To drive this point home: if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year, it would entirely offset the annual water consumption of all US datacenters (including, therefore, the water footprint of AI).
How many hamburgers will it be if all the proposed/pending datacenters are completed and running?
I fear that you have unwittingly led us further into the inevitable Environmental Hamburger-Cost Continuum.
Wherein we will use EHCC units to inform the hamburger voters about a) the nobility of even the smallest hamburgerian sacrifice, and b) the gentle, loving hand of industrialisation.
See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them!
They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes.
The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped.
I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”
Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense.
Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for
So, on the matter of scale: there likely isn't a cap on water use of these datacenters. Both the heat emission and usage levels for these systems will likely go up unless there is a fundamental technical breakthrough.
On the matter of utility: As a sibling of GP mentioned, the utility of food is clear.
On the matter of polution: I am not remotely read on waste water and contamination due to industrial agriculture. Is this also something where the judgmental scale is tipped in favor of food production vs cooling systems?
This is bullshit to be charitable.
> This is bullshit to be charitable.
What is bullshit is sockpuppets shilling for the very few who have bet the 'farm' on this and want return on their investment, the wellbeing of society be damned.
Even amongst municipal water usage, it seems hard to figure out how much DC usage factors in to other uses because often they’re not required, and therefore don’t, disclose their usage.
All I’m saying is that it’s not a closed case and not everyone complaining about DC water usage is a Russian propaganda bot.
There are ideological perspectives--another comment in this chain declares that anything that an LLM does has zero value, purely by virtue of being from an LLM. There's not much to discuss there: maybe I find alfalfa useless and LLMs provide a lot of value, maybe you do the opposite. Short of violence, either immediate or delegated, the best way to resolve this conflict is to incorporate costs for resources like water appropriately (accounting for externalities), and let market participants bid to determine who gets access to it.
Datacenter owners are highly likely to find this a reasonable process, because they believe that what they are investing in and operating will provide a great deal of value on the market. And other industries (like your alfalfa) are far more likely to throw a fit at this process.
Or if you think alfalfa farms have fundamental, deep-seated water rights that don't extend to data centers, then data center operators can just purchase water from alfalfa farmers, and everyone involved will eagerly make that trade.
Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices.
This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.
we're literally dumping several times the amount of water used by data centers onto the ground for no benefit at all. oddly enough I haven't seen any protests about this despite how concerned everyone is about water usage.
Meanwhile, datacenters sacrifice water by sending it to Mars in order to compute criminal deepfakes of innocent politicians.