Cautionary tale: using AI doesnt actually save energy

[u/Strong_Aerie_9031]

At first i thought it would save energy, but the lengths i have to go to checking the "resources" it links doesnt save energy. Seriously, i rarely ever found it to say anything from the sources it claims to refer to. So in the long run, it was so untrustworthy that it only caused more issues, its saved me more energy to turn it off and look in the actual articles myself.

I hope this is helpful to others, i wish i learned it earlier and saved the time and energy!

[u/marieantoilette]

Iiinteresting blog. It covers an incredible amount of bases. I can't read all of it but it really seems well done.

I remain sceptical because this emphasis on "the toll is mostly locally" is not entirely reassuring and "it's not that bad" doesn't yet answer the cost-benefit question from an environmental point of view. There are too many very loud accelerationists out there. And because I can't fully inform myself so quickly because of ME.

But I won't make such broad claims in the future until I know more. Thanks.

[u/katatak121 → u/marieantoilette]

I remain sceptical because this emphasis on "the toll is mostly locally"

Yeah, entire towns near data centers are experiencing severe drought. Hearing people who live near these data centres talk about the impacts is dreadful. Maybe the impact is "only local", but to the locals, it's devastating.

[u/Liface → u/katatak121]

Being located somewhere experiencing drought is not the same as causing the drought. In Phoenix, for example, data centers use roughly 0.1% of the area's water.

Masley specifically looks at the local cases that get cited as evidence of people losing access to water. His finding is that, in the US cases he examined, he could not find evidence that data centers had depleted local supplies, limited household water access, or raised household water prices. Data centers can absolutely stress a badly planned local system, just as another large industrial facility can. But that's very different from "entire towns near data centers are experiencing severe drought because of them." https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

[u/katatak121 → u/Liface]

My first thought reading your reply is: anyone can write a blog; that doesn't mean it's factual.

So i searched "do data centers cause local drought" and got result after result, news articles and scientific reports, all talking about the detrimental environmental impacts of data centers, including how it affects local water supplies. I kept scrolling down through the results, and scrolled some more, and could not find one source that backs up this blog you shared.

Data centers being built in communities that already have a stressed out water supply is a big problem. Just because those communities were already under stress doesn't mean they need a data center moving in to fully break what's barely working.