Oh that's funny. I've been repeatedly told that AI is in fact negligible it comes to water usage.
Is it possible we were lied to, again? ๐คฃ
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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ChatGPT told me that their hallucinations are worth it, and outweighs their negligible environmental impact. I'm not smart enough to do the maths, but it sounds like no worries, boss!
If it needs to be fresh water, then they need to pay in full to build a desal plant for ocean water, and a solar farm to power it, to be owned and operated by the state. And, that plant needs to send half it's water to the local municipal water system at no cost.
Because fuck em.
having not looked into it at all: it probably doesn't "need" to be fresh water, but it'll probably be rivers anyways.
i assume it works similarly to other large scale cooling operations: you have a closed loop for the heat exchangers and the cooling towers are fed by a local source of flowing water.
doesn't need to be all that clean, or fresh water, but since rivers are pretty much the only source of moving water in most places, there's not really many other options. (for the cooling towers, not AI datacanters...they could just NOT build them, if they weren't fuckwits)
same as nuclear power plants, or any other industrial application that needs a lot of cooling!
You don't understand if it's not clean freshwater it will mean cleaning and maintenance of the equipment. It's much cheaper to use clean freshwater.
Techbros got a bit too excited with Moore's law: they want everything they touch to grow exponentially. Specially money.
I sure hope their devs can find something the AI is actually useful for, soon.
Can someone explain to me why this needs to be potable water?
It doesn't need to be potable, but since it's using evaporative cooling, it does need to be somewhat clean. You don't want to leave gunk all over your cooling equipment.
I mean you totally could leave gunk all over your cooling equipment, and then just have to clean it. It would just cost more money.
Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of how these systems work. I'm basically just guessing
If the water is overly basic or acidic, and you concentrate it via evaporation, then you can damage the equipment at an accelerated pace. But even then, it's indeed a matter of money.
Let's just skip to the end where we live on Rainworld after all the water has been evaporated into atmo
If only we knew if there is critical mass that can make it run away so we will end up like Mars.
Is this evaporative cooling? Why cant they use it in closed loop?
that costs more money
The water gets dirtied and they'd need to add in a filtration system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U.S._and_Canada
Edit: I guess the first link I put had some shitty info/estimates, my bad. Swapped it for a wiki article.
those numbers are inflated to fuck, or else the people studied for it are just wasteful as fuck
I take long showers often multiple times a day, wash a lot of stuff by hand, do a lot of garden watering, fill a kiddie pool when it's hot, and wash my hands very often. I still only reach a max of 60 gallons a day on average in the summer. typically half that in the winter. and I wfh so all my shitting is done at home, too.
who the fuck is flushing 15 gallons a day just by themself? and who the fuck is doing multiple loads of laundry every single day?
the incredibly low quality of that blog post pisses me off. garbage like that makes the world a worse place, and whoever published that should be ashamed of their work
Copilot told me that they need fresh water to survive, just like us.