Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity.
What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?
AI has no utility.
Almonds make marzipan.
That is, the topic is not one where I have already picked a side that I'd like to win by any means necessary. It's one where I think there are legitimate tradeoffs, and I want the strongest arguments on both sides to be heard so we get the best possible policies in the end.
The article made a really interesting and coherent argument, for example. That's the kind of discourse around the topic I'd like to see.
AI is at least as useful as marzipan.
Of course surface water availability can also be a serious problem.
Tried buying a GPU lately?
Example article from a decade ago: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...
The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years.
Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.
Excellent, that means we can save massive amounts of water by stopping almond production in the western US.
If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)
The contention with AI water use is that something like this is currently happening as local water supplies are being diverted for data-centers.
Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ?
I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples.
Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have cloud AI compute. It's personal, but I'd be more sad that I'd never get to experience the taste of an almond and all the cuisine that comes with it.
You've misread it. It's not compared to AI datacenters, it's every type of datacenter, for all types of computing.
In the future scenario you've laid out it wouldn't be cloud AI compute. You wouldn't be able to use HN or send email or pay with a credit card or play video games or stream video.
Data centers in the USA use less than a fraction of a percent of the water that's used for agriculture.
I'll start worrying about competition with water for food production when that value goes up by a multiple of about 1000.
Also a lot less meat in general. A huge part of our agriculture is feed to feed our food. We need some meat, but the current amount is excessive
The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.
For every vegan/vegetarian in the US there are probably 25 people that feed beef products to their pets on a daily basis.
The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.
Also, while I'm vegetarian going on vegan, welfare arguments are obviously not relevant in response to an assertation that Americans aren't going to give up meat, because if animal welfare was relevant then Americans would give up meat.
But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.
Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.
I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.
I don't see any signs that the US is going to give up on AI and data centers, either. (The coming AI winter notwithstanding)
For what it's worth, I've cut back quite a bit on my beef and pork consumption, and now mostly eat chicken. The environmental and ethical arguments finally got to me.
Of course water used up will eventually evaporate, and produce rainfall in the water cycle, but unfortunately at many places "fossil" water is used up, or more water used in an area then the watershed can sustainably support.
This is a constant source of miscommunication about water usage, and that of agriculture also. It is very different to talk about the water needs to raise a cow in eg. Colorado and in Scotish highlands, but this is usually removed from the picture.
The same context should be considered for datacenters.
I think it's bad though to be against growth, for reasons I've described in another comment.