alt Hacker News> use too much ground water
Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.
The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?
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Tell that to the poor people in Mexico, where hundreds of new data centers are sucking the local aquifers dry... (hurting the people directly)
"Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in particular struggle with their water supply and should not be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too lazy to think.
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Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off.
These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
I'd rather have something to eat or take a shower at home than talk to an LLM.
Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.