That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water.
The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something
The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels
This has almost zero to do with the data centers themselves and instead the politicians we vote in.
Simply put we need more 'clean' power generation any way you go about it. Economic growth and production is based on ones ability to produce power. We've been coasting on increasing efficiency for a long time, but we've been in need of larger sources of power and distribution for decades, data centers or not.
With that said DC's shouldn't be built in west texas where it's dry. East of the Mississippi gets enough rain that you build a reservoir and you'll have more than enough water to feed the DC for decades.
Counting water is genuinely just asinine double counting ridiculousness that makes down stream things look completely insane. Like making a pound of beef look like it consumes 10,000L of water.
In reality of course running your shower for 10 to 15 hours is no where near somehow equivalent to eating beef lasagna for dinner and we would actually have a crisis if people started applying any optimization pressure on these useless metrics.
No, not a container ship, or anything substantial like that, just one container (1).
Yet, it makes people lose their rational minds and start foaming at the mouth about Apple’s “wasteful practices”.
It doesn’t alter the conclusion that much: in the grand scheme of human industrial activity, this is nothing.
I.e.: if AirPods were made by an independent company, that firm would be in the top 50 of the largest corporations in the world!
For example, a comparable sized company would be Coca Cola, which goes through 300,000 tons of aluminium annually for their cans, not to mention oil used for plastic bottles!
A reduction in what can be used from the summer snowmelt is a problem, regardless of whether equivalent atoms are redeposited in the winter snowfall.
[0] - "And what we found is is that up to 43% of data centers, and this is our largest data centers, are located in areas of high or extremely high water stress. And that's really shocking because data centers require huge amount of drinking water to be able to cool their servers."
[0]- Business Insider | Exposing The Dark Side of America's AI Data Center Explosion - https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?t=1201
Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer.
It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case.
What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.
Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries, of course, but to a first approximation they are accurate.
Are we? Is anybody? Criticism doesn't need to be directed towards one thing at a time.
Totally agreed that criticism should be directed where it's due. But what this thread is saying is that criticism of GenAI is misdirected. I haven't seen nearly as much consternation over e.g. the food industry as I'm seeing over AI -- an industry that increasingly looks like its utility exceeds its costs.
(If the last part sounds hypothetical, in past comments I've linked a number of reports, including government-affiliated sources, finding noticeable benefits from GenAI adoption.)
- food, a thing that literally every human needs every 24 hours (really 6-12) to continue to live
- GenAI, a new product with dubious value that contributes significantly to the systemic enshittification of the US and global economy?
FYI whataboutism is a well known (and honestly quite lazy) fallacy and propaganda strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I didn't see the OP's point as whataboutism, but rather putting things into perspective. We are debating the water usage of a powerful new technology that a large fraction of the world is finding useful [1], which is a fraction of what other, much more frivolous (golf courses!) or even actively harmful (Nestle!) industries use.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794907 -- Recent thread with very rough numbers which could well be wrong, but the productivity impact is becoming detectable at a national level.
It’s a fundamentally flawed argument
If something looks like a "weird stance", consider trying harder to understand it. It's better for everyone else in the conversation.
At some we need to end this AGI" rat race and focus on realizing practical benefits from the models we currently have.
As long as there’s a market, machines are going to continue toto displace labor. That’s not going to stop
For decades we've been told we shouldn't develop urban centers because of how it development affects local communities, but really it just benefited another class of elites (anonymous foreign investors), and now housing prices are impoverishing younger generations and driving homelessness.
Obviously that's not a perfect comparison to AI, which isn't as necessary, but I think the anti-growth argument isn't a good one. Democracies need to keep growing or authoritarian states will take over who don't care so much about human rights. (Or, authoritarian governments will take over democracies.)
There needs to be a political movement that's both pro-growth and pro-humanity, that is capable of making hard or disruptive decisions that actually benefits the poor. Maybe that's a fantasy, but again, I think we should find ways to grow sustainably.
I do think the whole water issue as pointed out in the book is completely discredited with this call out.
The author Karen Hao acknowledges this:
I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption.
If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe.
It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view.
I really recommend the book.