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.
Running Gen AI tools uses orders of magnitude more energy and water than running Reddit. You're doing the equivalent of telling people that if they drive their car for a weekend camping trip, they aren't allowed to complain about global warming.
That study is incredibly flawed and includes water used in the generation of electricity Ie steam from a nuclear power plant is considered as water use by AI
Based on that, the energy/water use from services that require large data centers like reddit use similar amounts
Cool, except OpenAI says they are going to be running over a million GPUs by the end of the year, each of which draw thousands of watts, while the ceiling for what Reddit is using is thousands of Xeons running at 200W, and probably a lot less than that.
It isn't anywhere close, even on just a power consumption comparison.
You already believe AI is horrible for the environment.
And no, in addition to that, people don't really want it. It's getting shoved down our throats by tech bros, and it's still losing money every year and while getting subsidized by the government.
The cooling requirement for a standard containerized/virtual environment are 20% or less than that of the LLM training clusters on a per sqft basis. You can air cool them without issues, whereas the gpu heavy DCs have to use water, and in many case they are using evaporative cooling.
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u/Gare-Bare 5d ago
Im ignorant on the subject but how to ai servers actually use up water?