this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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This is not how any of this works. Hundreds of GWh is how much YouTube usage consumes in less than a week. If it was comparable to cutting down a forest we would be out of forests a decade ago.
If you watch an hour of YouTube daily you are using more energy (and thus water) than someone querying ChatGPT 60 times a day, even with training costs amortized.
Do they need to build dozens of gas turbines to run YouTube for me to watch it for an hour?
The AI buildout is happening so fast that the grid can't support it, you need to account for that.
They did need to build gas and coal power plants to let you watch YouTube back when it was becoming popular, yes. Their share in the new generation capacity was very high back then.
I actually 100% agree that we should not be building more datacenters. Current-gen (and even last-gen) local LLMs are very good already, and we are past the point of diminishing returns.
USians are growing so much alfalfa in some of their deserts that it leaves locals without water for residential use or even drinking. It's not a problem exclusive to data centers.
If anything, if we can re-focus the energy infrastructure buildout to renewables, this would be an immensely good thing. Once the AI bubble pops and those datacenters become useless, the excess power generation capacity can be used for home and train electrification.
No, they did not need to build new gas and coal plants for YouTube, what the fuck are you talking about? We were closing coal plants before the AI datacenter boom, now they're trying to reopen them. They're actually building unregulated off-grid gas turbines and dreaming up miniature nuclear power plants to power the data centers, that's totally different than what they did to build YouTube.
People hate AI and it sounds like what you're saying is we shouldn't care about AI water or energy use because of cars, flesh, planes, and YouTube. All that does is make people hate you. You care about messaging, right? Then what you should actually be doing is using AI as the starting point to make people start caring about those other things too.
i complain about that, too
you're only allowed to solve one problem at a time. i'm very clever you see so i don't need to educate myself about that but you should perhaps ponder upon it.
"I've cut down a forest for you, now here are your toothpicks. You have to use them otherwise that forest was cut down for nothing. You should be grateful. That matchstick factory over there cut down two forests last week."
Your analogy is quite apt actually. You are blaming people for using toothpicks and matches while they are completely irrelevant to deforestation, accounting for (rounded) 0.0% of deforestation worldwide. Interestingly, beef production is the worst issue here, accounting for ~40%.
In a similar way, all AI usage, including the much more wasteful video genAI, is accounting for ~1-2% of energy use worldwide, on the same order of magnitude as YouTube. Meanwhile personal cars is like 20%
lookit, intellekshual word twisting and lying at the same time... what does anyone else think about me pointing out how they ignored the basic premise of the qUiTe ApT analogy? waste of my time or not?
Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
In the next 2 years, energy usage of Youtube will largely stay stable, while energy usage of LLMs is projected to keep increasing exponentially.
liar