Just like Clayton! Rim shot!
Here is a very long article putting the AI water issue into perspective. Yes I read the entire thing but idiots like Clayton Tucker and Potato Head Fitzharris won’t bother. That’s because it’s bigger than a bumper sticker, which is the limit of their pea brains.
Here are a few excerpts to give you an idea of the logic, reason and math that are involved:
All U.S. data centers (which mostly support the internet, not AI) used 200–250 million gallons of freshwater daily in 2023. The U.S. consumes approximately 132 billion gallons of freshwater daily.1 The U.S. circulates a lot more water day to day, but to be extra conservative I’ll stick to this measure of its consumptive use, see here for a breakdown of how the U.S. uses water. So data centers in the U.S. consumed approximately 0.2% of the nation’s freshwater in 2023. I repeat this point a lot, but Americans spend half their waking lives online. A data center is just a big computer that hosts the things you do online. Everything we do online interacts with and uses energy and water in data centers. When you’re online, you’re using a data center as you would a personal computer. It’s a miracle that something we spend 50% of our time using only consumes 0.2% of our water.
Amen brother! Here is some more:
All AI in all American data centers is collectively using 8 times as much water as the local water utility in my town provides to consumers.2 You should be exactly as worried about AI’s current national water usage as you would be if you found out that 8 additional towns of 16,000 people each were going to be built around the country.
Here’s data center water use compared to a lot of other American industries:
And here’s a comparison to how much water different American agricultural products use, the main way water is used in America. All of these are the amount of water irrigated crops use and aren’t measuring rainwater:
So in 2030, AI in data centers specifically will be using 0.08% of America’s freshwater. This means it will rise to the level of 5% of America’s current water used on golf courses, or 5% of U.S. steel production, or be about 173 square miles of irrigated corn farms.
The average American’s consumptive lifestyle freshwater footprint is 422 gallons per day. This means that in 2023, AI data centers used as much water as the lifestyles of 25,000 Americans, 0.007% of the population. By 2030, they might use as much as the lifestyles of 250,000 Americans, 0.07% of the population. Not nothing, but 250,000 people over 5 years is just 4% of America’s current rate of population growth. If you found out that immigration plus new births in America would increase by 4% of its current rate, would you first thought be “We can’t afford that, it’s way too much water”?