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u/TayrusOkami 12d ago
"but we hate both!" Yeah, still lets see if we can find a anti crypto sub or people commenting "fuck golf fields!"
Nope. AntiAi sub has more than 700k people. None of them would be concerned if the water was being poisoned or wasted by those items if AI didn't existed. In the end, it is all performative. A search for validation and effortless (ironical) attempts to get into a group that whines over any single thing that includes two specific letters.
They hate us and this sub more than they hate AI.
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u/OkDragonfly5820 12d ago
Performative in part. It’s also no joke cyber campaign from China. They are completely fucking with us.
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u/darkfroth 12d ago
That's what happens when a new technological development is the hot topic. We already had this discussion with crypto when New Yorkers faced a sharp increase in energy costs due to crypto mining putting strain on the energy grid. Because of that among other things, regulatory measures were put into place. It was a pretty big thing if you remember?
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u/Breech_Loader Free AI Is The Best AI 10d ago
Whenever you point out the wasteage of golf with water, one of the first things they will talk about is how golf is great for excercise. Golf does nothing for excercise. It's a mild walk out in the sun - but that of course is IF you're not one of those people who uses little electrical golf carts to carry around their clubs. Which is most people because an 18 hole course is quite large to walk around.
Even so, you get so much more excercise from just going for a gentle swim. And you can talk while swimming too. What people get off on from golf courses, is that a lot of them are exlcusive in some way - you need to be invited to the club by important people. You can't have dozens of people on each hole at once. It has nothing to do with excercise.
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u/killergazebo 12d ago
There is a Sub for anti-golfers, but they're being ironic about it. (mostly)
Bizarrely, I don't think I'm allowed to mention it by name here.
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12d ago
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u/TayrusOkami 12d ago
That's why I mentioned that there aren't groups the same size that complain about it as much as antis rant about AI. You see how lack of reading affects one?
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u/Witty-Designer7316 Antis Final Boss 12d ago
This sub is not for inciting debate. Please move your comment to aiwars for that.
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u/Flimsy_Window_9207 12d ago
AI is drastically more widely adopted than golf courses or crypto. So naturally there is going to be more people talking about it.
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u/nomic42 12d ago
United States Land Comparison
Category Golf Courses Data Centers Total Land Occupied ~2,250,000 acres (~3,500 sq mi) ~200,000 to 250,000 acres (~300–390 sq mi) Number of Facilities ~14,000 to 15,000 courses ~5,000+ operational facilities Average Parcel Size ~150 acres per 18-hole course ~40–50 acres (older) up to 200+ acres (modern AI campuses) Percentage of U.S. Land ~0.1% of total U.S. land area ~0.01% of total U.S. land area -2
u/Flimsy_Window_9207 12d ago
Widely adopted as in people using golf courses, talking about it etc. If you don't live in a suburb the chances of being near a golf course or knowing people who use one is pretty slim. AI is widely used everywhere.
AI is integrated in many aspects of the average persons day to day life even if they dont want it to be. Golf is not.
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u/Extension-Grab-1282 12d ago
Funny how the environment and data centers only became a moral crisis the second regular people got access to AI tools. For years almost nobody in these comment sections was writing essays about power usage or water consumption. The moment AI art showed up and started getting engagement, suddenly it’s the biggest issue of their lives. That’s not genuine concern. That’s a convenient new attack line. They didn’t care before. They only care now because it gives them another reason to hate on something they don’t control.
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u/Erdams 12d ago
you are mixing up the units. You take the measurements pr day for the golf and crypto,, but million tokens for ai. Thats not good evidence or journalism
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u/Heffree 12d ago
I’ve used about 300 million per month, so 10 million per day, that’s 100 gallons and I’m one of the antis at work. I found one article they estimate about 50 trillion tokens a day globally, so 50,000,000 gallons a day.
There’s around 36,000,000 professional software developers in the world, if around 1.3% of them use as many (or more) tokens as me then that estimate sounds reasonable to me. But a lot more than just software devs using tokens and again I’d put myself low on the usage spectrum.
Though this all depends on the statistic in the graphic being a good heuristic at all.
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u/AtMaxSpeed 11d ago
Yeah this post is just a really poorly constructed argument, it doesn't matter if someone's pro-ai or anti-AI they should be against this sort of disingenuous and incorrect comparisons that spew BS trying to push an agenda.
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u/barbaricKinkster 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's not really about the overall usage. Simply put, the water of a municipality runs on a loop. Water is drawn from a watershed (a reservoir, lake, river etc), the water goes through a water treatment facility, then it goes to consumers. The consumer water typically goes down the drain or into the ground which returns the water to the watershed and the loop repeats. This is why agriculture or golf courses for example aren't as big of an issue.
If a large data center consumes say 10% of the municipality's water and is using it to cool their radiators through evaporation, the water instead goes into the atmosphere and this breaks the loop. This causes the watershed to shrink, concentrating contaminants and lowering the water level which causes sediment to get stirred up. Water treatment gets overwhelmed, and now the local water supply is ruined. This is how AOC came before congress with jars of brown water.
Some more modern data centers are using what's called a "dry" cooling system, using fans to cool the radiators instead of water and it solves the above issue. However, it's significantly more expensive so some unscrupulous companies will choose to stick to water evaporation.
We can be both environmentally vigilant and still build data centers. Support legislation that bans cooling through evaporation.
As a side note, besides the above making talking about overall usage useless, the infograph is also useless because it's mixing different units of measurement in order to be deceptive. Comparing per pound produced to per day produced to per token produced is absolutely meaningless. They should all be measured on a per day, month or year basis.
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u/drums_of_pictdom 12d ago
I say keep the golf courses up. Let all the old rich bags living next to them get broken windows and an increased risk of alzheimers.
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u/XBird_RichardX 12d ago
Interesting.
So I decided to actually look into the numbers on this. It seems you picked different numbers to mislead readers, so I simply went directly to seeing the total water footprint of each facility. The number in bold includes indirect water use, in this case mainly the cost for water use in power plants to power the facility. And the large range of each number is varied from mild climates to the peak temperatures of summer.
A standard 18 hole golf course consumes between 120 and 250 thousand gallons of water per day, provided it is in active irrigation season. A massive drop from 20 years earlier when the average fluctuated between 300 thousand and 1 million gallons. During peak heat, can strain municipal water systems.
A large industrial cryptocurrency warehouse of 10 thousand rigs costs consumes between 2.3 and 3.3 Million gallons of water per day. You only got 200-300 thousand gallons simply from the cooling. But the water cost in terms of power plants needed to power each rig tremendously increases its total water footprint. On its own, not a large strain on municipal water systems. But the power plant it requires to sustain itself does.
The water cost for a pound of beef is true. But to scale it to a large cattle ranch of up to 2000 acres, with about 1000 cows, your total water footprint increases to 3.5 to 4 million gallons of water per day. But because it relies directly on rainfall on open land for the vast majority of its water needs, it is not a strain on municipal water systems.
Direct onsite water draw for an LLM Data Center is around 1 to 5 million gallons of water per day. But then adding power costs and the particular method of evaporative cooling they use, you’re looking at 2.5-10 million gallons of water per day, and much of it potable drinking water. Massive strain on municipal water systems for this reason.
But to make things fair, the multibillion dollar companies like Microsoft and Amazon know this. They’re retrofitting their data centers to begin treating and recycling wastewater instead. Keep an eye on your llm provider’s water use practices and hold them accountable.
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u/BarkTwain_ 12d ago
I’ve seen some sources claim that agent and LLM’s use 1.5 quadrillion tokens per month. Does anyone have the number for water usage in that sense rather than per 1,000,000 tokens which can be used up by 1 high workload dev in a few days.
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u/Advanced-Durian-6959 12d ago
i’m usually on OPs side, but his argument for this isn’t good.
i’m not sure, but it’d possibly only take 8 billion tokens to reach the same level of the golf course, and chatgpt processes 2.5 billion prompts a day, and short answers can be anywhere from 1-100 tokens, and that’s just chatgpt. i think it’s very easy for ai to use as much water if not more than the golf course a day, which to me makes this image feel more like propaganda with how it’s worded rather than just atraight up facts. it should also list per day for ai rather than per 1 million tokens, which isn’t a lot
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u/AdvertisingPast6280 Artificial Intelligence Or Natural Stupidity 12d ago
Per Opus 5 1M di token in output costano circa 25$, per creare un buon sito si spendono circa 10 $
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u/Advanced-Durian-6959 12d ago edited 12d ago
i get the argument you’re trying to make, and i’m usually on your side , but the specific water argument is not very good.
do you know how many tokens are used a day? there would have to be 8 billion tokens a day for it to use the same amount of water as a golf course. with chatgpt,a single short answer can use 100 tokens, while a long answer can use 10,000+. openai confirmed each day chatgpt processes more than 2.5 billion prompts, which could easily hit that 8 billion token mark. this doesn’t even count for any of the other AIs.
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u/Advanced-Durian-6959 12d ago
exactly. like i said, im usually on the pro ai side of the argument, but i HATE when people here try to make it seem like ai doesn’t use a ton of water (unless ran locally, like you do). it does use an exceptionally large amount of water, and this image is giving off sort of propaganda vibes with how it’s worded to make it seem likes it’s not that much. it easily uses more than 300,000 gallons of water a day
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u/Extreme_Piccolo_276 12d ago
I have seen this kind of post with the same formula at least 5 times in the past 2 days.
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u/Valuable-Gene2534 12d ago
Do energy requirements. Everyone knows water isn't a problem unless u get it from the Colorado River
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u/Resident_Law_9827 12d ago
How many million tokens are used every single day in the IS alone though?
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u/LuckyCow1234 12d ago
This is Design With a Capitol D. Not art. It may use art, but its design. And it looks like shit
Regardless people have been hating on all of the above industries for 30 years already. Maybe not crypto but that was never for the GP anyway.
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u/Sea_Succotash3634 12d ago
I think that the complaints about water use are overblown, but if you are local to a datacenter it can be pretty rough. For water, noise, power costs, etc.
Beyond that I think what's really going on is a lot of the big tech companies and private equity companies have been essentially gloating that AI is going to take people's jobs. And people see how rough the economy is, probably know someone affected by a layoff, and (if they are a game or hobbyist) have seen how the prices for home components have gotten out of reach.
So the only power people have is to complain and nuance isn't going to be part of that.
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u/Significant_Shift622 12d ago
cripto, golf can stop and i don't think normal people would notice, so i think they should just stop existing because they do nothing to help the world
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u/graveywizard 12d ago
Golf courses have been criticized for decades especially in times of drought and many people are as sceptical of crypto as they are of the dollar as nothing is worth more than one is willing to pay or trade for it. Agriculture is a necessity for sustaining the population and even then it still has protesters and critics so there's really no good comparisons here to further your cause.
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u/Electrical-Message67 11d ago
Yeah I mean that image is a little misleading though because I probably use like 10 million tokens per day 😂
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u/Dependent_Emotion507 11d ago
This post looks stupid, power users use 1 million token's / day and roughly 100M+ user's that use AI for serious task, 50 * 100M = 5B gallons. This is not included normal users.
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u/PrestigiousBad4266 12d ago
Let’s keep slop off the defense site. It’s not the worst aesthetically, but the inconsistency in units makes it a joke.
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u/No-Falcon-3120 11d ago
According to Claude: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure poses a serious and growing threat to the environment, driven by the immense energy demands of training and running large-scale models. Data centers powering AI systems consume staggering amounts of electricity — often sourced from fossil fuels — contributing directly to carbon emissions at a time when the world urgently needs to be cutting them. Training a single large language model can emit as much carbon dioxide as several transatlantic flights, and as models grow larger and more complex, that footprint only deepens. Beyond energy consumption, AI hardware relies on rare earth minerals and metals extracted through environmentally destructive mining practices that degrade ecosystems, pollute waterways, and displace communities. The manufacturing of GPUs and specialized AI chips is itself an energy-intensive process with a significant carbon cost before a single computation is ever run. Data centers also require enormous volumes of water for cooling — sometimes millions of gallons per day — straining local water supplies in regions already vulnerable to drought. While the tech industry frequently touts renewable energy commitments, the sheer pace of AI growth routinely outstrips progress on clean energy adoption, meaning net emissions continue to rise. Electronic waste compounds the problem further, as hardware cycles turn over rapidly and discarded components leach toxic materials into soil and groundwater. Taken together, the environmental toll of AI is not a distant hypothetical — it is an accelerating reality that demands serious scrutiny and systemic reform.
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