“Companies have been trying to hide the full footprint of their data centers because they know the public could turn against them if they knew the reality. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google was found to be using a quarter of the city’s water supply to cool its facilities. Tech companies have been facing pushback elsewhere in the United States, but also across the world in places like Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, Ireland, and New Zealand. Now opposition is growing in Spain too, where droughts are wiping out crops and people are wondering why they’d give their limited water resources to Meta for a data center. But adopting generative AI will require a lot more of those data centers to be built around the world.

The tech industry is constantly incentivized to increase the computing power we use as a society, because that works for their business models — especially when Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have massive cloud computing divisions. But we never seem to stop and ask whether that additional computing power is necessary to improve our lives. As Hugging Face climate lead Sasha Luccioni told The Guardian, “we’re seeing this shift of people using generative AI models just because they feel like they should, without sustainability being taken into account.” Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, but it’s not clear that’s actually in anyone’s interests but those of founders and investors who are hoping to cash in on the latest AI bubble.”

Paris Marx reminds us that the chat behind the bot is not free.

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