AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water

I hope you're all morally consistent and don't eat beef, which requires 15,000 litres of fresh water per kilo.

threeduck, you should stop eating beef.

For all the harm that this current AI craze has caused with its excessive power usage, I don’t get how water usage is a thing. I’ve been in many data centers with water cooled systems and they were all closed loop systems. The water was a heat transport mechanism. The weren’t using fresh water to gather the heat and then just dumping it on the ground. So how is this a problem?

Many of the AI/LLM focused DCs are using open loop systems. It's stupid as fuck but, it's cheap (as a large corporation).
- Yeah I’ve been reading up on this and it’s just stupidly wasteful.
They pump it out of aquifers then when done it goes down the drain to be processed and inevitably evaporated. The problem is we are pumping it out faster than it can naturally the aquifers. This causes long term environmental damage and at some point the aquifer will fail and no longer regenerate.
Welcome to the water wars.

Sparking concerns. A-ha. Right. I could have asked why this shit is not banned for this reason alone, but sadly I know the answer

Relatively easy, but expensive, problem to solve. We have all the salt water you need. Build nuclear plants and desalinate.

Stop allowing them to use the Colorado River.

seawater is not all saltwater, its a bunch of other chemicals in it too.
I'm pretty sure desalinization doesn't scale. The salt needs to go somewhere.
- we can use them for some sort of project like building a pyramid out of salt, and it will become the perfect venue to host league of legends tournaments.
- And it takes a lot of energy
- Why not just put it back in the fucking ocean?
- it scales fine (roughly linear at large scale), people just don't want to pay the energy cost because they think farms need cheap water.

I'm no expert by any means but why not just filter the salt out of fucking sea water?

Because it’s expensive to do that at scale. I’m sure we’ll get to a point where it’s necessary to do that, but the capitalist machine doesn’t want to “waste money” on that.
Capitalism is a fucking disease.
- Capitalism is annoying yes but it's leaps and bounds better than communism
The real shortage is the shortage of usable energy.
Entropy is what makes you able to use energy, but also what makes you lose energy.

Don’t worry, I’ll stop using my swamp cooler this summer

Had to check image was not AI

Loss? They consume it?

No, they don't consume. Instead, they use it for cooling their servers. You might have heard of a way to cool a computer that is more effective than a fan called water cooling. It basically uses water to absorb the hot air from the GPU/CPU to be sent to the radiator where the water is cooled and sent back to be pumped and continue the cycle. This is called a closed-loop water cooling system. These big "AI" databases are also using water to cool the components like how they're being used in the computer, but unlike the example, it's not a closed-loop water cooling system, meaning that instead of the water being reused, it instead gets evaporated and participates in the water cycle. The problem with this is that water used in these open-loop systems is evaporated, meaning it is remove from the local water cycles, making fresh water less accessible in areas that already face shortages, so while the amount of fresh water on Earth stays the same, it becomes inaccessible to the people, which leads to the current situation where more than a billion people don't have enough access to fresh water while big "AI" databases are using over 100 million liters daily. This is only one of the alarming consequences of "AI". This however could be easily fixed by using a closed-loop water cooling systems that use renuable energy sources for the energy required to pump and cool the system. However, sadly, in our current capitalist society, the rich are too greedy and corrupt to save lives and actually help the people.
https://tube.blahaj.zone/w/qEcczobJGVGmBe2rbWJkMN
There is air cooled water chillers and water cooled water chillers. Depending on what the companies go with they could have water cooled chillers causing the water loss. Air cooled chillers don't really have that problem because they don't have the same cooling situation. I attached a video of a water cooled chiller
I don't get this either, they just heat the water

... 71% of the earth's surface is covered in water.

Any water a data center uses comes out the other side as... Warm water and evaporation. It's not lost to the world or anything. It's just moving rain elsewhere.

AI datacenters are not latency sensitive so they can easily be built in optimal energy/water locations going forward. Just regulate them like we do other industries.

Did you just wrote that AI is increasing size of El Nino because of increased evaporation ? We can sue technological companies for hurricane damages ? Great !
Seawater cannot be used for cooling, salt buildup will kill the system. Water involved in human activity is 100% freshwater, which is the the most scarce resource as in the article (human accessible is 1% of whole water). Desallination is energy intense process too.
- seawater is also corrosive and it will kill wildlife around it, that is not the ocean.
- pretty sure technetium is more scarce
They’re trying to get ahead of those pesky regulations right now. That’s the problem.

Can we stop using religious terms to describe the real world, please?

I think you're maybe confusing scarce with sacred?
- rereads the title
  Yes, that would be accurate.
  Sorry for the confusion, and thank you for letting me know.
Which one is the religious term?
- The word "scarce", when misreading it as "sacred", when I just woke up