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Comment by tomwphillips | Hacker News Reader

Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!).

I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption.

If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe.

It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view.

I really recommend the book.

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The fact that certain specific data centres are being proposed or built in areas with water issues may be bad, but it does not imply that all AI data centres are water guzzling drain holes that are killing Earth, which is the point you were (semi-implicitly) making in the article.

What is it that you imagine happens to the water after it goes through the data center?

Clearly it vanishes without a trace and simply leaves the water cycle.

Just because it doesn’t leave the cycle doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, that means it’s less distributed

That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water.

The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something

The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels

The way they measure water consumption is genuinely unbelievably misleading at best. For example measuring the water evaporated from a dams basin if any hydroelectric power is used.

Counting water is genuinely just asinine double counting ridiculousness that makes down stream things look completely insane. Like making a pound of beef look like it consumes 10,000L of water.

In reality of course running your shower for 10 to 15 hours is no where near somehow equivalent to eating beef lasagna for dinner and we would actually have a crisis if people started applying any optimization pressure on these useless metrics.

My favourite example is the complaints about “e-waste” because AirPod batteries are not replaceable. Never mind that the batteries make up about half of the weight of the things ro begin with, the entire annual production of AirPods and their cases would barely fill a single shipping container.

No, not a container ship, or anything substantial like that, just one container (1).

Yet, it makes people lose their rational minds and start foaming at the mouth about Apple’s “wasteful practices”.

Do you have a citation for that factoid?

Apologies, looks like I mis-remembered the numbers from the original debate, the actual number is about 110x 40-foot containers. It can be calculated easily enough from the # shipped, the volume of a charging case, and the volume of a shipping container.

It doesn’t alter the conclusion that much: in the grand scheme of human industrial activity, this is nothing.

I.e.: if AirPods were made by an independent company, that firm would be in the top 50 of the largest corporations in the world!

For example, a comparable sized company would be Coca Cola, which goes through 300,000 tons of aluminium annually for their cans, not to mention oil used for plastic bottles!

Sure, I’m with you on your larger point.

>The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels

This has almost zero to do with the data centers themselves and instead the politicians we vote in.

Simply put we need more 'clean' power generation any way you go about it. Economic growth and production is based on ones ability to produce power. We've been coasting on increasing efficiency for a long time, but we've been in need of larger sources of power and distribution for decades, data centers or not.

With that said DC's shouldn't be built in west texas where it's dry. East of the Mississippi gets enough rain that you build a reservoir and you'll have more than enough water to feed the DC for decades.

Is it more of a pricing problem? If data centers paid the same for water as I do they’d be far more efficient with it. Likewise for power. Giving sweet deals to these things based on promises of jobs and tax revenue seems a bad idea at this point.

"I took all your money and gambled it away, but don't worry because it wasn't destroyed, it's still circulating in the economy and will come back someday."

A reduction in what can be used from the summer snowmelt is a problem, regardless of whether equivalent atoms are redeposited in the winter snowfall.

Drinking water does not magically appears in the water cycle the next day.

[0] - "And what we found is is that up to 43% of data centers, and this is our largest data centers, are located in areas of high or extremely high water stress. And that's really shocking because data centers require huge amount of drinking water to be able to cool their servers."

[0]- Business Insider | Exposing The Dark Side of America's AI Data Center Explosion - https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?t=1201

Areas of "high water stress" sound very sunny, which presumably is great news for renewable power generation.

I’m sure there was some planning commission process involved with the development of these sites. I’m curious if anyone has bothered to look at those meeting minutes to see if there are some material misrepresentation of the water and power needs. I’m going to guess that answer is no.

An update: there seems to be a critical error in the reporting of metrics in this book for the water issue. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mis....

I do think the whole water issue as pointed out in the book is completely discredited with this call out.

The author Karen Hao acknowledges this:

https://x.com/_KarenHao/status/1990412118584144113

Thanks for the recommendation, added to my reading list.

The mistake you are making is letting the author choose your points of comparison, without having a high-level picture of where water usage goes. Comparing water usage to a city is misleading because cities don't use much water; large-scale water use is entirely dominated by agriculture.

I'm conflicted. Zooming out, the problem isn't with AI specifically but economic development in general. Everything has a side effect.

For decades we've been told we shouldn't develop urban centers because of how it development affects local communities, but really it just benefited another class of elites (anonymous foreign investors), and now housing prices are impoverishing younger generations and driving homelessness.

Obviously that's not a perfect comparison to AI, which isn't as necessary, but I think the anti-growth argument isn't a good one. Democracies need to keep growing or authoritarian states will take over who don't care so much about human rights. (Or, authoritarian governments will take over democracies.)

There needs to be a political movement that's both pro-growth and pro-humanity, that is capable of making hard or disruptive decisions that actually benefits the poor. Maybe that's a fantasy, but again, I think we should find ways to grow sustainably.

Not just the poor, how about the bottom 99%? This is what's so frustrating to me about the culture wars and identity politics. Regardless of ones views on the hot button cultural issue du jour, at best they are a distraction, and at worst actively exploited by moneyed interests as a political smokescreen to prevent changes that would be obvious wins for super majorities of the population if analyzed and viewed through a more sober and objective lens of the net effects.

IIRC Google chose to pull out altogether to punish the locals for standing up to them— even though they happily built air-cooled data centers elsewhere.

I mean yes, almost all corporations that have a choice do this. Walmart is one of the better known ones that will put a store right on the edge of a municipality that doesn't want one and cause all kinds of issues for the city at hand.

None of which have to do with AI or AGI.

Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer.

It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case.

What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.

Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"? God help us.

My interpretation was "If an industry that actively works to harm the global health of humanity through their addictive and unhealthy food products is using way more water and we're OK with it, maybe we should give a pass to the industry using a fraction of that water to improve human productivity."

Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries, of course, but to a first approximation they are accurate.

> and we're OK with it

Are we? Is anybody? Criticism doesn't need to be directed towards one thing at a time.

Well, the food industry continues churning billions in profits at the expense of our health, so statistically speaking, looks like "we" are OK with!

Totally agreed that criticism should be directed where it's due. But what this thread is saying is that criticism of GenAI is misdirected. I haven't seen nearly as much consternation over e.g. the food industry as I'm seeing over AI -- an industry that increasingly looks like its utility exceeds its costs.

(If the last part sounds hypothetical, in past comments I've linked a number of reports, including government-affiliated sources, finding noticeable benefits from GenAI adoption.)

Have you considered that there is a difference between:

- food, a thing that literally every human needs every 24 hours (really 6-12) to continue to live

- GenAI, a new product with dubious value that contributes significantly to the systemic enshittification of the US and global economy?

FYI whataboutism is a well known (and honestly quite lazy) fallacy and propaganda strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I should have been more precise with my terms, but there is a difference between "food" and the "food industry" indicated by the likes of Nestle. Yes, everybody needs food. No, nobody needs the ultraprocessed junk Nestle produces.

I didn't see the OP's point as whataboutism, but rather putting things into perspective. We are debating the water usage of a powerful new technology that a large fraction of the world is finding useful [1], which is a fraction of what other, much more frivolous (golf courses!) or even actively harmful (Nestle!) industries use.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794907 -- Recent thread with very rough numbers which could well be wrong, but the productivity impact is becoming detectable at a national level.

No it’s a red herring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring)

It’s a fundamentally flawed argument

What a weird stance. You agree to mislead or distract from a relevant or important question?

Attempt generosity. Can you think of another way to interpret the comment above yours? Is it more likely they are calling their own argument a red herring, or the one they are responding to?

If something looks like a "weird stance", consider trying harder to understand it. It's better for everyone else in the conversation.

I was supporting the GPs premise directly

I think the point is: where does this end? Do we continue to build orders-of-magnitude bigger models guzzling orders-of-magnitude more water and other resources, in pursuit of the elusive AGI?

At some we need to end this AGI" rat race and focus on realizing practical benefits from the models we currently have.

Well then vote with your wallet and convince everyone you know to stop the train.

As long as there’s a market, machines are going to continue toto displace labor. That’s not going to stop

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