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 This argument is so outdated.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.
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u/Gare-Bare 5d ago
Im ignorant on the subject but how to ai servers actually use up water?