this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
108 points (68.6% liked)
Fuck AI
7560 readers
1581 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Per what?
This looks to be the total number of each category. If so, it's a useless graph. How many L/day are used per single unit. Maybe per farm/datacenter.
Edit.
I did the math
3,562 Cattle farms
21,617,069 L/day/ranch
5,400 data centers
416,667 L/day/data center
45 AI data centers
600,000 L/day/AI data center
This does not take into consideration the heat produced nor fossil fuels consumed by each.
If water is your only metric, cattle ranches are worse. But this isn't a good metric for many reasons, since livestock, being food, is a commodity, while data centers are not.
Let's normalize to technology, ans ignore beef for a moment.
AI data centers consume about 33% more water than non-AI centers.
There is not a situation where this is fine.
The other part I don't see talked about is that evaporative cooling produces water vapour, and water vapour increases greenhouse effects. Normally we don't worry about water vapour emissions because it tends to fall out as rain or snow a couple of weeks later, but this is continuous usage. Continuous plumes of 600 tonnes of water vapour per AI data centre per day.
I think that's more of a localized pressure, like how corn sweat makes the Midwest super humid.