@clive That estimate says your queries are using .3 kWh of electricity or so, so it is about 2 cents of power and the water that gets boiled by that (since effectively all energy consumed by computers ends up as heat).

But I don't believe it, assuming 10s of runtime, that means your query used 180 servers for that 10 seconds. LLMs are hungry but not THAT hungry.

@jwatt @clive
It depends. Data centers on a river or ocean will direct heat-exchange. Other than that you use evaporation to dump heat, all AC type systems on any scale do ("cooling towers").

However, the water use is in the noise compared to say agricultural use for alfalfa. A single acre of alfalfa will use 4 acre-feet/year, so 5 MILLION liters of water to grow cattle feed (that is commonly shipped to Saudi Arabia where growing it is banned).