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 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think it goes out of the cycle somewhat, kinda like all that is held up

If 100L rain down a day, and you use 10L for cooling then you will have still have 100L flowing but now only 90L for actual use. And then datacenters take up a significant amount of the total then you have a lot less to use elsewhere such as watering fields for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Where I live we have this huge river around our city that provides most of the province with freshwater (along with all of the rivers that feed into it, but the population concentrates around that one big river)

That one big river is also a place for ships to go through, and an ecosystem (despite all of the disruption).

More water in use by all kinds of facilities still manages to lower the level of the river significantly, to the point where there have been worries raised about the ecosystem and where shipping capacity was reduced.