It's no secret that AIs like ChatGPT require insane amounts of energy — but as a new paper reveals, they also seem to use an absurd amount of water, too.
So if it’s using water for evaporative cooling, which generally doesn’t give a shit about water quality, any word on what kind of water and where geographically it’s located? Because there’s a huge difference between using up clean tap water in California during a drought vs using minimally filtered river water in Florida during monsoon season, vs using raw sea water, vs using treated sewage and wastewater that needs to be discharged far from human settlements anyway if it wasn’t being evaporated in a data center.
I don’t even like OpenAI due to their other practices and am not defending them, but this seems like one of the less significant things to freak out over compared to the other shit they’ve pulled. If anything you should be worried way more about how much energy they use and whether that energy comes from fossil fuels.
So if it’s using water for evaporative cooling, which generally doesn’t give a shit about water quality, any word on what kind of water and where geographically it’s located? Because there’s a huge difference between using up clean tap water in California during a drought vs using minimally filtered river water in Florida during monsoon season, vs using raw sea water, vs using treated sewage and wastewater that needs to be discharged far from human settlements anyway if it wasn’t being evaporated in a data center.
I don’t even like OpenAI due to their other practices and am not defending them, but this seems like one of the less significant things to freak out over compared to the other shit they’ve pulled. If anything you should be worried way more about how much energy they use and whether that energy comes from fossil fuels.