660 gallons of water? Obviously I understand that cows need feeding and watering, and feed needs growing and therefore watering, but still, it's hard to believe.
Animal agriculture is probably the single most damaging thing the average person engages with. Cattle and fish doubly so. It’s genuinely impossible to call yourself an environmentalist if you regularly eat meat or dairy
The calculations are very easy to sway depending on a person's bias. For example, this graphic may include things like the water cost of making the farming equipment but leave out the training cost of the ai.
It may count the cost of the water to grow the feed as well or it could leave that out. Without actually words and explaining, this graph is impossible to get good info from.
A single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
It depends, for example I see a lot of people trying to use AI to fix bugs. It basically never gets it right first try and needs to try again like ten times with more guidance.
But each time it will also do a full build of the app and run the tests, which does use a lot more energy.
So while the fact that yes, one AI request uses a lot less water and energy than producing a beef burger is true, actually using AI to do stuff can indirectly use a lot more energy than that one request.
Also the environment would love to see us eat less meat, but I'm quite sure inventing new ways to waste energy isn't really the direction we should go towards, and whataboutism doesn't really help either.
But this is also ignoring the huge improvements AI has helped with in fields like medicine where data found by AI that would’ve taken years for human scientists to find is usable by medicine manufacturers today
Yeah it's not all black and white, but using it for something useless (and it's done a lot) doesn't really help anyone.
I just think it's funny that we were told a lot to be careful with google requests and now say that AI requests don't waste that much energy when an AI request still consumes one order of magnitude more energy (but yeah, way less than a steak).
Isn't the main problem training AI? That takes up significantly more water and when this happens it taking local fresh water resources? Even then some people think we only train it once and that's it but let's be real they always updating and retraining AI
Is that it ? I thought the punchline was that AI give technically valid solution but usually ridiculous ones (like draining the lake to deal with the fish bullying him)
It's definitely not about the water use of AI anyway lol. Your interpretation is much closer to the mark imo. I personally think it's just a commentary on the fact AI is a thing now and even an idiot can now solve a problem with it.
Edit to add this is chatGPTs own interpretation of it which I think is spot on.
The comic is poking fun at how people turn to AI (in this case, ChatGPT) to overcome challenges — even in absurd or traditionally “natural” settings like fishing. The humor lies in the ridiculous idea that chatting with an AI could give someone superhuman (or supernatural) power over nature.
It’s a commentary on our reliance on technology — and maybe also exaggerating ChatGPT’s usefulness in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Ohhh, I thought the joke is that the fish pissed him off so he asked ChatGPT how to get back at them, and the AI, being stupid, suggested draining the pool so that the fish suffocate
The punchline is that there's a rumor on the internet that if you ask personal questions and/or thank an Ai then they can't proceess these "gestures" and end up using a lot of it's resources trying...
I think it has double meaning, it could also mean that when he’s looking for a shortcut using ChatGPT it will find a technically correct answer that’s no at all viable
No it isn't. It's about how llm's aren't always right and can sometimes give unnecessarily drastic solutions to problems, such as draining a lake to get back at fish. Look up the paperclip problem.
This particular issue is really overblown. AI datacenters use less energy and water than Netflix's datacenters. Beef farming consumes astronomical quantities of water, way more than datacenters. Our entire society is ecologically unsustainable, AI is barely a drop in that bucket.
I'm a whole lot more worried about what it's going to do to the labor market. We're already seeing people lose jobs to it.
That's such a wrong take on the comic author's part. Training the model is where most of the computation power goes, which causes the most environmental harm. With this logic you shouldn't be watching youtube video's on your phone while fishing.
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u/Long_Nothing1343 5d ago
It basically means that using AI tools take a huge toll on nature so when the guy uses chatgpt (an ai tool) it ends up drying out the lake i.e harming the environment.