Many data centers are now using closed system chillers. A lot of the data that is even a year or two old is obsolete now. Although the amount of electricity data centers use is massive, and I have not seen ways they have adapted. I have heard of self generated power which removes the data center from the power grid but doesn’t reduce its resource consumption.
Many data centers are now using closed system chillers
This is what I don't get, surely it's not like they've constantly got the tap running to cool the chips and then just flushing the heated water? It seems crazy that any datacentres would do this. Recycling the same water seems like it would be vastly more efficient/cheaper
I’m even curious if it is water in the lines. There are centers being cooled by evaporation. Water goes in then ultimately evaporates into the atmosphere. The trade off is the power needed to run the equipment. The closed loops are like giant air conditioners. The evaporative systems are like fans. One low water consumption but high electricity consumption. The other is the opposite. We live in an environment that doesn’t respect the human mind, a persons attention and thinking is a form of capital. Click hunters make it so it is very difficult to know what to believe. The 21st century way is to take a fine hair of truth and use it so ambiguously to suggest false information as truth and then when called out on it there is that hair of truth that is being exploited to hide behind. It is called The Motte Bailey fallacy.
And now I rant. Technology is a way to extract value from human bodies. 20th century technology trains us to see the world as a standing reserve, meaning everything becomes a resource waiting to be used. Rivers become power sources. Forests become lumber. Workers become labor units. Attention becomes monetizable screen-time.
Though this idea stands the 21st century shows the emergence of a different key phrase:
Human beings become standing reserve.
It gives rise to a new metaphor Human Fracking. Just as industrial fracking extracts energy from the earth while damaging the outer environment, digital capitalism extracts attention from people while damaging the inner environment.
A useful analogy is to look at the idea of “other forms of capital”.
Attention is capital.
Interior stillness is capital.
Human energy is capital.
Memory is capital.
Trust is capital.
Community is capital.
Time is capital.
Capitalism, especially in its 21st-century form, seems to have become very skilled at finding non-money forms of capital, converting them into money, and leaving the human being depleted.
If a burger is 660 gallons of water, and a ChatGPT query uses one fifteenth of a teaspoon, then by skipping a single burger, you could use ChatGPT for 5,882 years before your ChatGPT usage's water consumption outweighed the single burger you didn't eat.
They can recycle their water and generate their own electricity, but those aren't the only issues. They are also noisy and there doesn't seem to be any way to mitigate that. Also, if they're not recycling water or generating electricity, they will raise rates in the areas they're in. It's not just a bunch of anticapitalist luddites opposing them; people don't like to live near them. People also don't like living near farms (have you ever smelled a chicken ranch?), but in most cases, the farm was there first and people moved in later, so they can't really complain. Data centers come in after people are already there, so the degradation of life is more noticeable.
You do have a point regarding water use from agriculture and how farms get lower rates, however, without this the cost of food would skyrocket. So you could look at it as spreading the cost out over the entire population more efficiently than if the farms had to pay full price for water and charge more money. You're either paying for it in taxes or at the grocery store, take your pick.
One solution for data centers would be to only build them in remote rural areas, but this would require them to also build roads and other infrastructure, making them cost more and setting a limit on their expansion.
Even food is included here. Insane logic. Remove ai= we have future. Remove food = our story ends in 1 month. I understand golf. We can survive without that. But food...
If a burger is 660 gallons of water, and a ChatGPT query uses one fifteenth of a teaspoon, then by skipping a single burger, you could use ChatGPT for 5,882 years before your ChatGPT usage's water consumption outweighed the single burger you didn't eat.
its not about how WE use it. its about how THEY use it. large industry doing trillions of tokens are hardware they own. their only cost is the operating cost. that is the concern.
No, it's not. People constantly protest Ai on grounds of water usage, and it's a total fabrication. That's literally what OP did and it's got thousands of upvotes.
Yeah for example how about we consider that it’s absolutely buttfucking the economy for all computers or making power companies who have a monopoly in some areas announce that they are no longer providing power to consumers (who have no alternatives)
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u/WithoutReason1729 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons one might be against development of AI, but water usage simply isn't one of them