Artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT was built in Iowa – with a lot of water::As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water, pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing.
Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it “was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines.”
In response to questions from The Associated Press, Microsoft said in a statement this week that it is investing in research to measure AI’s energy and carbon footprint “while working on ways to make large systems more efficient, in both training and application.”
Microsoft first said it was developing one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers for OpenAI in 2020, declining to reveal its location to AP at the time but describing it as a “single system” with more than 285,000 cores of conventional semiconductors, and 10,000 graphics processors — a kind of chip that’s become crucial to AI workloads.
It wasn’t until late May that Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, disclosed that it had built its “advanced AI supercomputing data center” in Iowa, exclusively to enable OpenAI to train what has become its fourth-generation model, GPT-4.
In some ways, West Des Moines is a relatively efficient place to train a powerful AI system, especially compared to Microsoft’s data centers in Arizona that consume far more water for the same computing demand.
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So, they’re using evaporative cooling for this?
I wonder if this could be done by taking and returning water from a continually cold lake, like Lake Superior.
Yes, one of the primary datacenters in downtown Toronto (151 front street) is primarily cooled from pulling cold water from the bottom of lake Ontario and cycling the warm back. I’ve been in there a number of times, the pipes were way bigger then I expected - pretty cool stuff
I get why evaporative cooling is an economic issue and a challenge for a local water company but is it an environmental issue? It seems like it would just go back into the water cycle like any other water that evaporates.
The issue is that the process doesn’t put the water immediately back to where it was pulled from. That water is lost until the water cycle brings it back to the area
Pull enough water water out of an environment before it can be replenished and the ecosystem will drastically change
Could this be somehow combined with salt water, so the evaporated water would then be drinkable?
I’m not an expert, but I think saltwater has a lower heat capacity than freshwater (like how pasta water boils faster with salt in it)
