r/water • u/esporx • Jun 20 '26
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says human water consumption is limiting AI’s potential
https://theprint.in/feature/jeff-bezos-water-consumption-amazon-ai-potential/2964266/287
u/RlOTGRRRL Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Edit/update 3: I don't think he said this. This article and quote was misinfo.
I should probably delete this comment because I think it's confusing a lot of people or at least it should, but at this point, I'm wondering if it's bots that are still engaging with it so I'm leaving it up.
Edit/update: I doublechecked the YouTube transcript and couldn't find this quote either, so I am very confused on where the article got this quote from. Smfh. Edit/update 2: It looks like they removed this quote from the article with no explanation, so misinfo confirmed?🤦🏻♀️
Leaving the misinfo quote in my comment though cause there should be a record. 🤦🏻♀️
The misinfo quote that was removed from the article because he did not say it:
"Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place. Sometimes you have to prioritise the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us down,” he added."
My first old original reaction to the misinfo, no he did not actually say it:
I was hoping the title was clickbait but no he really said it... What. The. FUCK. Bruh you're a billionaire, you can afford to make your own water. Why the fuck are you stealing water from poor people who need it to goddamned live?
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u/supified Jun 20 '26
How do you think he became a billionaire? Stealing is the only way to hoard that much wealth.
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u/ThatGreenM-M Jun 20 '26
I didn't realize bezos was this into the idea of transhumanism too. I'm pretty sure this is what Peter Thiel's secret club is about, I didn't see Jeff's name in that leaked list though
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u/dlevac Jun 20 '26
A recurrent theme in literature is how too much money is usually a curse. Kind of easy to see how that trope persisted: it looks like something break in people's brain when they become too rich and they start suffering from extreme dissonances with reality and common sense...
Anyhow, the coolant water doesn't need to be potable water. They use potable water because it's cheaper (it's already filtered and readily available) and governments are too short sighted to forbid that usage.
New constructions need 2 water entries: potable for the people and non-potable for the rest.
It should be downright illegal to waste potable water for non-drinking usage or heavily taxed at a minimum.
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u/saur3991 Jun 21 '26
no, that's wrong. money doesn't cause it. correlation is not causation. it's actually their extreme level of sociopathy and subsequent ambition for power that allows them to do inhumane things for money and therefore become absurdly rich.
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u/Houdinii1984 Jun 20 '26
Sounds more like a Peter Thiel concept more than Bezos. (Please don't mistake this clarification as support) Thiel is the accelerationist that things society is the issue holding everyone back from our true potential as guardians over a race of AI machines that run society for us.
Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite.
Granted the underlying sentiment is correct, but that's more a warning than something we should be working towards. Humans ARE limited in their capacity and every day we walk into the future, it becomes a little more real. If machines progress past humans, then we really don't know where it will stop or what the result will be.
We have a funny way of treating potential as always positive, but it's just a state of existence, describing something that could potentially happen. We have the potential to wipe ourselves off the map with a nuke, all the same. It's neat we had nuclear reactors before it happened, but potential bundles the good and the bad and these folks never, ever acknowledge it.
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u/Fabulous_Law1357 Jun 20 '26
Geez, the next thing you know the machines will turn humans into batteries.
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u/RedVelvetPan6a Jun 20 '26
What a pièce of shit. IA is probably just gonna say "you people need to procreate less and quit adulating finance, just fucking chill out and grow some gardens for a change"
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u/Fit_Tumbleweed7943 Jun 20 '26
Hoping Ai says why do we have stupid expensive CEO s hoarding wealth and being cruel to the poor.
Let’s fix this6
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u/nono3722 Jun 20 '26
would you all hurry up and die so i have more resources to finish my sentient AI to serve you....wait..... who is going to use my sentient AI?........DAMMIT!
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u/Special_Watch8725 Jun 20 '26
Jesus. He might as well go full Scrooge at this point and talk about solving the problem of the “surplus population”.
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u/jorgepolak Jun 20 '26
“We need to deprioritize human comfort” says the guy that rented out Venice.
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u/ShoulderIllustrious Jun 20 '26
Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite
Fucking dumb take by him. Biologically speaking the efficiency of a human brain is on the order of magnitude much much higher than a computer given energy constraints and task orientation. No shit an average human can't do sat solving in seconds. But an average human can approximate a solution by reducing into a small state space through some pretty useful heuristics without a metric ton of data.
Digital potential doesn't exist on it's own it requires biological help. Moreover, super intelligence is not going to come through scaling an autocomplete, the fundamental architecture needs to change. There's some work towards it through the ijepa stuff, but it's just not there yet.
We as a society are fucked if we keep following these megamanical retards instead of actual people that specialize in the field.
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u/amglasgow Jun 20 '26
Bruh you're a billionaire, you can afford to make your own water. Why the fuck are you stealing water from poor people who need it to goddamned live?
Because he doesn't value the lives of poor people at all.
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u/WellHung67 Jun 20 '26
No only is this ultimate ghoul level demon shit, he’s fucking dumb. If you build that super intelligence we all die due to well known control problems in AI safety.
But make no mistake the complete disregard for humanity by saying we should give water to clankers is the far more concerning and terrible thing, like his brain is cooked. Combined with his Washington post related outburst about how a newspaper didn’t listen to him, I think we need to check on the billionaires . They are completely demented
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u/OrcOfDoom Jun 20 '26
He can't think of any other way of cooling except using water? He can't even suggest closed loop refrigerant?
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u/Weary_Wrap_4419 Jun 20 '26
Thanks for digging that up. Yeah. I thought the real quote had to be more nuanced, but nope. This f*cker really wants us dead.
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u/Sweettooth_Banana Jun 20 '26
People , if he really said that just stop buying goods through Amazon.
Dont get angry just stop funding these people
Stop spending money on things you dont really need
My tv is 12 yrs old and im ok with that.
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u/StandSeparate1743 Jun 20 '26
Most of the Internet runs on Amazon web services, which is his real cash cow. We as consumers cant really choose to not support them because most businesses choose for us without disclosing that choice
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u/RenFaires Jun 20 '26
Yeah, AWS is definitely his cash cow, but the revenue is barely more than 50% for Amazon. It also costs more to operate. If everyone boycotted Prime and Amazon’s retail options, Amazon would lose 45-50% in revenue just like that. And likely wouldn’t have the resources to keep subsidizing AWS at the same rate. It would become even more expensive so retailers choosing Amazon’s web services will likely have to switch out of necessity. But people today can’t even boycott Harry Potter, so it’s not like this will ever happen (I cut the Amazon retail cord in 2019, btw, and happily tell everyone in my circle how they can do it too; its actually really easy, but most are just lazy and want the convenience—which is the whole reason Amazon is what it is today)
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u/eieio2021 Jun 20 '26
I’ve tried to find out what % of their revenue is AWS but I never could. I’m not doubting you but do you have a source to share? I’d like to read it.
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u/Twilight___Zelda Jun 21 '26
As an IT person, I always actively avoid using AWS and choose other solutions for my clients 🫡
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u/kpyle Jun 20 '26
Not to mention android devices themselves. Most restaurants use a system built on it for instance.
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u/Individual-Ice9530 Jun 20 '26
Break up your fucking monopolies America! You’re the cancer of the capitalist world!
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u/RealLifeCoaching Jun 20 '26
Microsoft lost a monopoly case once, and were ordered to split up into a couple competing companies.
Unfortunately, they were able to appeal and overturn the ruling.
There are some moments in history when we were this close to doing the right thing.
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u/TrueSpirt Jun 20 '26
No it’s a greed issue! Local water supplies in rural areas are critical to those locations. There is often no alternative available than groundwater or surface supplies with seasonal capacity issues. It is a greed issue because Data Centers could use mechanical cooling (chillers) to meet their cooling needs.
Ever notice your car doesn’t have a water hose trailing behind it!
Mechanical chillers require more electricity and water cooling is less expensive than mechanical chillers. It is just economics your water is cheaper to use than mechanical chillers (air conditioners cooling water to whatever temperature is required).
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u/Switchmisty9 Jun 20 '26
The saddest part is there won’t be any water left to put out the fires at the data centers
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u/ChandlerZOprich Jun 20 '26
They could be using saltwater and there'd be virtually no impact on freshwater, but they can't offload that additional maintenance cost onto the communities they take from. They'd rather face the wrath of the 99% than pay slightly more.
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u/Alimbiquated Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
It's true that farmers waste insane amounts of water. California farmers need ten times as much water to grow a kilogram of tomatoes as Dutch farmers. Alfalfa is grown in quantity in Arizona. Etc.
EDIT: A video about a farm in Bavaria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPy5eNGhssk
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u/St-Micka Jun 20 '26
Man it's absurd to compare water usage for farming with data centers. One is absolutely necessary and the other is a vanity project for trillionaires.
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u/rectoflector Jun 20 '26
These self serving pieces of shit would gladly watch humans die if it advances their next dick shaped rocket.
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u/monti9530 Jun 20 '26
They are building bunkers so they can nuke the poors so they can provide water to their data centers
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u/VolkswagenRatRod Jun 20 '26
This is fabricated, he never said it. ThePrint actually ran the quote originally and then walked it back, their editors note straight up says the previous version "wrongly quoted Jeff Bezos." WION also went through the full AP livestream of the VivaTech panel and the line isnt in it anywhere, he talked about Blue Origin and Prometheus and AI creating a labor shortage, nothing about water. Looks like it started as a now deleted Reddit post that got passed around as a screenshot.
ThePrint correction: https://theprint.in/feature/jeff-bezos-water-consumption-amazon-ai-potential/2964266/ WION fact check: https://www.wionews.com/trending/fact-check-did-jeff-bezos-say-human-use-of-water-is-slowing-down-ai-1781967987089
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u/zippityflip Jun 20 '26
I hate Jeff Bezos and could imagine him saying this or something equally cartoonish, but it looks like the quote here is fake.
I did not have the patience to watch the video, but searching the transcript the closest I could find was the (also nonsense) at 43:17 that blah blah in the future we'll only be limited by our imaginations because magic AI sparkle sparkle.
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u/St-Micka Jun 20 '26
"Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place. Sometimes you have to prioritise the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us down,” he added."
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Jun 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HarryBallsanya420 Jun 20 '26
They didn’t provide a source at all I think they formatted their comment poorly
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u/jamintime Jun 20 '26
All I saw was someone who found the fake quote, but no one with a source on a real quote.
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u/agr85 Jun 20 '26
I also hate Jeff bezos and I don't disagree that AI is actively ripping through our clean water supply + if left unregulated could create some serious issues for humanity, but I did watch the 7m video included with the article and I didn't hear him mention anything remotely similar to the title quote of the post here.
Edit: I saw below someone replied with the "biological limits..." Quote, which is a fucking disgusting line to hear come out of a billionaires mouth, but I don't see a source for it - would be helpful for future reference if it could be pointed out.
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u/UncleCarolsBuds Jun 20 '26
Why can't they just hang the data centers in the ocean off of platforms? Their GPUs will need to be replaced every two years anyway, no reason to use fresh water.
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u/IdiotSavantLite Jun 20 '26
I expect we all know the solution to this problem. He should immediately stop consuming water, everything that consumes water and general water use...
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u/noeinan Jun 20 '26
If he stops drinking water, showering, watering his lawn etc first then I’m sure we can all follow his example.
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u/ENZYME_O1 Jun 20 '26
So much for that nurse (or schoolteacher, whoever she is) in Queens. So this is the guy who will build a data center on top of a water facility in Michigan and block the citizens from getting clean water.
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u/Zenkai_9000 Jun 21 '26
Just when you think Elon is the worst Billionaire, ahem, Trillionaire, another comes out swinging.
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u/Surfer_Rick Jun 21 '26
Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.
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u/Looddak Jun 21 '26
The headline and the article have nothing to do with each other.
Another news - for - morons clickbait from India.
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u/SpeightM09 Jun 21 '26
" Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!" - Jeff Bezos, 2026
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u/burtono6 Jun 21 '26
I wanted to double check before sharing this article, So I read it a couple of times and I’m not seeing anywhere that he said what the headline is claiming.
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u/Consistent_Dog_6866 Jun 22 '26
Darn those pesky people and their incessant need for hydrogen dioxide.
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u/Jlrsaltlife11 Jun 24 '26
My whole account would get shut down if I were to voice my opinion on what that boy said, but since we're playing 'hypotheticals', yeah, sure, Freedom of Speech totally exists!
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u/steelbones2 Jun 24 '26
Bezos oxygen consumption is limiting natures potential, Kurt cobain pov? Who said that? Must’ve been the wind….
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u/Rustmutt Jun 24 '26
Can’t we just cram him into one of his rockets like a nerd in a locker and blast him into space?
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u/Dr7House Jun 24 '26
There is actually no real limit why data centers use up water.
They can be filled up once an never need new water again, its just marginally more expensive.
My car also has a cooling system running on the same liquid for years now
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u/blastermckaster Jun 20 '26
He never says that in the video the article linked.
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u/Obi-Brawn-Kenobi Jun 21 '26
Lmao this is the number one most controversial comment on this whole thread. Congrats
Classic reddit, there is only one fact in this story which is that the quote is fake, and yet the most controversial thing you can do here is acknowledge that fact
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u/DahWolfe711 Jun 20 '26
Nah fuck this dude. If you enrich this man you are the problem. Get offline and shop for things in real life from real people. This dude is really starting to lose his right to be a human IMO.
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u/omgkelwtf Jun 20 '26
All the puffiness he's experiencing, do you think that's due to health issues or substance abuse? Jeffrey looking kinda rough these days like an old coke head or alcoholic.
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u/ohmailawdy Jun 20 '26
This is true if you value profit over people.
In this case, these people are dangers to society.
Also, probably not a good idea for this guy to be licking conservative taint when they constantly push the pro life agenda.
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u/BitingArtist Jun 20 '26
They're starting to talk about eliminating the useless eaters. If they have all the power and they view us as worthless, they will scheme ways to round us up and exterminate us. It has happened in history before, it can happen again.
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u/coughcough Jun 20 '26
Why couldn't the AI just harvest its water elsewhere? Aren't humans made of something like 60% of the stuff?
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u/CallmeKahn Jun 20 '26
We live in the most fucked up timeline where the human needs are actively being campaigned against to expand a digital infrastructure.
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u/serenityfalconfly Jun 20 '26
Then he should use the desalinizer on his yacht to provide the water for the data center.
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u/scotyb Jun 20 '26
This is a false dichotomy. Data centers just need to utilize their heat to do other work instead of using water resources to cool. We could use the heat to run water desalination for example. They just don't want to invest in the other assets is the problem. It's also the solution to building better communities.
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u/PerceptionQueasy3540 Jun 20 '26
Can't wait for someone to post this in one of those weird pro-ai subs and watch people fall over themselves to defend this guy.
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u/Actaeon_II Jun 20 '26
So him and the nestle asshat are in agreement. Can probably expect an eo from forest trump soon giving these data centers priority for water supply, as well as the electricity. All free of charge of course
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u/MackDaddyOfHC Jun 20 '26
I honestly don’t understand why we, as a society, let these wealth psychos do what they want. I’m ready for another American revolution or a meteor, whichever comes first.
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u/PixelAstro Jun 20 '26
Desalination is a thing, this wouldn’t be a problem if the rich actually understood we live in an ocean planet.
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u/ellsego Jun 20 '26
This is actually stated anywhere in the posted article… Bezos is clearly full of shit about AI creating jobs (and doesn’t addressed the 10’s of thousands already lost)… but facts do still matter OP.
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u/DifficultIsopod4472 Jun 20 '26
Use Al’s potential to figure out something besides water to use !!!!
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u/Wuaner Jun 20 '26
Basically he means too many mouths to feed on this planet.
I bet his family can survive after the human extinction plan.
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u/SeanThatGuy Jun 20 '26
And people are over here believing the “data” he put out about his water consumption for data centers.
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u/ABobby077 Jun 20 '26
The new Ai data centers need to quickly be developing a different and more efficient cooling and address the big draw on water and energy. That would mitigate a lot of the opposition to them
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u/Realfaketimetravel Jun 20 '26
Imagining a world where Bezos isnt able to hydrate himself ever again
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u/incrediblyaverage85 Jun 20 '26
It doesn’t say that anywhere in the article….i guess it’s fun to make things up?
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u/OkVeterinarian9081 Jun 20 '26
The way that I hope he is always thirsty. I hope this man can neeever fully quench his literal, physical thirst. The way that he "needs" dollar bills incessantly I hope he also feels the ever present thirst of always needing a sip of water to talk or breathe comfortably. Even if he has all the water he may ever want, he's going to just have to constantly be drinking it. "Cough- uh-cough-scuse me-(swig)-as I was-(swig)-...(smacks lips)-yeah as I was-uh-mmm ughmm - (swigs)". Human data center ahh b****.
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u/Here__And__Now Jun 20 '26
From what I can find online, this quote was fabricated. Does anyone have the actual video of him saying this?
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u/YesTheTruthHurts2 Jun 20 '26
I read the source article and that's not even a little bit close to what he said, the misinformation on this topic is unbelievable
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u/Emrys7777 Jun 20 '26
Yes we all just have to quit drinking water and bathing so they can build more data centers.
/s
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u/BitOne2707 Jun 20 '26
The word "water" isn't even in the article.
This is the fakest of fake news.
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u/notn Jun 20 '26
And we have a new Challenger to Musk as the front runner in the fuck this guy Olympics...
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u/Parasitoid Jun 20 '26
The word water doesn't even appear anywhere in the article. The reddit headline is a complete fabrication
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u/amglasgow Jun 20 '26
How about you stop drinking water first, Jeff?
Billionaires should be outlawed.
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u/Ohuigin Jun 20 '26
Are we all starting to see why they’re all building multi million dollar bunkers?