I commented on that video the day it came out and I’m still having arguments with people on it.
There seems to be two common threads:
- claiming that data centers use as much water as a golf course and no more energy than any other big building “because they use new more efficient designs”
- comparing it to things that humans use to survive, like agriculture, refrigeration, heating and cooling
Both of these seem to be some right wing influencer or news casters talking points and they’re both insane.
The actual facts:
- Retail data centers use about 6 million gallons of water a year. Yes that is almost the exact same as a golf course.
- Hyperscale data centers (the data centers that AWS, GCP, Azure, etc run on — the ones built, owned and operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — use 200+ million gallons a year. This is a fucking order of magnitude larger than a retail data center and IT’S STILL NOT HOW MUCH AI DATA CENTERS USE.
We don’t have numbers for AI data centers because they’re hiding them, but just from energy usage alone the water usage will be more, because that’s what the water is used for.
- Yes, new designs exist…but they don’t solve anything. Those new designs trade off water for electricity. Either they use more electricity or more water. Unless the design is completely renewable energy they are using just as much water (guess what power plants use to cool their systems?!?!?)
- The majority of new AI data centers are not using these new systems, so it’s literally just a red herring to stop your argument about water usage.
- Agriculture is used to keep people alive. If you deleted LLMs from the planet right now, nothing would happen. People would go back to their daily lives. You can’t delete food from the planet.
- I had a sixth but I can’t remember it. If I remember it I’ll put it here.
If y’all want my sources I can post them, just wanted to jot all this down quickly between meetings.