Sigh. You're supposedly a PhD student. If you think LLMs are evil because of water usage, please, please do the least bit of due diligence and read a bit about it.
> When we perform risk/benefit analyses of language technology, we must keep in mind how the risks and benefits are distributed, because they do not accrue to the same people. On the one hand, it is well documented in the literature on environmental racism that the negative effects of climate change are reaching and impacting the world’s most marginalized communities first.
Please, please do the least bit of due diligence and understand the discourse before condescending to other people.
[1] https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-res...
A problem you’re not considering is that data centers, at least ones in current operation, consume mostly potable water, so you can’t compare agricultural use directly to data center usage. Doing some rough math:
Phoenix has about 150 data centers operational or planned. Let’s say 100 of those are operational. The average mid-sized data center uses 1.4 million liters / 0.37 million gallons of water per day for cooling servers. There is an additional 3x burden of water consumed to generate electricity. Let’s assume 70% of the data center water and 20% of the supplemental water consumed is potable [2]. We’re looking at 1.3 * 0.37 = 0.481 million gallons of potable water consumed per data center. So 100 * 365 * 0.481 = 17.5 billion gallons of potable water per year in the Phoenix region. That is a significant and growing fraction of the 110 billion gallons of potable water Phoenix produces per year.
These are using conservative estimates for potable water fraction.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/desert...
[2] In 2023, 78% of Google data centers’ water consumption was potable. See “Alternative water sources”, https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center...