The Little Talked About Cost of Using AI [video]

We all know the importance of taking care of our earth's precious resources and that there are issues with technology and doing so. Electric cars — anything with a lithium battery — isn't helping the environment as much as the green wordsmiths would love us to believe.

When looking at the cobalt mines in the Congo, and that electricity in the US is generated primarily by coal powered plants it shouldn’t have shocked me so much to read a recent article by the Associated Press about the insane amount of water required for us to use artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.

Think Big Tech, think California. Des Moines, Iowa doesn't really sound like the place you'd imagine generative AI developing, but a huge Microsoft data center is located there. Microsoft is a mega moolah funder of Open AI whose ChatGPT generates away amongst the Iowan cows and corn fields.

Large tech corporations are quiet about how their AI is being fed with content (though we’re getting ideas from all the copyright infringement info that keeps coming out,) but also the resources used at the buildings the computers reside in.

Once you know that for 5 to 50 prompts or questions in ChatGPT, depending on the server locations and the weather there, about 16oz of water is required, it doesn’t take much of a visual for that whole pallet sitting outside your local gas station to go bye, bye — does it?

It makes one reconsider being so laissez faire about hitting ChatGPT’s “Generate” button.

WTH.

It’s no surprise then that Microsoft disclosed its water consumption around the globe spiked by 34% from 2021 to 2022! And when you think that 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic size swimming pools of water were used in that timeframe, it makes you reassess how we're all using AI. It's everywhere, whether blatantly or quietly behind-the-scenes.

If you're a marketer like me, you can't get away from AI! All the SaaS tools are loaded with it, from Canva to Notion, and innumerable other cloud based services. Google's not much better than Microsoft when it comes to water usage. They reported a 20% growth in their water use for the same period.

14% less than Microsoft, but still way too much.

And they're not the only companies, so it's kind of scary that a precious resource like water is being guzzled around the globe in large data centers.

While we're talking about large data centers, the NSA’s massive data center in Utah has pretty much gone dark on its water usage. A quick search to find out how much the NSA's data center guzzles and you're looking at information from a decade ago, when it was reporting 1.7 million gallons a day.

AI's need for water is really the same as any data center's need for water. Last year, the United States had about 2,600 data centers, most of them around Dallas, the San Fran Bay Area, and LA. Some don’t use as much water as others according to reports, but when we have droughts and farming being affected by a lack of water, it really makes you think about how important it is to be able to take a bite, rather than use up a byte.

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