You may have heard that having a conversation with ChatGPT is the climate equivalent of pouring out a bottle of water. In fact, that is likely an underestimate. In the 3rd installment in our series on the climate costs of AI, we tackle AI’s unquenchable thirst. www.youtube.com/watch?v=s67L...

The bottled water estimates are from a 2023 study from UC-Riverside. But the real numbers are likely much worse. They studied older, smaller AI models running in big tech owned data centers. Today AI is bigger and often hosted in less efficient 3rd party data centers. arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271

You can see the rising water usage of AI in the numbers. In 2022 Microsoft water consumption rose 34% and Google’s rose 22%. In 2023 Microsoft’s entire operations, including all data centers, consumed enough water to fill 15.6 billion water bottles.

And there’s another problem for AI data centers: it’s hard to be both water and carbon efficient. Places that are hot and dry tend to be good for solar power, and places that are cool tend to use more water to generate electricity. So companies may have to pick which climate goal to sacrifice.