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AI uses less water than the public thinks

californiawaterblog.com

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Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#141

Post by LostMyLogin »

Petersipoi wrote: post #92
parsimo2010 wrote: post #69

Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. O…

> have to eat to live Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!

My wife works with farmers professionally as part of a conservation district and just responded "THIS PERSON KNOWS FARMING" when showing her the discussion. I genuinely have no idea what you guys are talking about but she immediately got heated.

Based in Colorado.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#142

Post by lxgr »

pier25 wrote: post #50
bee_rider wrote: post #38

I don’t really get the water concerns in datacenter cooling. Even if a lot of water was used for cooling with every prompt (which he argues against here, but, even if )… water “used up” by cooling just comes out a little hotter, right? Maybe evaporated. Then it’ll come back in the form of rain. This isn’t an industrial chemistry process that leaves some toxic waste in the water. Or an agricultural one that puts water…

Just 30 mins from where I live data centers are having an impact on water used for farming. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/25/m... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo

If only we could do water-intensive activities in areas where water is abundant and then ship the resulting products to where they are needed...

In a far science fiction future, I could e.g. imagine connecting LLM inference data centers to a global data network instead of always having to drive up to them to ask my prompts.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#143

Post by phil21 »

trollbridge wrote: post #114
AustinDev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t data centers use gray water more often? Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone? My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out. But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/i…

Those of us by the Great Lakes would prefer that our water not get sold to other places, thanks.

Not all of us. I'm totally fine with water pipelines in exchange for long distance transmission lines for solar power and other such infrastructure like gas pipelines from areas that produce stuff we do not.

Export an abundant resource for a scarcer one seems win/win to me. Kind of the point of interstate commerce.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#144

Post by tptacek »

AmbroseBierce wrote: post #138
Petersipoi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have to eat to live Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!

There was massive controversy about that so I don't know how good counterexample it's that. Unless the argument is "we already waste a lot why would you care about wasting more??" Which is not a great argument.

The point of the counterexample is a huge component of US agriculture, massively dwarfing data centers in water use, doesn't serve the core needs proposed by the top comment.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#146

Post by ssl-3 »

shimman wrote: post #24
cleverpotato479 wrote: post #10

A lot of confusion around AI water usage might stem from whether it's an open-loop or a closed-loop cooling system. e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality…

A lot o the confusion around data centers is that these companies purposely hide this information from the public. We already know how damaging normal data centers are: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles... Citizens had to sue their town to force them to give up water usage, something Google was adamant about hiding from the public. When there is no accountability, trust plummets. There is n…

A lot of us work for and do business with companies that purposefully hide information from the public.

That doesn't seem to be an unusual state of affairs at all; it instead seems like a very normal way of doing things.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#147

Post by therobots927 »

tptacek wrote: post #30
therobots927 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d recommend you read the following report: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses… https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Did you read the paper carefully? It's about pesticide use. (It's not especially plausible as epidemiological studies go, though I'm unsurprised if a better study finds a firmer correlation between pesticides and PD.)

Did you not read that the effect was directly tied to “Individuals living within water service areas” in my original comment? Yeah no shit it’s pesticides. They’re seeping into the water supply from the golf course runoff.

Datacenters expel water filled with all kinds of heavy metals and other kinds of toxic sludge. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...

It should be pretty obvious the parallel I’m drawing here. Where’d you get your epidemiology PhD?

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#148

Post by tolerance »

alephnerd wrote: post #8
dado3212 wrote: post #3

This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s

That's populism for ya, and it's sadly extremely effective. Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1]. Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes…

I suspect soon young learners of the future may tilt their heads in curiosity when finding that Obama was a "Democrat" in the same way they did in the past when finding that Lincoln was a "Republican".

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#149

Post by awkward »

I’ve seen a tremendous amount of content about AI water usage, mostly from pro AI sources. The most common type is comparing AI to particularly water intensive agriculture.

The result is that now I think water usage should be taken into account when siting data centers. Great Lakes and eastern seaboard fine, maybe not as much in California or Arizona.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#150

Post by tempaccount5050 »

bronson wrote: post #54
bee_rider wrote: post #38

I don’t really get the water concerns in datacenter cooling. Even if a lot of water was used for cooling with every prompt (which he argues against here, but, even if )… water “used up” by cooling just comes out a little hotter, right? Maybe evaporated. Then it’ll come back in the form of rain. This isn’t an industrial chemistry process that leaves some toxic waste in the water. Or an agricultural one that puts water…

Because they're taking water from already parched regions, often pumping it out of the ground. Even if the water did come back locally as rain (it doesn't), it still makes it impossible for people to live off the same aquifers and water sources sustainably.

People are losing their minds in Wisconsin saying proposed data centers will drain lake michigan. I'm not kidding.
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