Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10267315
Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.
The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.
So when computer systems use water, it’s typically in a closed cooling loop. The water is heated by the computer components and then cooled in a radiator before being returned to the computer components to absorb more heat and the cycle repeats.
So why do these articles always read like it’s consuming water in a way that eliminates it from existence?
As far as I’m aware they’re not taking water and turning it into something else like concrete, so what exactly is happening that it’s reducing our fresh water supply on Earth?
Data center water cooling isn’t a closed loop. They generally don’t use it like PC water cooling. There are exceptions, but servers are typically air cooled.
What they did is look for a less energy intensive way to cool the air than traditional air conditioning. So they turned to evaporative cooling, and also misting the incoming air. This reduced their energy use, but at the expense of water use.
It shows up in the inflow and outflow of water:
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/sip-or-guzzle-heres-how-googles-data-centers-use-water
Most of the overall amount of “operational” water that Google used in 2021 is related to these data centers; it withdrew 6.3 billion gallons during that fiscal year, according to its 2022 Environmental Report. Of that amount, 1.7 billion was discharged.
They’re evaporating away a lot more water than they return.
They’re evaporating away a lot more water than they return.
Ok, but the point is once water evaporates it doesn’t stay evaporated forever. It condenses and turns into rain or snow.
Where exactly do people think this water is going when it evaporates? Space?
“why does a decline in freshwater supply matter when it all ends up in the sea anyway?”
No. People are tracking useable water supplies. If it gets out of that, we don’t care what happens to it.
We’re draining aquifers to give people and industry drinkable, useable water (no matter how we feel about that). The water “still existing” somewhere else is an entirely pedantic point, and a huge waste of everyone’s time.
I think it goes out of the cycle somewhat, kinda like all that is held up
If 100L rain down a day, and you use 10L for cooling then you will have still have 100L flowing but now only 90L for actual use. And then datacenters take up a significant amount of the total then you have a lot less to use elsewhere such as watering fields for example.
If you’re taking water and putting it in a closed loop, you’re effectively removing it from the natural water cycle until you remove it from said closed loop, no?
I agree the articles make it sound more like they are just burning water out of existence lol.
Right. Makes not sense at all, but people gobble it up the same way they blame bitcoin for the environment because the narrative is that it uses a lot of power. It’s not about the power, it is about how carbon intensive the generation method is. Such a great distraction.
Except you’re both fundamentally wrong about how data center cooling works. It’s not closed loop water cooling, they use evaporative cooling by misting the cooling air. There’s no ‘great distraction’ here, just some attention to one of very many problems with how we run large data centers.