Yes beef is probably the least efficient massively consumed food.

To be clear: I am a vegan and think it's a great choice to make for both the environment and moral reasons if you have the ability to do it. I don't really proselytize about it, but it makes me very happy when people choose to go vegan. I absolutely do think the huge environmental impacts of animal agriculture, especially industrialized cow consumption, are things that should concern people and see real pushback on a major scale.

But this feels like a really cherry-picked 'whataboutism' graph and that raises my hackles. In the first place, this focuses on one very specific metric (water consumption) without considering the major other negative impacts of data centers like electricity rates, infrasound noise pollution of surrounding communities, and so on. Other people have also pointed out that this ignores things like the amount of water used in chip manufacturing. Recycling water for data center cooling makes data centers use less water, but, in a cruel twist, also concentrates pollutants already found in the groundwater, which means that the water that does get returned to the environment now has a higher concentration of pollutants.(And yes, in some cosmic irony, agriculture including animal agriculture was involved in releasing those pollutants in the first place). Meta had an incident where data center construction released bacteria-contaminated water into the environment.

And yes, of course, animal agriculture and in particular cow consumption have so many more negative environmental impacts than just water usage, too. I am vegan. I actively condemn this shit. But in general, I have seen this argument used in a lot of "whataboutism" whose primary point appears to be, "this new unnecessary thing we're pushing may cause a lot of bad things, but if you look at these cherry-picked metrics, it's not as bad as this other thing that you already consume, so you might as well let us do whatever we want, too." "You are in blood stepped in so far that, should you wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er, so build those data centers" is not a good argument.

OP is an AI booster, check their profile.

This is an attempt to disregard the damage that's done by slop generators, comparing it to most inefficient food source.

Hope you have a terrible day, op.

1. you can eat a cow. you cannot eat an llm.
2. we should eat less cows.
3. we should feed cows grass, not corn
4. fuck elon musk. he promised to build a water treatment plant in memphis to cool grok and then ‘paused’ the planning. not the construction, the planning.
5. pleas do not use grok.
6. you should plant a garden.

Yes, water consumption is a shit reason to argue against data centers. Power consumption is the real big issue

I hate this kind of reasoning.

"Let's ignore this big problem because there are other bigger problems"

The same people say shit like: "Why are you sad? There are so many people who have it even worse than you!"

All this makes us do nothing until the "smaller" problems become so big that the damage is done and then those people will say "Well, we are in too deep. It it what it is. Can't change it now 🤡"

Yes. Water consumption has and always will be a dumb ass argument against data centers. There are PLENTY of good reasons, especially power consumption, that it baffles me that the movement hangs on this one.

The cattle industry is a HUGE HUGE HUGE problem, yes it’s true and it’s a global problem. It uses a ton of water, land and resources, makes a ton of methane that contributes to greenhouse gases. THAT SAID, everyone is talking about the water usage of data centers but no one is talking about the way they generate electricity, disposable fuels, they use fossil fuels to power generators to create the huge amounts of electricity they use. They are hugely polluting due to this, their water usage is problematic and it’s the only problem we are talking about because the media has yet again dropped the ball at the behest of the billionaire class. Data centers water usage is problematic but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to their emissions. They have other serious problems too like sound pollution and wastewater runoff that is a direct result of running generators.

The water usage of data centers is “reasonable” (I personally disagree but this chart illustrates the trap) compared to other industries, literally everything else about data centers is wildly unreasonable and the media is essentially silent about it.

So, from a real source and not some reddit or linked in post: https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/

Yes, this is true. But, those numbers do not include:

• water required for Chip/GPU production
• the fact that datacenters are often build in areas with already little water

What's missing is the plastic and steel industries, and the power sector, but it's pretty accurate

Per what?
This looks to be the total number of each category. If so, it's a useless graph. How many L/day are used per single unit. Maybe per farm/datacenter.

Edit.
I did the math
3,562 Cattle farms
21,617,069 L/day/ranch

5,400 data centers
416,667 L/day/data center

45 AI data centers
600,000 L/day/AI data center

This does not take into consideration the heat produced nor fossil fuels consumed by each.

If water is your only metric, cattle ranches are worse. But this isn't a good metric for many reasons, since livestock, being food, is a commodity, while data centers are not.

Let's normalize to technology, ans ignore beef for a moment.
AI data centers consume about 33% more water than non-AI centers.
There is not a situation where this is fine.

yes agriculture and especially beef is a big problem. however, this does not mean we should ignore the newly emerging problems - just because they are not as big as the biggest problem (yet). i also doubt, that any agricultural business uses as much energy as datacenters.

additionally beef is edible. the only edible thing about datacenters is the rich owner.

I prefer the cows.

Water is a distraction. The heat and fossil fueled power consumption is the real problem. They will burn us all alive and we have to sit back and let it happen because the fascists are in power, I guess.

We really need to stop farming cows for health and climate reasons. I am more for vegetarianism than for removing data centers.

It has a serious effect that shouldn't be ignored. Everyone says "I can't eat slop" but you won't eat anything if the climate destroys agriculture regardless.

Meat should be a very rare thing for people, like it was in the medieval times. Or even just focus more on poultry, farmed in sustainable and ethical ways? They eat bugs ffs. We can turn bug protein to edible protein through... Farming chicken.

Gr8
b8
m8

yes, beef is comically inefiecient (most meat production is too, but beef takes the crown for ineffiency), and data centers have a big incetive to have closed loops water cooling systems, although specially wih loops this big there will always be some significant ammount of lost water

Yes, people got mad at me for pointing out the land use for data centers is also minuscule compared to any suburban development.

That doesn't make it any less of a concern, but one of the major issues of data centers is that they are bypassing costs by unloading them onto average citizens. They don't want to pay taxes and higher costs for energy and water so they offload electric costs onto everyone else and then abuse the water supply to avoid making a closed loop system.

I keep quoting the exact stat wrong, but most of the world's freshwater goes into agriculture and farming.

That doesn't seem likely. And the pollution done to said water will be much different.

"Guys where is source?"

Agriculture as a whole plays a big part in pollution and wasting water. I personally think being able to get "out of season" foods is a huge waste of resources and extremely damaging to the ecosystem as a whole.

We had a really fucking bad year for crops in general, so bad even the hay died. And if you think about it, all that water was wasted just generating dead biomass. Which is worse than the usual over consumption concerns.

Idk where I'm going with this, so I'll just leave it at that.

I can't eat data

Yes. I'm vegan and anti-AI.

are these things related, or we changing the subject on ourselves for no particular reason?

steaks > slop

If no source: not true

Without an as-of date, there’s no way I’d trust it. AI data centers are pretty new so it wouldn’t need to go very far back for it to be negligible.

Even if the graph is true, it’s misleading . Whatever water beef is using hasn’t really changed, but AI data Centers are a recent significant change much more likely to affect me. Depending on what you’re trying to show that is probably the wrong type of graph