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Guys is this actually true? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

I don't necessarily disagree in general that AI water and power consumption is an issue, but a couple of nitpicks:

just because they are not as big as the biggest problem (yet).

It's doubtful it'll ever actually reach the scale of the beef industry. The problem is so tiny compared to the beef, it's not even funny. It can also be regulated to demand more efficient water usage in future data centers instead of running evaporative cooling. Not likely to happen under current US admin, but perhaps the next one. The current one is also recommending excessive beef consumption unfortunately, but that's beside the point.

i also doubt, that any agricultural business uses as much energy as datacenters.

Annual AI datacenter energy usage in the US is expected to reach 90 TWh this year. That's 324 petajoules. Annual fossil energy use of cattle is 569 +- 53 PJ. Not sure how much extra should be attributed to cattle in non-fossil energy usage. AI datacenters use local fossil energy (gas turbines) and whatever's in the grid. So for now, beef still requires more. However, data centers could quickly overtake it if forced to use closed loop liquid cooling. They use evaporative to save on energy costs.

Water usage IMO is the bigger problem. Energy generation is a solved problem, you just throw money at panels and batteries for clean energy. Just needs a competent administration and the benefits reach everyone, not just the AI industry. If it's cheap enough and data centers are forced to pay more for water, they'll start building closed loop cooling systems out of their own accord. You can't, however, make cows drink less water or eat less (cow food is plants and plants take water to grow after all) or fart less methane.

I'm not innocent here myself, still enjoy the occasional burger but it's got to be like 3-4 times a year at this point. Most of my meat consumption is chicken at this point, with pork in second place. Luckily my country makes it easier to avoid beef consumption by making it very expensive. Beef mince is now 3-4x more expensive than pork, steak prices are otherworldly.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    maybe i should have been more specific: i did not mean the total energy usage of datacenters vs agriculture. i was talking about putting them into relation. not sure which relation makes the most sense: total PJ / total locations ? total PJ / ha land used ? total PJ / total employee ?

    it doesn't matter which relation though. the business of datacenters is to put lightning into magic minerals to make funny things...

    while you are absolutely right in saying energy production is an engineering problem, it is not a simple problem. water is for sure more severe, as there is a finite amount fresh water to consume. but especially now, when communities are somehow expected to pay for the increased energy usage of the local datacenter, it seems cynical to me, when you say:

    Energy generation is a solved problem, you just throw money at panels and batteries for clean energy.

    as humans we generally need more and more energy. while we get better at producing it, we are still struggling at keeping up with the demand. so much so, that places that decided against nuclear energy are thinking about new reactors. i won't go into the whole nuclear discussion. but i would say those discussions are telling how important and non-trivial a constant output of electricity is.

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