Even the US Government Says AI Requires Massive Amounts of Water

A Government Accountability Office report released this week reveals generative AI systems consume staggering amounts of water, with 250 million daily queries requiring over 1.1 million gallons -- all while companies provide minimal transparency about resource usage. The 47-page analysis [PDF] found cooling data centers -- which demand between 100-1000 megawatts of power -- constitutes 40% of their energy consumption, a figure expected to rise as global temperatures increase.

Water usage varies dramatically by location, with geography significantly affecting both water requirements and carbon emissions. Meta's Llama 3.1 405B model has generated 8,930 metric tons of carbon, compared to Google's Gemma2 at 1,247.61 metric tons and OpenAI's GPT3 at 552 metric tons. The report confirms generative AI searches cost approximately ten times more than standard keyword searches. The GAO asserted about persistent transparency problems across the industry, noting these systems remain "black boxes" even to their designers.

Same

[Anonymous Coward]

I get thirsty answering dumb questions all day too.

No one asked for this

[Rujiel]

It might seem like they're spinning up this infrastructure so that people don't have to work to eat, when a truer goal for them is that people won't be able to work OR eat

Re:No one asked for this

[Rinnon]

It might seem like they're spinning up this infrastructure so that people don't have to work to eat,

I would be surprised if anyone was naive enough to believe this.

when a truer goal for them is that people won't be able to work OR eat

That's not the goal, the goal is to make a pile of money. What you describe is a side effect. It's an important distinction because as we all know: putting people out of work and starving them intentionally is evil; putting people out of work and starving them in the pursuit of greater value for the shareholders is capitalism, and is to be celebrated.

Re:

[Targon]

So, they make a lot of money for themselves, but then pay very little in taxes that could be used to improve the infrastructure or help the people who no longer have jobs due to AI. Give money to the wealthy, give water, electricity, everything to the wealthy, so they can put money in the stock market and offshore accounts where no one benefits.

Re:

[Rujiel]

"That's not the goal, the goal is to make a pile of money"

And does the current landscape of burning piles ot money on AI until the day the singularity arrives seem to lend itself to that? Or the tech giants moving towards their own power production?

It's similar the US' military industrial complex fleecing itself at the public's expense for decades. They spin up a fetid cocoon with our livelihoods in the hopes that they alone will emerge. I agree with your take on capitalism, you're halfway there. Read about

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[alvinrod]

You fail to realize that displacing existing workers and jobs with more productive replacements is why we can sit around and complain about it on the internet. Would you be happier if we were all eking out a living subsistence farming instead? The side effects aren't so bad when you look at it that way. They're even less bad when you realize that far fewer people starve in capitalist societies than did historically or under contemporary alternatives. We seems to have the opposite problem where overconsumpti

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[Rujiel]

Wow, you did so much better than those dozens of societies you terrorized for being too pink. Great job. Also, overconsumption is not the sole problem, and is certainly not why the average lifespan has begun to drop.

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[Smidge204]

> I would be surprised if anyone was naive enough to believe this.

There is a nontrivial sector of people who truly believe AI will be able to solve all of humanity's problems. They are mostly a subset of the "rationalists."

The thinking goes (roughly) that a sufficiently powerful AI will be able to solve any problem, therefore we should prioritize investment in AI over addressing problems today, because the AI's future solution will be so much better that delaying its development even to easy human suffer

Re:

[nightflameauto]

It might seem like they're spinning up this infrastructure so that people don't have to work to eat,

I would be surprised if anyone was naive enough to believe this.

when a truer goal for them is that people won't be able to work OR eat

That's not the goal, the goal is to make a pile of money. What you describe is a side effect. It's an important distinction because as we all know: putting people out of work and starving them intentionally is evil; putting people out of work and starving them in the pursuit of greater value for the shareholders is capitalism, and is to be celebrated.

That distinction won't mean a whole hell of a lot to the starving masses. Which is why so many are starting to see capitalism as a synonym for evil. I know this'll earn me a "no other system has helped so many people" rant, but even the biggest believers in capitalism have always said, "There is no bigger enemy to capitalism than unfettered capitalism." And while our capitalism may have a bit of the trappings of regulation, it's running pretty hard toward unfettered these days.

so does A-1

[drinkypoo]

It's mostly water, too.

Significant figures fail

[VaccinesCauseAdults]

I can forgive the use of gallons because the report came from one of the three remaining non-metric countries (Liberia, United States, Myanmar). But where the hell do they get six significant figures from? “Google's Gemma2 at 1,247.61 metric tons” That should say 1200 metric tons, at best.

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[Targon]

Cooling is moving to liquid cooling from air, so now, you have liquid cooling, high power use for the actual processing, and higher electric costs due to power being less abundant.

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[Zocalo]

Metric tons of *carbon*. It's two different statistics that are totally disconnected in TFS which, despite the headline, gave more details on the carbon production stats than the water consumption ones. Welcome to Slashdot & editors that publish content even worse than AI summaries...

Also, it's not like the water is "spent" like fuel and can't be recycled; it's still the same H2O that went into the system, just somewhat warmer. If you're being efficient, then it would be possible to reuse or recla

Stop putting these things in West Coast deserts

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of the country doesn't have a water problem like this.

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[Rujiel]

I know I can always turn to AC for some self-assured capitalist pablum, nevermind that companies like google and oracle started as proteges of the intelligence community.. and nevermind all those government funds that go to microsoft while they repeatedly fuck up the OS that used to be their core business.

Let's not forget that this isn't necessary

[chaoskitty]

Datacenters don't need to use evaporative cooling. If municipalities choose to sell water for cheap enough that evaporative cooling costs less than alternatives, then this is on the municipalities.

Increase the cost for bulk water, and the datacenters will switch to closed loop, geothermal, whatever. If they generate the heat, they can pay for proper cooling.

Doh. Doh. Doh. Doh....

[fluffernutter]

We are going to destroy this world over a technology being made to take our jobs..... How stupid are we?

waste not want not

[oumuamua]

Put those datacenters in northern states and that heat can be put to good use, like heating houses or offices. Germany did it: https://www.datacenterdynamics... [datacenterdynamics.com] The same thing applies to nuclear power, waste heat? only for the un-creative: https://www.powermag.com/distr... [powermag.com]

those numbers might not be too bad

[hdyoung]

A swimming pool contains 30,000 gallons of water. Ok, and AI is consuming 1.1 million gallons per day. So, 30-35 swimming pools of water. Not bad, but it's not like entire lakes of water. Also, how much of this water is recycled-reused? It's not like it gets all that polluted and I suspect most of those systems are pretty closed-loop.

Ok, so what about the carbon?. Apprently AI is generating 10s of thousands of tons of carbon. Not great, except a single US automobile generates about 5 metric tons of carbon per year.

So, it sounds like the worlds AI is consuming the resources equivalent to dozens of community swimming pools and several thousand cars. So, that would be a small fraction of a medium-sized US city. Sorry, but that doesn't seem all that bad to me.

Water, water, not everywhere

[kackle]

I am in the water industry, for 2 decades now. We have specs. coming down the pipe now for a new, nearby data centers' water requirements. I can confirm that these are in the few millions of gallons per day. That's what a town of tens of thousands of people uses. That's a bummer because some water tables around here are not replenishing fast enough, as they used to. But I'm sure it's cheaper ( all praise "cheaper"! [youtu.be] ) for them to cool it that way.

Re:

[BranMan]

So tell us - are you pushing your specs / requirements back on them? As in - OK, you can use 3 million gallons per day, but it must remain potable, to our standards, so when it comes out of your datacenter it is just warmer (so they need a closed loop inside and heat exchangers for instance). As long as they are not "consuming" the water they use, I say let them have what they need.

Then that town of 10,000 still gets the water they need, just a little warmer.

Please tell us the water industry is at least d

So, more nuclear power plants then?

[MacMann]

I really want people to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

It's a bunch of dudes in Texas bullshitting over beers on how we need more nuclear power. They lived through a winter storm that froze up windmills and left solar panels covered in snow. I get the impression they don't care about global warming any more, they just want the electricity to stay on so they don't have to watch their children freeze to death in the next winter storm.

Is water some kind of issue? Apparently, but we know