21–30 of 242 posts
Water use is a pretty close proxy for power use which is a pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. I can totally see why a company wants to keep this info secret. Competitors would really like to know.
Water use is a pretty close proxy for power use which is a pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. I can totally see why a company wants to keep this info secret. Competitors would really like to know.
> pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening.
This is incredibly meaningless reporting. Water use for all of AI is inconsequential compared to agriculture. In addition, water is almost never wasted, only moved around. Energy is the important input.
Water use is a pretty close proxy for power use which is a pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. I can totally see why a company wants to keep this info secret. Competitors would really like to know.
Yes if we squint really hard then this could be the reason. It could also be because it's a PR disaster.
The electricity use is really substantial though, but that's harder for people to visualise so gets less media attention.
Water use is a pretty close proxy for power use which is a pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. I can totally see why a company wants to keep this info secret. Competitors would really like to know.
Is this water even “used” in the same sense that water is used for bathing or agriculture? Where does the water go? If they simply take in cold water and release hot water, that water is still available for other uses. Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants?
Well, first you need to cool it down in a way that's good for the environment, I presume. You should not pour down hot water in a cold river with all its fishes and plants.
Water use is a pretty close proxy for power use which is a pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. I can totally see why a company wants to keep this info secret. Competitors would really like to know.
> pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. [citation needed]. See the vastly different power budget and cost of AWS graviton ARM vs x86 compute. Looking even at power use directly is only going to give a very low precision proxy for aggregate compute, with water usage even more indirect.
Is this water even “used” in the same sense that water is used for bathing or agriculture? Where does the water go? If they simply take in cold water and release hot water, that water is still available for other uses. Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants?
> Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants? Yes. Not always, but evaporative cooling is much more energy efficient than heat exchange to outside air. That said, stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers like golf courses and agriculture (e.g. to ship alfalfa to the middle east).
With agriculture, water usage is necessary as eating is not something optional and everyone needs to eat to survive. From the PR point of view, of course. We couldn't live without agriculture, as we had agriculture 20 years ago too.
Golf courses are unrelated as they don't use nearly as much water as agriculture or data centers.
PR is everything, the narrative is what makes the difference. There is a lot of hypocrisy in this field, which is why I try to avoid it, but there is also some truth in it - we really didn't need that many data centers 20 years ago.
Water use is a pretty close proxy for power use which is a pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. I can totally see why a company wants to keep this info secret. Competitors would really like to know.