alt Hacker NewsTheir estimated water usage by AI data centers for 2030 is about 9.8 trillion liters. The global almond crop is estimated to use ~8 trillion liters. So I vote we just ban almonds. Problem solved!
Also, I find the framing of water usage in terms of “the water needs of Sub-Saharan Africans” to be manipulative and misleading. It appears they just picked a poor part of the world where per capita water usage is very low, so they could make it sound as bad as possible. But virtually none of these data centers will have a deleterious effect on water availability for those people.
Alternative headline: “Despite massive growth globally, AI is projected to only use about a third as much water in 2030 as Turkmenistan”
(~28 trillion liters, mostly to grow cotton in the desert).
Or here’s another fun one: the entire annual global water usage of all of AI in 2030, including the water needed to generate all the power for AI, is about what golf courses use daily.
So dumb.
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We can do two things: limit almond farming and limit AI water usage.
> So I vote we just ban almonds. Problem solved!
I'm pretty sure if we had an actually vote between banning AI data centers and banning almond farming, one would win by a landslide. I'm actually confident that if some hypothetical community had absolutely no water or energy problems they would vote against having the AI data center built.
Humans need to eat. Humans don't need AI. We're consuming too much in general and this speculative bubble is making consumption skyrocket with questionable gains for humanity.
Then feel free to lobby for a data center in your community; and then let me know how your tap water is.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but does the waste water from almond farms come out as toxic and hazardous for where they eventually end up in?
Or alfalfa, which uses ~6 trillion liters per year in California alone. Essentially none of it is eaten by humans, and a large fraction gets exported to China and Japan to feed livestock there.