Just for perspective, since this anti-AI meme handwringing about water won’t die.

The US Corn industry alone uses 8x more water than all of the AI datacenters on the entire planet. 40% of that production is used to make fuels which are shipped around the country to be burned, injecting carbon into the atmosphere.

The water used by datacenters is evaporated and remains part of the local hydrological cycle. Unless they are placed in an area with water shortages, like a desert, the amount of water used by a datacenter isn’t significant.

Local power usage, local noise pollution, unsustainable investments made by capricious capitalists… those are all legitimate areas of criticism for AI datacenters. Water use is not.

so those datacenters Iran is blowing up in the desert then… hooray?

Yeah.

I’m not defending the dumbass capitalists exploiting AI and causing a bubble with their bad decisions… but outside of places like deserts the water usage is largely trivial.

i just wish we had a good way of using, i dunno, seawater or something.