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Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

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Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#71

Post by cm2012 »

alxmdev wrote: post #58
cm2012 wrote: post #19

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.

Isn't agriculture objectively more important and more beneficial to humanity than Big data centers?

yes and no. Most agriculture is not necessary for pure survival, especially water-needing crops in the desert. It's more luxury food products.

In addition, increasing human productivity through technological innovation is the only thing that ever let us escape the malthusian trap.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#72

Post by WolfeReader »

macinjosh wrote: post #60
triceratops wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Beef too. It uses the same amount of water but people eat 30x as much annually.

Beef is more nutrient efficient though and has better macros for human consumption. It has 4 times more protein, less fat, and no carbs. Seems to me at least Americans could do well to eat more beef and less products created from processed almonds mixed with refined vegetable oils and sugar. Beef and milk are harvested ready to eat. Vegan substitutes are all highly processed. Processed food consumption is associated…

Factory-farmed beef is the worst source of pollution in the food industry. We definitely need less of that.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#73

Post by neoromantique »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #32
teeray wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers That's something of a fallacy of relative privation. When water is scarce, all frivolous uses should be under scrutiny. The others you mention have been well-known for a long time. The current stories simply highlight a new consumer people haven't thought of before.

Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment? If 100x current usage levels become a concern, I don't know why people pretend that current usage is not a concern for a tech that many of those same people are projecting to scale.

>Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment?

Yes.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#75

Post by lotsofpulp »

rtaylorgarlock wrote: post #62
triceratops wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Beef too. It uses the same amount of water but people eat 30x as much annually.

And cheaper cow production, focused on grain-feeding, uses even more water than grass feeding; after spending a month in Switzerland, it's wild to see how addicted we Americans are to cheap beef.

I wonder if cow milk products would be more expensive if people ate less beef.

Presumably, after a cow is done being used for milk, it can then be sold for meat.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#76

Post by fruitworks »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #36

This isn't really about using water as much as dealing with all of the heat that comes out of computation. The water is just the simplest way to dispose of the heat. Isn't there some better way we can, perhaps, turn some of the heat back into something useful? Maybe heat a building? Or turn it back into electricity. It doesn't have to be an efficient conversion because it's now 100% wasted.

the efficiency of converting it to electricity would be low, due to low absolute temperature difference and thus carnot effeciency.

I think it could be higher with germanium semiconductors, as you could run them at a higher temp and get superheated steam

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#77

Post by litenboll »

ilamont wrote: post #52
Faelon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential to the point, I think we should be careful about the almond talking point. Insofar as it is used for milk, almond milk uses almost half as much water as dairy milk, uses 1/18 the land and emits 1/5 the amount of carbon. As food, it is eaten in such a vanishingly small quantity compared to other water-hungry foods (meat) as to be insignificant. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-m...

Account created 10 minutes ago, hitting talking points of the almond growers industry association.

They are replying to talking points of the dairy industry.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#78

Post by user3939382 »

imgabe wrote: post #10

> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.

Oh right are almonds actively extracting money from you because their business model is exploitative?

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#79

Post by dominicq »

moooo99 wrote: post #68
cm2012 wrote: post #19

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.

> In addition, water is almost never wasted, only moved around. You can literally day the same thing about energy. Electricity is never wasted, its just different afterwards. Water use absolutely does matter, because „being moved around“ in the quantities we do, is far from trivial. Its also different than agriculture. Agriculture still has a somewhat closed local water cycle while the water used for evaporative cool…

In an increasing number of regions, yes, but not where AWS data centers are located. People are not dying of thirst because of us-east-1. The one has nothing to do with the other.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#80

Post by sxp »

imgabe wrote: post #10

> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.

To put this in context, it takes about 1 gallon of water per 1g of almond [1]. And in California's dry climate, this water comes from groundwater that doesn't renew as fast as it's depleted. So the next time someone chastises you for your non-low flow showerhead that uses more than 2 almonds of water per minute, remember to put the numbers in context.

1. Numbers from a pro-almond group: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise

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