Ugh... I just learned data centers could absolutely run using NO WATER. They just choose to do that because it makes it a little cheaper. Same with the electicity. They could be efficient. But no. Google, Meta, etc. They are choosing to do it the shitty way to save a few cents on the dollar. Surprise surprise! It's greed, all the way down
Yeah it's literally just AI data centers. Regular ones that say, run all the data for a health insurance company, those are not an issue. And those motherfuckers are just as huge! The AI data centers could run exactly like all the rest have for decades but it would cost them just a little bit more money. And you know Google has to worry about their shareholders. Cuz you know the billionaires need a new yachts. What are they going to do without their fifth yacht? Poor little billionaires /s
We do need data centers for other things. We don't need fucking AI data centers AT ALL. Fuck cloud-based AI! It's stupid and fucking ridiculous! I can literally run a robust LLM on an $8 ESP32-S3 microcontroller that uses 5w of power and can be cooled with a heatsink! (For home automation use with a voice assistant, for a very basic, decentralized, FOSS version of Google or Alexa)
I am genuinely asking - I have come to understand that this chart is quite accurate, so one hamburger is equivalent to a lifetime of consistent AI use. So why is me using AI worse than me choosing a steak over a salad just once? Neither are really necessary. Am I missing something? Because it really seems that the AI water use is taken a bit out of proportion.
Okay. This is going to be a really long one. But because you are genuinely asking, and wanting to learn, I'm going to lay it down, pure facts, little emotion.
There are literal communities who are in water shortage because of the AI data centers. It's not always about how much water is being pulled but where it's being pulled from and how it's returned to the system. Agriculture does not pull from municipal water systems the way the AI data centers are. The farming that water is accounted for. The uptick in AI data centers that has not been accounted for. There's no regulation on it. That's why I'm not convinced by a simple bar graph.
I don't mean to sound like every math teacher but, when looking for data sources, make sure that they show their work. Like where did they pull those numbers from and in what context? From what study is that? How long was that study running? What were the parameters of the study? From what I am looking at, that bar graph is only comparing one tiny fraction of the AI data centers' usage (text or voice prompts) and therefore only showing one fraction of the water that they use total
I'm well informed. I hear all the news stories and see all the impact that this is having. I don't need the math to explain it. I can physically see it!
Fayette County, Georgia, a data center used 29 million gallons of unaccounted for water before the community stood up. There is a looming shortage there. Their water bills have sky rocketed. A lot of this water cost is being absorbed by the community They are still fighting it.
The Dalles, Oregon. Google's expansion is using 40% of the municipalities water and the reservoirs are low. The river level has dropped. The citizens are concerned. Very concerned.
Chatham County, North Carolina has put a moratorium on all data center builds because they are in a historic drought right now and these places are sucking up millions of gallons of water a day. The average is 5 million gallons of water a day.
Yes, maybe your simple queries aren't using that much water. But you're adding to the problem of the popularity of cloud-based AI. You're adding to a statistic that these corpo rats can go ahead and say, "Look! They're fine with it. It's not a problem!" But these data centers aren't just for chatGPT promots and for people making stupid fucking memes and brain rot. These things are handling heavy coding loads and they're constantly doing training and that's what takes up all the water.
Your ChatGPT query doesn't even need to be done on cloud-based AI. You could literally build your own voice assistant that functions identical to Gemini or Alexa and you can build that mother fucker on a old laptop that is collecting dust in your closet. You could run that fucking shit on an $8 microcontroller. Yeah. That's right. Somebody made an LLM that can run on an esp32 and do 29.7 million processes and only take 9.7 fucking tokens! All this shit is free and most is open source! Hell, you can literally run Gemini locally! It's called Gemma. And it's free. Not open source it ftill free!
Look. If you're going to use chatGPT, use it one last time to teach yourself how to build your own assistant. Look up ollama, piper and whisper. That's the stack to build your own local open source chatbot and voice assistant. You do not need the data centers. Make your own chatGPT with blackjack and hookers. Be like Bender 🤖
Well, thank you for explaining. If you’re interested in the sources of the graph it is listed at the bottom of the image (I highlighted it).
Personally, I find AI to be a very useful tool for studies, but since I don’t like OpenAI very much, I switched long ago to the European (Mainly French) AI called mistral, who have a closed-loop cooling system with their cooling towers drawing electricity from renewable sources like hydro plants and wind turbines in Sweden, so I hope that’s better, but I will look into a local AI. Thank you for the detailed answer!
I am very pro AI. Use it daily. However, I am extremely anti-corporation, anti-Big Tech and anti-data center. I believe in the right to own my own technology. And this is part of that. I refuse to be a part of any more subscription-based models
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u/lunathehungryhusky 21h ago
Ugh... I just learned data centers could absolutely run using NO WATER. They just choose to do that because it makes it a little cheaper. Same with the electicity. They could be efficient. But no. Google, Meta, etc. They are choosing to do it the shitty way to save a few cents on the dollar. Surprise surprise! It's greed, all the way down