this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Even the U.S. Government Says AI Requires Massive Amounts of Water (www.404media.co)
submitted 18 hours ago by who@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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https://web.archive.org/web/20250424134846/https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/

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[–] ExtantHuman@lemm.ee 13 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (6 children)

I've never seen any of these articles explain what this means. How is generative AI "using up" water. When a search uses a liter or whatever of water, what is happening to this water?

Every time that happens, a little more water is burned and a little more carbon is released.

This is just nonsense that makes me think the author doesn't know either.

Water is often used in cooling servers. But it's contained and reused. It doesn't go anywhere, it's the vehicle to move heat from the servers to wherever else. In a pipe. In a closed loop. All these doomsday AI articles act like water is being lost permanently due to the use of these servers. Even if the water was escaping the closed system...did no one pay attention to the water cycle unit in grade school?!

[–] RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world 10 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

It's not a sealed system like a personal computer uses. They're on a huge huge scale. They use evaporation / cooling towers. But those lose a certain amount of water to evaporation which needs to be replaced regularly.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

just... use rain water and condensation pipes. Idk why that would be an issue at all

[–] epyon22@programming.dev 4 points 13 hours ago

It also generates waste water that has to be sent to a treatment plant they can't dump it back into the environment because it's so concentrated with minerals

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