Big Tech's thirst for water is sparking a global resistance
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This is like calling a rubber raft "enormous" after comparing it to an aircraft carrier. Agriculture consumes astronomically more water, often wastefully, for far less valuable purposes. I can't take these objections seriously.
This is just the latest weird moral panic.
10% of California's electricity goes to pumping water around. Or that was the figure not too long ago. And it's being pumped all over, not just to ag.
The reality is, the most wasteful users of water are residential, where a lot is used to ornamental things like lawns.
There's a lot to worry about with AI, but data centers? Now? No one cared when they were being built out for AWS to host 7 gazillion Wordpress pages.
This is very easy to search. Here's an example: https://waterknowledge.colostate.edu/water-management-admini...
Agriculture is 86% for Colorado. All other sources combined pale in comparison.
And agriculture does not simply "make food". They are often growing feed for animals, so they're making food inputs, which will require still further water to become food for humans.
They also often practice flood irrigation, arguably the least efficient method of watering plants.
Finally, due to "use it or lose it" systems, they have to continue using their water or they won't have access to it next season, so they sometimes literally just dump it on the ground where there aren't any plants to keep their quota up so they don't have access to less water next year.
Yes we need food, but there are a lot of ways in which we can grow just as much or more food without using quite so much water.
Data? Not as essential.
However, for those of us who pay attention, we know there is an extreme amount of wastefulness when it comes to how water gets used for agriculture, that is completely unnecessary. (Think growing alfalfa in Arizona, or spray irrigation in hot climates, or or or - the examples are sadly endless.
Hopefully this becomes a good opportunity for us to better pay attention and regulate how water is used in many different instances.
Society should, and is, openly reject such disdain and contempt toward humanity.
Even without the economic incentive, I've turned off the lawn irrigation installed by previous owners, use soaker or drip irrigation in my berry and vegetable gardens, and water ornamental plants only when they're really in distress during our summertime droughts. It's amazing how soil can go from moist and wonderful in the spring to desiccated powder in a summer drought.
Coming soon, we'll be replacing the front yards with creeping thyme and maybe wild strawberries. I do need to see if wild strawberries, though, are a groundhog buffet. I hate those little fuckers.
The waste is NOT residential.
1. is something that many intensely don't want, and many with valid reasons; 2. will inarguably consume some of a resource which we all need, which is already becoming more scarce globally; 3. is in many cases contributing negatively to actual or perceived quality of life via DC noise and pollution; 4. threatens the livelihood of millions in the near term, even if it will improve outcomes over time; 5. is inextricably tied to and will substantially benefit a wealthy cohort, who is already seen as exerting undue control over populations governments ; 6. present potential systemic societal risk, yet is moving forward at breakneck speed; 7. has apparent total US government support, despite complaints about all the above, in a political environment which is frankly frightening, and where that government is exercising little restraint against - and collecting more sensitive data than ever about - citizens who protest against policy.
None of us should be surprised about this reaction.
You think AI is more valuable than food? Finding this really hard to compute
By your reasoning everyone should stop bathing so that we don't starve to death.
> According to its own projections, the data center Google wanted to build in Cerrillos was poised to use 169 liters of water every single second. In just one day, the data center would consume as much water as all 80,000 residents of Cerrillos use for drinking in a year. To make matters worse, it wanted to draw that water from an underground aquifer that had been under a decree that restricted how much water could be removed since 2005.
I can't take these objections seriously.
Well, once there are enough of these objections, you are forced to take them seriously whether you "can" or not, because they have the power to stop the party into which so much capital and valuations are tied up.
Or to put it another way, I can't take vaccine objectors seriously, but now there are enough of them that I don't have any choice. For better or worse, that's how democracy works.
Check the HARC report on this.
No, my major concern is about what happens to the waste? Does it just get dumped into the sewers? What else might that poison? Where do those sewers get their water treated, and where does that water go downstream? Because my “treated” water output back into the rivers and aquifers is your downstream water input for humans to drink, golf courses to water their grass, etc….
And what happens when there is a toxic spill? Does that go into creeks and rivers on the surface? Where do those creeks and rivers go? Where do they let out, in relation to the closest water intakes?
Does the toxic spill go into the karst geography below the land? Into the aquifers? What all is exactly down there, and how many decades or centuries might they be poisoned? I mean, you may be able to clean up a surface creek or river, but you can’t clean up the karst geography below the surface, or the aquifers.
You could easily poison an entire city with a single spill of toxic waste from a datacenter, and continue to poison that city for years and decades to come.
I do wonder how these radical skeptics --Paris Marx, Ed Zitron, Emily Bender, Alex Hanna, Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, etc.-- will be viewed by posterity, assuming such a thing exists. When the first catastrophe(s) strike, will they just fade into obscurity, or catch some of the blame?
...on second thought, the most likely answer is that they'll just seamlessly slide into a different brand of "Anti-AI"-ism, neither acknowledging nor facing redicule for the fact that they'd have to completely abandon their core arguments to do so. If I die of a molotov thrown in 2029 from someone in this crowd after spending years begging them to look up, I'm gonna be so miffed.
My city has tiered pricing for water consumption based on gallons consumed per-household. Instead of the vague pearl clutching here, why can't municipalities provide preferred pricing to residential customers and have the data center consumers subsidize ongoing water treatment and infrastructure build out to support the extra capacity. Seems like a win-win.
> "Unless the water providers are selling water too cheaply, what's the problem?"
Do you really not understand how coming in and making a bunch of people's water more expensive isn't popular with those people? You think the problem was that they had it too good with their cheap water and this is fixing that problem?
Then go to carbon-based computing to waste less heat.
That being said, water isn't like electricity, land, or a given year's tax revenues. It exists in a cycle and can be reused. It can be piped in from a potable water source, and you could probably develop a cooling loop that would return it back to the civic supply in potable form.
Other than somebody not wanting to because "b-b-b-b-but what about the shareholders!?", why not build that loop, put its components into mass production, and let economies of scale start cutting the cost while having less impact upon local water districts?
Makes sense.
They can afford to pay whatever the rates, they just want the public to give them more corporate welfare so they can get greedier while inflicting a surveillance state upon the masses.