this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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AI’s excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributions, researchers say (theconversation.com)
submitted 7 months ago by 0x815@feddit.de to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10267315

Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.

The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.

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[–] Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Right. Makes not sense at all, but people gobble it up the same way they blame bitcoin for the environment because the narrative is that it uses a lot of power. It’s not about the power, it is about how carbon intensive the generation method is. Such a great distraction.

[–] Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Except you're both fundamentally wrong about how data center cooling works. It's not closed loop water cooling, they use evaporative cooling by misting the cooling air. There's no 'great distraction' here, just some attention to one of very many problems with how we run large data centers.

[–] Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago

Google’s data centres use 4.3B gallons of water a year which is about the same as a city of 100,000 people. I think we have bigger things to worry about. Like MUCH bigger things than a literally drop in the bucket.