Oh, ok. Nevermind guys, turns out the sun is going to explode at some point and galaxies will drift so far apart there won't be any stars left to see, we'll drift alone in a cold dark void until the heat death of the universe. Guess we'll just let civilization collapse now, no point if we're all gonna die eventually.
Can we also stop subsidizing beef and dairy $38 billion per year (in the U.S. alone). Producing a single hamburger uses over 600 gallons of water. But of course there was no mention of that during California's last big drought.
Cattle farming is a massive blind spot for most people.
It's easy to be loudly opposed to things that don't require you to make any real changes to your lifestyle. You can say "I'm against slavery!" to make yourself feel really good and moral, but you'll never have to prove that claim by your actions.
It's not really possible to be an environmentalist while consuming animal products.
Agreed. It's simply not possible to avert catastrophic climate change without renouncing animal products. The math is very simple. Per capita CO2e has to be below 2 T per year. A meat-heavy diet alone produces 3.3 tons. Cutting out beef makes a big dent, brings you down to 1.9, but then you have a remaining budget of 0.1 T, which you might achieve if you spend the majority of your time meditating in a cave. Realistically, veganism is the only option for the preservation of our biosphere.
Datacenters have existed for a long time without being a problem just running on regular air cooling. AI came around and require a ton of GPUs in all the servers and now they draw 20x the power and need to be water cooled. You should blame the real problem.
No, they've always needed that. In fact, being mostly cooled in closed-circuit, most modern and recent data centers are much more efficient and don't use up nearly as much water as the massive, old ones we've all collectively been using for decades.
The main issue is that both on the front of water AND power usage, it's still an increase in load on a system that has been looking at anything but long-term planning. Corruption, lobbyism, by now most of the developped world should have, similar to what China's doing, been looking for the most efficient and durable ways to go forward.
We haven't. Instead we still burn fuel like the dumbasses we are for everyone of our needs and in turn, this also massively increases our water demands. We're decades behind and right now, the future is knocking at our door and we aren't ready to foot the bill.
When properly planned out and executed, all these datacenters don't HAVE to be awful and terrible. The issue is that they'll end up being terrible, because of atrocious planning.
> Datacenters have existed for a long time without being a problem just running on regular air cooling. AI came around and require a ton of GPUs in all the servers and now they draw 20x the power and need to be water cooled. You should blame the real problem.
It takes more water to make the world's almond milk than it does to run all the data centers on Earth. It takes about 3 gallons of water per almond and 80 almonds/gallon for a whopping 240 gallons of water wasted for every gallon of your almond milk.
Modern society would collapse without highways, but it's not irrational to say that building highways that harm communities without providing clear benefits is something that ought to be opposed.
Yeah, but essentially people are saying "Highways should be illegal".
And of course, no they shouldn't. Their construction should be regulated. Just like data center construction should be regulated. But I guess it's just not as satisfying to scream: "Data centers creation should be regulated with proper laws"!
You know what's a real strain on the fresh water supply? Golf courses. How about let's stop building golf courses in the desert. Now there's something that should be illegal. Do you realize we have a golf course in Death Valley, one of the hottest and driest places on the earth? Insanity.
I don't disagree. I am very much on the regulate it side of the discussion. The major problem I have is that tech companies are doing their usual thing of causing massive disruptions before regulations have a chance to catch up with changing technologies. I would really like a world where we would pause to consider the impacts of new tech before shoving it out into the wild.
Then data centers should only get to be run on desalinated water and not ground water. Or grey water that can not be used for sustenance would be even better.
AI data centers are being blamed for decades long problems? Ok. There are farm crops that are far worse. Way worse. How about just planning things better?
My point is let’s not take the easy way out by pinning blame on a subset of a problem. You could get rid of all data centers and water will still run out. Am I right or wrong?
Edit also by saying “let’s plan things better” is literally me saying let’s take all things into consideration? How else can you take that?
The title of the article literally mentions more than one problem. No one here is trying to take "take the easy way out by only blaming a subset of a problem."
AI datacenters are not being blamed entirely for decades-long problems. People know we've been overdrawing aquifers here in the US to irritate wasteful farmland too. For over a century. Several people have warned this was coming, starting all the way back in the 1870s.
Get rid of almond crops and we all get more. Or did that water drainer suddenly stop becoming a problem? How about a more comprehensive overall strategy?
The issue with water is not data centers, literally no mentally sound research will say it is. Its entirely to do with litter, pollution, and sewage works dumping sewage into rivers.
I don’t think you read or comprehended the article then because it did not provide any research for the claim that data centers are significantly implicated in global water shortages. Although it did state GPT training used 700 kL of water for training the context and statistical analysis for how that fits into the broader context is missing.
You fucking read it. Here, quoted directly from the article:
"Recently, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has further increased water use at data centers, which store and process the data needed to run AI services. Data centers use cooling water to remove the heat generated by servers. Large facilities can consume hundreds of thousands of liters of water a day.
For example, training GPT-3 requires roughly 700,000 liters of cooling water. Because of this, regions with many data centers, such as the southwestern United States, are expected to face even more severe water shortages. Professor Christian Franzke noted, “The cooling water used in data centers evaporates and eventually falls as rain somewhere else,” adding that “this will further deepen regional imbalances in water availability.”"
A medium sized data center uses a huge amount of water every day, the same as a small town of 50000 people does for all its activities. The fact that they do is just that; a known fact of their engineering, not a conspiracy theory or propaganda.
Data centers are not causing freshwater supplies to deplete. The river displaces infinitely more water than the data center by flowing daily. The water cycle is a circle. The real issue is climate change caused by fossil fuels, and the economic systems that incentivize their use.
> Your comparison to a river is potentially one of the most fucking inane things a human has ever said. Congrats.
It is an excellent comparison because it puts the relatively small scale of displacement of water caused by evaporative cooling into context. Even if you want to ignore natural water displacement (which is an appeal to naturalism fallacy), the elephant in the room is agriculture.
> The river adds water to the local area. Some filters down into the earth, some gets held in the local soil, it hosts life.
A river has a dynamic relationship with the land, it does not simply "add water" to the local area, it also moves water through and out of the local area. The fact that evaporative cooling is not in and of itself an ecosystem, like a river, does not make it harmful. It's a minuscule contributor to the overall water cycle, which is a self-regulating system.
> Evaporative cooling doesn't do any of that, forces the water to disperse into the atmosphere where it may go thousands of miles away.
The distance the water vapor from evaporative cooling travels is irrelevant if the limits of the biosphere are far higher than the amount being evaporated. Also, while it does require more power, you can do air cooling, or closed loop water cooling to retain water if the specific data center location calls for it.
> To add on to that: once you collapse an aquifer, it's gone.
Not all groundwater extraction causes aquifers to collapse. Obviously, like anything else requiring water, it shouldn't be built in an area where there is already a severe water shortage, but its not going to cause one by itself. It does not make up a big enough slice of the pie.
Time-Traveller | a day ago
Hmm, if only any of these were preventable....
aMusicLover | a day ago
Yeah, but who can really predict these things.
calm-lab66 | a day ago
Probably AI could predict it, using a large enough data center. 🥴🙃
costafilh0 | 23 hours ago
Yes. We can have more efficient agriculture, but is not that easy, specially on a global scale.
_Enclose_ | 22 hours ago
Oh, ok. Nevermind guys, turns out it's not that easy. Guess we'll just let civilization collapse.
basementreality | 20 hours ago
We've had a good run boys... let's just call it and go home.
txroller | 21 hours ago
It’s not a matter of “if” but “when”
_Enclose_ | 21 hours ago
Oh, ok. Nevermind guys, turns out the sun is going to explode at some point and galaxies will drift so far apart there won't be any stars left to see, we'll drift alone in a cold dark void until the heat death of the universe. Guess we'll just let civilization collapse now, no point if we're all gonna die eventually.
trojantricky1986 | a day ago
A topic that is not spoken about anywhere near enough.
DeepHistory | a day ago
Can we also stop subsidizing beef and dairy $38 billion per year (in the U.S. alone). Producing a single hamburger uses over 600 gallons of water. But of course there was no mention of that during California's last big drought.
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-gallons-of-water-to-make-a-burger-20140124-story.html
7FootElvis | 17 hours ago
Probably because we can't eat data centers. Yet.
AltruisticCoelacanth | 16 hours ago
Cattle farming is a massive blind spot for most people.
It's easy to be loudly opposed to things that don't require you to make any real changes to your lifestyle. You can say "I'm against slavery!" to make yourself feel really good and moral, but you'll never have to prove that claim by your actions.
It's not really possible to be an environmentalist while consuming animal products.
DeepHistory | 16 hours ago
Agreed. It's simply not possible to avert catastrophic climate change without renouncing animal products. The math is very simple. Per capita CO2e has to be below 2 T per year. A meat-heavy diet alone produces 3.3 tons. Cutting out beef makes a big dent, brings you down to 1.9, but then you have a remaining budget of 0.1 T, which you might achieve if you spend the majority of your time meditating in a cave. Realistically, veganism is the only option for the preservation of our biosphere.
https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet/
DanimalPlays | a day ago
Data centers should be illegal.
everfixsolaris | a day ago
Datacenters have existed for a long time without being a problem just running on regular air cooling. AI came around and require a ton of GPUs in all the servers and now they draw 20x the power and need to be water cooled. You should blame the real problem.
PenguinSunday | a day ago
The problem being the new datacenters that require water to cool?
Sinder-Soyl | 7 hours ago
No, they've always needed that. In fact, being mostly cooled in closed-circuit, most modern and recent data centers are much more efficient and don't use up nearly as much water as the massive, old ones we've all collectively been using for decades.
The main issue is that both on the front of water AND power usage, it's still an increase in load on a system that has been looking at anything but long-term planning. Corruption, lobbyism, by now most of the developped world should have, similar to what China's doing, been looking for the most efficient and durable ways to go forward.
We haven't. Instead we still burn fuel like the dumbasses we are for everyone of our needs and in turn, this also massively increases our water demands. We're decades behind and right now, the future is knocking at our door and we aren't ready to foot the bill.
When properly planned out and executed, all these datacenters don't HAVE to be awful and terrible. The issue is that they'll end up being terrible, because of atrocious planning.
Elvarien2 | a day ago
exactly, so stop whining about data-centres and ai.
corrupt billionaires.
It's always billionaires.
SLAMMERisONLINE | 8 hours ago
> Datacenters have existed for a long time without being a problem just running on regular air cooling. AI came around and require a ton of GPUs in all the servers and now they draw 20x the power and need to be water cooled. You should blame the real problem.
It takes more water to make the world's almond milk than it does to run all the data centers on Earth. It takes about 3 gallons of water per almond and 80 almonds/gallon for a whopping 240 gallons of water wasted for every gallon of your almond milk.
big_trike | a day ago
Or at least use greywater
q120 | a day ago
Do you realize you’re using a data center RIGHT NOW to use Reddit?
Things we all use data centers for:
No data centers? Bye bye modern society
anrwlias | a day ago
Modern society would collapse without highways, but it's not irrational to say that building highways that harm communities without providing clear benefits is something that ought to be opposed.
TheCrazyRed | 21 hours ago
Yeah, but essentially people are saying "Highways should be illegal".
And of course, no they shouldn't. Their construction should be regulated. Just like data center construction should be regulated. But I guess it's just not as satisfying to scream: "Data centers creation should be regulated with proper laws"!
You know what's a real strain on the fresh water supply? Golf courses. How about let's stop building golf courses in the desert. Now there's something that should be illegal. Do you realize we have a golf course in Death Valley, one of the hottest and driest places on the earth? Insanity.
anrwlias | 20 hours ago
I don't disagree. I am very much on the regulate it side of the discussion. The major problem I have is that tech companies are doing their usual thing of causing massive disruptions before regulations have a chance to catch up with changing technologies. I would really like a world where we would pause to consider the impacts of new tech before shoving it out into the wild.
DanimalPlays | a day ago
I do. We'd be fine without all those things and interestingly most of them existed before data centers.
omegaphallic | a day ago
That would end the internet.
Desalination tech gets better all the time, folks need to chill out.
HamunaHamunaHamuna | a day ago
Then data centers should only get to be run on desalinated water and not ground water. Or grey water that can not be used for sustenance would be even better.
Mcozy333 | a day ago
build those data center like an Earthship ...
DrCalamity | 22 hours ago
And pray tell, what will power these future plants; farts and wishes? How will the water get inland?
DanimalPlays | a day ago
Thats fine. The internet needs to be reconstructed. It's just an advertisement and propaganda machine at this point.
costafilh0 | 23 hours ago
They aren't mentioned in the article, because they are not the problem.
You have been baited.
DanimalPlays | 22 hours ago
Nope. I'm not responding to the article. I'm saying data centers are problematic and should be illegal.
It's unbelievably ironic for you to assume my stance while calling me out for not doing diligence. Like, i mean, good god yo, pull it together.
Pandemonium_Fallen | a day ago
There they go again with the useless lip service while they do absolutely nothing, as usual.
amircruz | 7 hours ago
UN warns... the fuck!?. This people have power, DO SOMETHING !
Top_Box_8952 | 16 hours ago
Dust Bowl 2.0, let’s get tornado season to constant risk!
NoPain4551 | 13 hours ago
So many dystopian science fiction stories showed us exactly where we’d end up
SelfAsleep2708 | 12 hours ago
Solarbabies from back in '86
Captobvious75 | 4 hours ago
I love the Fallout series- when it stays fictional.
SLAMMERisONLINE | 8 hours ago
> UN warns of "global water bankruptcy" as groundwater depletion, drought and AI data centers strain freshwater supplies
Tell the UN to ask chatGPT to explain to them how groundwater, drought and AI data-centers work so they stop making ridiculous claims.
eleqtriq | a day ago
AI data centers are being blamed for decades long problems? Ok. There are farm crops that are far worse. Way worse. How about just planning things better?
PenguinSunday | a day ago
We can worry about more than one thing at once
eleqtriq | 18 hours ago
My point is let’s not take the easy way out by pinning blame on a subset of a problem. You could get rid of all data centers and water will still run out. Am I right or wrong?
Edit also by saying “let’s plan things better” is literally me saying let’s take all things into consideration? How else can you take that?
PenguinSunday | 14 hours ago
The title of the article literally mentions more than one problem. No one here is trying to take "take the easy way out by only blaming a subset of a problem."
AI datacenters are not being blamed entirely for decades-long problems. People know we've been overdrawing aquifers here in the US to irritate wasteful farmland too. For over a century. Several people have warned this was coming, starting all the way back in the 1870s.
awkreddit | a day ago
Good luck eating GPUs
eleqtriq | 18 hours ago
Get rid of almond crops and we all get more. Or did that water drainer suddenly stop becoming a problem? How about a more comprehensive overall strategy?
costafilh0 | 23 hours ago
No, they aren't.
The title is FAKE.
They don't mention data centers ir AI at all.
help-its-inside-me | a day ago
But that doesn't fit the propaganda fear mongering narrative.
HamunaHamunaHamuna | a day ago
The propaganda fear mongering lol. Som epeople will sleepwalk humanity into its very predictable destruction.
help-its-inside-me | a day ago
The issue with water is not data centers, literally no mentally sound research will say it is. Its entirely to do with litter, pollution, and sewage works dumping sewage into rivers.
Get over yourself.
Katyafan | a day ago
This thread is about an article that said just that...
SloppySauce0 | a day ago
I don’t think you read or comprehended the article then because it did not provide any research for the claim that data centers are significantly implicated in global water shortages. Although it did state GPT training used 700 kL of water for training the context and statistical analysis for how that fits into the broader context is missing.
costafilh0 | 23 hours ago
Read the fvcking article. They don't even mention AI or datacenters.
HamunaHamunaHamuna | 22 hours ago
You fucking read it. Here, quoted directly from the article:
"Recently, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has further increased water use at data centers, which store and process the data needed to run AI services. Data centers use cooling water to remove the heat generated by servers. Large facilities can consume hundreds of thousands of liters of water a day.
For example, training GPT-3 requires roughly 700,000 liters of cooling water. Because of this, regions with many data centers, such as the southwestern United States, are expected to face even more severe water shortages. Professor Christian Franzke noted, “The cooling water used in data centers evaporates and eventually falls as rain somewhere else,” adding that “this will further deepen regional imbalances in water availability.”"
A medium sized data center uses a huge amount of water every day, the same as a small town of 50000 people does for all its activities. The fact that they do is just that; a known fact of their engineering, not a conspiracy theory or propaganda.
alexnoyle | 23 hours ago
Data centers are not causing freshwater supplies to deplete. The river displaces infinitely more water than the data center by flowing daily. The water cycle is a circle. The real issue is climate change caused by fossil fuels, and the economic systems that incentivize their use.
DrCalamity | 22 hours ago
Your comparison to a river is potentially one of the most fucking inane things a human has ever said. Congrats.
The river adds water to the local area. Some filters down into the earth, some gets held in the local soil, it hosts life.
Evaporative cooling doesn't do any of that, forces the water to disperse into the atmosphere where it may go thousands of miles away.
To add on to that: once you collapse an aquifer, it's gone.
alexnoyle | 3 hours ago
> Your comparison to a river is potentially one of the most fucking inane things a human has ever said. Congrats.
It is an excellent comparison because it puts the relatively small scale of displacement of water caused by evaporative cooling into context. Even if you want to ignore natural water displacement (which is an appeal to naturalism fallacy), the elephant in the room is agriculture.
> The river adds water to the local area. Some filters down into the earth, some gets held in the local soil, it hosts life.
A river has a dynamic relationship with the land, it does not simply "add water" to the local area, it also moves water through and out of the local area. The fact that evaporative cooling is not in and of itself an ecosystem, like a river, does not make it harmful. It's a minuscule contributor to the overall water cycle, which is a self-regulating system.
> Evaporative cooling doesn't do any of that, forces the water to disperse into the atmosphere where it may go thousands of miles away.
The distance the water vapor from evaporative cooling travels is irrelevant if the limits of the biosphere are far higher than the amount being evaporated. Also, while it does require more power, you can do air cooling, or closed loop water cooling to retain water if the specific data center location calls for it.
> To add on to that: once you collapse an aquifer, it's gone.
Not all groundwater extraction causes aquifers to collapse. Obviously, like anything else requiring water, it shouldn't be built in an area where there is already a severe water shortage, but its not going to cause one by itself. It does not make up a big enough slice of the pie.
costafilh0 | 23 hours ago
Click bait title.
The article says nothing about AI data centers.
hpygilmr | 18 hours ago
Ahh, the next UN grift, quick send them billions of dollars to thwart the threat 🤦🏽