Alt Text: The cartoon illustrates the problem of water use in the AI age: a farmer’s child and his mother are pumping a little water from a well for their daily use. Two knights in armor, transporting a large, spherical water container on wheels, come by and say, “The King wishes to make more avatars of himself as a Ghibli character.”
In the background, a castle sits enthroned on a hill. The cartoon illustrates the excessive water consumption required for AI model queries.
why are you consuming water for your AI?
Not sure if you’re serious, but cooling down servers consumes water.
Why does it consume water? Isn’t it in a closed loop?
It would be, if AI companies cared at all about anything but their wallet.
They also use a fuckton of electricity, many sources of electricity consume water.
They also require a fuckton of electronics, which require water to be manufactured.
I’m still not understanding how this is a water problem. Even in an open loop system, where do you think the water goes?
The same place where every other form of water consumption goes: to the water cycle.
If your argument is “that evaporated water will just rain again” then you’re arguing that water consumption is not real, and people should not care about wasting water.
That is not true. Most of the water of the water cycle is in the ocean. When you consume water, you are turning 100% high value fresh water into mostly low value salt water.
I’ve yet to see any actual evidence that any significant number of people are using evaporative cooling, and not just what everyone else uses when liquid cooling electronics - a closed loop.
Here’s a report by the UK government. Page 4 contains basically the same thing as I said. Which sources if you wanna go deeper:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688cb407dc6688ed50878367/Water_use_in_data_centre_and_AI_report.pdf
AI data centers use a fuckton of water. And before you say self host, this comic is directed at the other 99.9% of consumers.
Nice pre-counter on the shit ass argument of self hosting. Large scale is 100% of the problem
If everybody would self host and run their machines… Would that be efficient? Would use a fuckton of energy as well, and I doubt it’s all solar. Plus, the models they use base on work done before (energy used) unless all training is done at home… Unlikely
No I’m not understanding how it’s a problem. How does an AI datacenter “consume” water? Where does it go?
I understand they use water in a closed loop for cooling, but… that’s a closed loop. It isn’t consuming water. Where did you get the idea that it was?
Let’s start with this - where do you think the heat goes?
I think it goes into a pipe filled with a coolant that is circulated into a cooler medium like a lake or even just the air.
what happens to water when it’s heated?
And when the heat is the same amount as a power plant or more? Do you know how those work?
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
That’s shifted from AI to data centers in general, and most of what they’re complaining about is the power generation. I live in Ontario, we get our electricity from nuclear and hydro.
Do you think that AI doesn’t use data centers? What do you think that the huge surge in building data centers is for?
Literally at the top of the article I linked:
Also from the article:
And worse:
So, no, it’s very much not only about the power for the data centers, although that is one component. And it’s fantastic that you live in an area with renewable hydro power, but that doesn’t help data centers built in areas that aren’t served by renewables.
I think it’s damning that both the account you’re referring to and the one I was arguing with earlier are both likely to be bots, paid shills, or both trying to spread disinformation about how harmful and wasteful AI data centers are!
Who wants to trade away clean water and land to shitty AI facilities? I mean, except for oligarchs who want to cover the world in data centers.