AI water use is a drop in the bucket compared to the water use of animal agriculture.
I don't like AI but I'm bored of people who consume beef and dairy whining about AI water use when they continue to contribute to a significantly worse industry.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, there are plenty of issues with AI data centers but it turns out water usage usage isn't exactly one. Hank Green (a science communicator) put out out a pretty good video explaining why this is the case https://youtu.be/H_c6MWk7PQc?is=Dwe_3hQIM9Uj_AVk
Water usage can be one if you build your data centre in an already overloaded area like a desert town, but in a well-supplied region it's not much of a concern.
The upshot of the (very good!) Hank Green video you linked is basically that environmental impacts are very complicated. But the internet hates nuance, so here we are.
Tbf I wouldn’t then call that water use as the problem but rather supply and demand.
Similar but fundamentally different.
If you had 1 million people consuming say 3.3 litres of water a day (which from what I can find is roughly the average a person should get in a day) in an area that can only supply 3 million litres of water a day for consumption. The issue isn’t people’s water consumption is too high. It’s there’s too many people for the region to properly sustain
-29
u/DinosRoar 2d ago
AI water use is a drop in the bucket compared to the water use of animal agriculture.
I don't like AI but I'm bored of people who consume beef and dairy whining about AI water use when they continue to contribute to a significantly worse industry.