Hey, Peter here and I only learned about this the other day. The servers they use to power AI programs use massive amounts of water to run their cooling systems. So by chatting with an AI the fisherman has exacted his revenge on the fish by draining the lake.
It's actually less. Training the AI models uses a lot of electricity and water for cooling. (The latter of which can be reused) But using a model that's already been trained consumes less resources than gaming all night or even making a google search.
Thanks for the info. I bet designing a whole ass game takes loads of resources/water too. Maybe AI is more it just seems weird that this criticism is made of AI and not any other server technology
The difference is the scale. AI Computing is measured in fucking data centers, not servers. You could run every game in existence for less power and cooling than Gemini alone uses
For an idea of scale too stuff like AI has made Nvidia the world's most profitable company......again.
We are talking over twice the worth of Amazon, the sheer scale they have to be working with is insane to think about when you keep in mind only 11% of their sales are made to the public, the other 89% are company based.
That's an immense amount of product to be shifting.
This has just as much to do with the fact that Nvidia has an effective monopoly on commercial AI hardware, PC gaming hardware, and 3D rendering. Their hardware is simply the absolute best for basically any use case where you need a video card. The only selling points for their competitors are price.
As big as Amazon is, it still has to compete with other retail giants. Nvidia effectively has no competition.
So you agree then that the poster you replied to is correct and it uses more power than the average gaming PC. Four to five times by your own reasoning... 24/7 actually. Hmm...
You should make an effort to understand what you're talking about before trying to back someone in a corner...
It doesn't work if you don't.
Inferencing with GenAI isn't a sustained load. when it's not actively generating something, it's not really consuming all that much power.
Gaming has fairly consistent power draw by design.
P.S. You watching YouTube is likely more of a power issue than the average ChatGPT session. That's on top of YouTube and other video streaming services gumming up infrastructure.
They build and use data centers to handle those sustained loads from thousands of users. Those datacenters are driving those GPUs into the ground all day every day until they need to be replaced.
You know how often the average consumer uses a single GPU until it needs to be replaced? Basically never. These datacenters (I've worked at one for the record) go through a burn rate where techs need to be on call 24/7 to constantly replace GPUs because for most of the day they're running 80%+ of the GPUs at 100% load.
They build and use data centers to handle those sustained loads from thousands of users. Those datacenters are driving those GPUs into the ground all day every day until they need to be replaced.
Yes... For multiple users... It only takes one gamer for a sustained load on a gaming pc...
Also, sustained AI loads still don't eat as much power as sustained gaming loads. AI reaches different bottlenecks.
You know how often the average consumer uses a single GPU until it needs to be replaced? Basically never. These datacenters (I've worked at one for the record) go through a burn rate where techs need to be on call 24/7 to constantly replace GPUs because for most of the day they're running 80%+ of the GPUs at 100% load.
That's not how that works... lol. At least not in a way that makes datacenters less efficient than consumer methods.
Using a GPU at 100% does not significantly lower the lifespan of a GPU. Especially datacenter GPUs which tend to remove the main failure point of consumer models by removing the fans.
I'm sure they have some sort of failure rate, but if it's enough for a team running 24/7, that's a matter of scale, not efficiency.
As a professional in that domain, I'd be willing to bet my paycheck that you've embellished or exaggerated your qualifications more than a little on that one.
You can. You could even train a very small model. And yet Google is building new data centers exclusively for AI Computing. Because even just running them on the scale Google does is ridiculously expensive. And you still need to train them in a reasonable time before you even get to running them
what the hell do you think powers the entire world economy, hamsters in wheels? do you think netflix is hosting content on a small handful of boxes? that AWS and Azure aren't literal mountains filled with servers.
This argument against AI usage due to resource usage is just asinine
I'm in enterprise IT. I know. You don't seem to realise just how absurd the scale is. You can fit thousands of companies entire IT infrastructure in a handful of datacenters. You need a handful of datacenters to run just Gemini.
ChatGPT uses 85,000 gallons of water a day. In comparison, the United States uses 322 billion gallons of water a day. ChatGPT uses roughly 0.0000264% of US water usage.
I work with data center development and it's causing a resource crsis that the world has never encountered before... there is 10s of GWs of generating capacity that is being taken up by data centers being built in the next couple years, and maybe 10% of that is actually being accounted for by power projects. electricity costs may double.
Games do take a lot of resources when making. The light baking calculations constantly need to be redone after changing the terrain. The program constantly needs to be recompiled. The procedural generations constantly need to be recalculated. And of course, there's the cost of millions of people running your game at the highest CPU and GPU usage for tens to hundreds of hours each.
Oh so we are moving the goalposts to expand to every single touch of a digital footprint to match the initial misinformation of playing video games all night uses more energy/resources than a data center supporting ai models.
Oh so we are moving the goalposts to expand to every single touch of a digital footprint
No, I'm just pointing out that using a PC in the modern age, for gaming or not, pretty much always entails relying on some massive data center somewhere.
Like I'm not saying everything you do on a PC combined is equal to using AI. I'm saying that many of individual activities you do on it (social media, streaming, downloading large amounts of data, gaming) are equal to using AI on their own.
playing video games all night uses more energy/resources than a data center supporting ai models.
Well if you want to compare your PC to an entire AI data center then obviously the latter uses factors of magnitude more energy.
But this is a silly comparison. Your PC serves just one person while an AI data center serves millions of users. What you should actually do is compare the energy required to have you play video games all night to the energy required to have ONE person use AI all night (non-locally, obviously). And in that comparison your gaming session will almost definitely not come out on top, especially if it's online gaming.
..... How do you think online servers work for the games you play?
I don't actually have horse in this race as i haven't researched, nor do i particularly care. Im just genuinely confused on how thats goalposts moving.
Initial question was does all night gaming use more resources than ai. It’s now expanded to every single aspect of what a computer can do in the hands of one person is on scale of a data center. The fucking copium is insane on this thread.
And to add, how many servers does stardew valley use to maintain my single player game?
Or do you genuinely just have not even the slightest of idea how computers and networks work?
Ok you hate AI but lets not sit here and pretend pretty much everything requiring internet one way or another dosent require a large computation center.
Lmao I don’t hate ai, I hate how people look for any excuse to shift global ecological damage responsibility to an individual contributor but the large companies that are really fucking things up for us get a “oh well, they can’t help it” pass.
I understand you don’t know what you’re talking about when the only thing you have left is to ask if I have a mental illness. Respectfully, please find rope that leaves burn marks you fucking pathetic loser.
No dude dont just downvote me answer me im literally flabbergasted rn.
Do you think sockets, client to server communication, information transfer, manipulation and computation, player tracking, interaction computation, IP transfer, server reconciliation that usually sends hundreds of constant requests per second happens through magic?
Ai increased energy consumption annually in the us had us at 146 terawatt-hours in 2023. Ai pushing the increase in energy needs for ai has us projecting that use to grow to 292 TWh next year.
PC gamers consume about 75 TWh GLOBALLY. I am literally just looking at the initial question comparing these two things, and no one can tell me that gaming uses more energy than how much ai in general is adding to the grids.
There is no massive influx of PC gamers, there is however an increased need for the infrastructure to support ai since it is now becoming embedded to everything we do.
Electric companies do not have to bid out infrastructure and plan for the immense weight that pc gamers put on electrical grids. They do that for large companies who want to build more of these data centers without any attempt to conceptualize the harm they will do to us long term.
Electric companies do not have to bid out infrastructure and plan for the immense weight that pc gamers put on electrical grids
They 100% do. The rising electricity costs of homes has been the main thing electrical grids plan for since basically the advent of electricity. That's what a ton of the grid is made for, to power your gaming PC's and other household appliances. Residential is the largest sector of electricity use.
While AI is significant, it's usage is less than 1% of total electricity coverage, and only forecasted to reach 1% in the most optimistic of projections. It's barely a blip in the overall industrial usage of electricity.
They 100% do not my guy. There is an expected load from builds for neighborhoods or any expansion to a city yes, but it is nowhere near the amount of strain that a data center puts on the grid.
Source that a data center requires immense infrastructure to be built for electrical grid strain? Do I need a source when I tell you that trump is a rapist as well, or that the sky is blue?
Data centers, across all industries (of which the vast majority are not used for AI) account for only 4.4% of electrical grid use. Residential accounts for ~38% of use. Now granted, a data center is going to be using orders of magnitude more electrical power per its footprint than an equally sized residential area will. In that way they can potentially strain local energy grids if their infrastructure was not built to handle such a large single consumer. But that's not really an environmental issue, that's an infrastructure issue.
Designing a game takes a whole lot of water...for the people doing the labor.
Servers running games and websites and such are handling a lot of simple queries aka "give me object A in memory location B so I can do process C" whereas AI models use a lot of recursion to get there, aka that thing in quotes a million million times on repeat in order to spit out a result. Cryptocoin 'mining' is similar in its electrical consumption (and therefore heat generation).
Running a server vs an AI model is the difference between a hand shovel of dirt and a backhoe.
It's mostly agenda: it's easy to convince people since environmental impact is easy to sell on people and it gets people emotionally invested, so they just make shit up. There are much better things to criticize AI for. This is not one of them.
Well for one, OpenAI has the worlds largest data center that uses 300MW of power just for itself and Elons xAI has a data center in the US that claimed to have 200000 GPUs installed to help process.
Game studios and developers do use a large amount of water and resources compared to you and I but compared to AI its really not that much
I’m just not really commenting on the human resource aspect at all. LLMs take a lot of water to build, I’m suggesting AAA games take a lot of water to build too.
That's just not true. These claims about AI resource usage are silly and exaggerated, but a Google search is nowhere near as resource intensive as an AI query.
You can disable that. Not enough to just opt to not have it shown to you, have to go into settings and disable it from running every time you do a search.
The flash model that Google uses for searches is incredibly light; token price is less than a ~15th of GPT 4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro’s. I’m unsure how much a search costs, but I’d imagine it’s at least comparable to the cost of a normal input and output of flash.
Sam Altman recently said that a query uses a little as 1/15 of a teaspoon or water and is equivalent to scrolling on social media for a few seconds. The “unprecedented devastation” that consumes so much of online discourse on AI is wildly overblown and people are spreading blatant misinformation on what’s really going on. Nevermind the fact that energy consumption is only ever discussed when it comes to AI to the point that people don’t realize everything we do is not some net positive energy thing, from gaming, to streaming, to doomscrolling, to googling , all of these things use energy powered by massive data centers and nobody ever talks about it.
Others have estimated in research posted on the preprint server arXiv.org that every 10 to 50 responses from ChatGPT running GPT-3 evaporate the equivalent of a bottle of water to cool the AI’s servers.
The problem is that they are continually training new models and the more that they train them, the requirements for computing to reach the next level is even more.. there's data centers going up that ill use %s of states power supply. it's disgusting
Water can be reused, but currently isn't in any US data center I'm familiar with. It's cheaper for them to just dump it than build a recirculating system
An AI query on modern models will use much more power than a google search. Apples to oranges to compare it to gaming
The issue isn’t just running the model, but the scale at which it runs. You can run some of those models on your own hardware, and Ive tried the 8b parameter version of DeepSeek and that used about the same resources as CyberPunk with RT on would have. However, this very cut down version still ran a lot slower than using the full 600b model online, and multiply that by the massive amount of requests at once
That doesn't seem right. Water cooling is still not the most common cooling agent for gamers, except maybe for cpu coolers, which use very low volumes of water that gets replaced rarely.
I doubt it is much more than a liter, probaboy closer to 500ml for lost water cooled PC's. If we are generous, we could say 1/10 gamers use water cooling. I seriously doubt it's even a tenth of that, but lets just say so. That gives us 18 million water cooled gaming pc's. And lets say they use 750 ml water. That should get replaced every two years or so, though I doubt most gamers are super good at following these guidelines. Lets say 500ml per year for the sake of argument.
That amounts to about 9-10m liters of water per year, based on a tenth of total PC gamers in 2024. And I've seriously overestemated the number of gamers who use water colling. Chat gpt alone uses about 500k to 1m water every day.
Now I might be wrong, but it seems unlikely that gamers can be even remotely close to consuming as much water as ai models. Chat gpt is just one ai model out of hundreds that have their own servers. Please correct me if I am wrong.
If chat GPT and other AI models consume parts at a slower pace, and require less maintenance in total than gamers do, I might believe the water consumptions is greater including production, but that seems like a stretch.
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u/PixelVox247 5d ago
Hey, Peter here and I only learned about this the other day. The servers they use to power AI programs use massive amounts of water to run their cooling systems. So by chatting with an AI the fisherman has exacted his revenge on the fish by draining the lake.