Politicians Blame Los Angeles Fires on Explosion of AI Data Centers
Politicians have started pointing fingers at the burgeoning AI industry for water scarcity in California during the Los Angeles fire.
Case in point, Microsoft's water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the "construction of more data centers."
By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using "astronomical amounts of water" is a plain and simple lie.
Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that's not suitable for most other uses. Google's Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.
Their refusal to admit the problem will be the doom of us all.
People say New Orleans flooded because there was a category 5 hurricane.
But the better way to look at it is that New Orleans flooded because the government chose not to maintain the dikes as advised by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Or because it's basically a swampland and should be abandoned.
Oh
Forgiving who you are
For what you stand to gain
Just know that if you hide
It doesn't go away
There's so much hand waving and speculation here. For example, the amount of water that Microsoft uses to cool its data centers is a global number right? Not California specific. And for that matter, if those data centers are in the Bay area that's not going to matter for firefighting in Los Angeles, I wouldn't think. AI makes for kind of a convenient scapegoat right now.
Also, I thought we were blaming the fires on climate change and DEI?
Wasn't it the combination of a very dry year, lightning, and the Santa Ana winds?
I mean sure, putting out large fires is tricky, but we understand the cause of them pretty well... Fuel + oxygen + heat = fire
That's not a political thing, that's a physics thing. All the dei in the world won't spark a fire, extreme heat will, like a lightning strike (or a teenager with a tent, some wood and no brains).
It was also a lack of water in one of the reservoirs, a cut in the fire department budget, the fractured command structure of the local fire departments, the mayor being out of the country, failure to clear deadfall in the local forests, 100s of fire engines being down for maintenance, fire engines from other states being waylaid for emissions testing, fire equipment donated to Ukraine, a river being diverted into the ocean to save an endangered invasive fish species, and the fire department chief having a philosophy that it’s not her problem if people are stuck in a fire.
Fires get sparked all the time. That’s why we have fire departments: not to prevent fires from sparking, but to prevent them from spreading.
Oh... I misread the headline and though it said "explosion of data center." I was like "wow how did they not know a data center exploded that started the fire?? There must be some people working there....