Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory.

Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.

> have to eat to live

Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!

A pretty easy 'optional' comparison would be golf course watering. I saw a much more detailed write up on this that I can't find now, but a quick google shows 500 billion gallons a year for US golf courses and 180 billion gallons a year for all data centers, not just AI data centers.

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking

Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.

In the article it lists a data point that beer production in Arizona used more water than the data centers in Arizona. People may vehemently disagree, but we absolutely do not need beer. Would I trade beer for AI? That's an easy choice, AI every time. If you just keep track of the water to keep a person alive and the bare minimum water required for agriculture (which isn't particularly efficient in most cases), it would be a fraction of a fraction of what we use now.

Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.

This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately.

Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.

We absolutely do not need to waste as much water as we do on agriculture. Their is more efficient watering systems, crops that do not feed humans, and inefficient crops that aren't needed. Any one of those improvements would dwarf the water usage by AI.

Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live.

Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage.

Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.

> Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading

Kind of reminds me of things like "low fat" labels on foods that have little fat anyway, but tons of sugar.

In this case, electricity is the elephant in the room.

> we have to eat to live

You don't have to eat a burger.

Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).

We don't need AI in the same way we don't need washing machines and dryers. Like, sure, we don't need a machine to do our laundry, just like we don't need an AI to do our skilled labor, but it sure saves us a lot of time and energy.

It seems strange to draw the line at car washes.

But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?

A lot of agricultural water usage (more water than AI) is for growing corn to turn into ethanol so we can add it to gasoline. It's not a small amount either, 40% of all corn in the US is used for this purpose.

> Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?).

A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.

This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory.

If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.

The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.

What about golf courses which use up 476 Billion of water every year? Way more than data centers. People complain about Nestle using water in californa for bottled water but it doesn't compare to what single golf course uses in a year.

There's not really any NEED to grow almonds. Most agriculture in California is not required to sustain life in CA. However, without AI people wouldn't have jobs that could afford CA rents, so AI is required so people can live. Lets get rid of unnecessary uses like agriculture, unless farmers can justify that the usage is actually required to sustain life.

If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.

My understanding is that data centers (at least in LA) are using mostly grey/industrial water, not water you can consume or use for agriculture. It feels like we're measuring water as one entity when not all water is equally useful to a human.

Yeah, but data centers allow for jobs which gives people money to buy food.

one of the biggest health problems in US is obesity. 30 to 40% of the food produced in US goes to waste.

Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans.

It's a strawman.

Yes and no. We shouldn't compare datacenter water usage to residential water usage. We should compare it to industrial water usage, as that is what it is. The question like "how does datacenter water cooling compares to concrete factory water cooling?" makes some sense from engineering perspective, as you are comparing oranges to oranges to a degree.

Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...

Loads of agricultural water usage in the western states is on totally optional stuff like beef and almonds

Agricultural water usage distribution prioritizes luxury consumption and drought areas are subsidized

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