alt Hacker Newslet's compare ai water usage with something even more useless, water leaking out of pipes. the United States currently loses about 2 trillion gallons of water annually to leaking pipes. this is in comparison to around 230 billion gallons used by data centers.
we're literally dumping several times the amount of water used by data centers onto the ground for no benefit at all. oddly enough I haven't seen any protests about this despite how concerned everyone is about water usage.
It's because spilling water doesn't do anything: water evaporates, becomes cloud, rains down etc.
Meanwhile, datacenters sacrifice water by sending it to Mars in order to compute criminal deepfakes of innocent politicians.