AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water
AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water
www.forbes.com
AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water
26 comments
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Had to check image was not AI
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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.
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seawater is not all saltwater, its a bunch of other chemicals in it too.
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Loss? They consume it?
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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
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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.
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I don't get this either, they just heat the water
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... 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.
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They’re trying to get ahead of those pesky regulations right now. That’s the problem.
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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.
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seawater is also corrosive and it will kill wildlife around it, that is not the ocean.
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pretty sure technetium is more scarce
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Can we stop using religious terms to describe the real world, please?
26 comments