Data centres seem unattainable...

[t2van]

I saw this article yesterday in my feed:

Writing a single 100-word email with ChatGPT consumes approximately the volume of a standard bottle of water, the global infrastructure processing AI queries is projected to use the equivalent of half the United Kingdom's annual water withdrawal by 2

The figure for a single email comes from a 2025 peer-reviewed paper in Communications of the ACM by Pengfei Li, Shaolei Ren, and colleagues at the University of California, Riverside. The paper, titled “Making AI Less Thirsty,” sets out the methodology by which the per-query water footprint of...

spacedaily.com

Writing a single 100-word email with ChatGPT consumes approximately the volume of a standard bottle of water, the global infrastructure processing AI queries is projected to use the equivalent of half the United Kingdom's annual water withdrawal by 2027, and much of that water is being drawn from regions already experiencing severe drought.​

Given they constantly use fresh water to cool everything and never seem to recycle it or try to cool down the hot water and re use.

Surely the push, demand and development of more and more AI centres will become our own undoing?

I'm not sure if Michael Burry had this in mind when he was saying water would become the next market thing (the guy who predicted the market / housing crash)

Thoughts?

 

[SilverClouds]

That's really, really not sustainable

We need more local models, etc, not this. Especially since AI companies themselves can't pay for electricity costs and push costs on neighbours instead. Now extreme water usage as well. Just wow. I get that technology is interesting and useful but they need to fix that.