Like water usage became THE face of the "anti-AI for environmental reasons" criticism.
But.... Water usage in these kinds of contexts is stupidly difficult to track, and you have confounding factors both directions.
First off: is the water clean? Drinkable? Is it made undrinkable by its "use"? In many cases, yes. In many other cases, no. If a data center is getting water from an environment, slightly warming it up, and putting it back into the environment clean, but warm, it's still a negative environmental impact. But it's a much different story than clean water being polluted beyond recovery. This is already an analysis that happens with power generation all the time: what does it mean for a power plant to "use", for example, seawater that it's spitting back into the ocean?
But now let's look at the other direction, and build on that last point, even. How DO you track water used for power generation? Cuz data centers need a fuckton of power- are you accounting for all of that extra water used in power generation? Who is estimating that number? It is VERY difficult to track- each data center has a different power mix with different water usages.
And are you accounting for the land? How valuable the water is in a particular spot? Water matters a lot more in the Southwest than it does in the east.
But here I am. Having this debate. Telling you this back and forth. We're on "debatable" ground. Like yeah, if you tally all the water use, it's excessive. Yeah, it's a negative impact. But there's debate. There's fudging. There's wiggle room.
And there's also MASSIVE elephants in the room.
Semiconductor and rare earth metal usage. MASSIVE power demands, which are usually being met with fossil fuels, pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Local scale pollutants. Land destruction.
There is no fudging those numbers and those experiences of the people around these data centers. There's no "oh it's difficult to get an exact number" or "well what do you mean by USE that material?" we KNOW their power consumptions and the mass of the materials they're using.
So why are we talking about water? The thing where there is wiggle room?
I don't like to be conspiracy brained but water being the face of "antiAI environmentalism" feels like it benefits these companies.
Idk. This is a very half baked rant, and def a crackpot thing. If you disagree with me then I totally get it, if you think I'm wrong I totally get it. I'm on your side here.
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