Frankly this entire post is to bring attention to this article from Yale. If you read or skim that article I imagine you will feel the same way I do below.
Water pipes for cooling Google’s data center in Oregon – Source
How far are we going to go with generative AI? There is no end in sight. With the recent release of OpenAI’s SORA, the amount of processing power used for AI, again, leaps forward drastically. AI is slurping up insane amounts of electricity and water. In some areas, protests are erupting because planned data center construction would tap into real people’s drinking water supply:
As more data centers are built or expanded, their neighbors have been troubled to find out how much water they take. For example, in The Dalles, Oregon, where Google runs three data centers and plans two more, the city government filed a lawsuit in 2022 to keep Google’s water use a secret from farmers, environmentalists, and Native American tribes who were concerned about its effects on agriculture and on the region’s animals and plants. The city withdrew its suit early last year. The records it then made public showed that Google’s three extant data centers use more than a quarter of the city’s water supply. And in Chile and Uruguay, protests have erupted over planned Google data centers that would tap into the same reservoirs that supply drinking water. (Source)
This was already a talking point with other technologies – Bitcoin, for example, which uses more electricity than some small countries – but I rarely see it mentioned w.r.t. AI. Everyone is impressed with what AI can do, and forgets the massive computational scale required to crunch these models also requires a very real metal investment of GPUs running hot on electricity.
Technological “progress” like this has become a race to the bottom from the environmentalist viewpoint. Like Bitcoin, generative AI scripts and videos have no innate value. We cannot eat Bitcoins or drink AI videos. Are we seriously going to restrict real people’s drinking/cooking/bathing water to help keep facilities running that provide this digital garbage?
If global electricity use can feel a bit abstract, data centers’ water use is a more local and tangible issue — particularly in drought-afflicted areas. To cool delicate electronics in the clean interiors of the data centers, water has to be free of bacteria and impurities that could gunk up the works. In other words, data centers often compete “for the same water people drink, cook, and wash with,” says Ren. (Source)
Sure, YouTube and Netflix take up plenty of power and electric/water resources. And there is some hope that AI will improve efficiency in other industries and lead to less waste. Yet, the ever-increasing resources being taken up by AI and big data applications is so staggering that I wonder if even the most meager environmental protections will be able to keep up.
Google’s data centers used 20 percent more water in 2022 than in 2021, while Microsoft’s water use rose by 34 percent. (Source)
Is this really “progress”?
Daniel