Why is the article using "match" and "triple" in the same sentence for things that are pretty much in the same order of magnitude?
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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triples that of 650 million
Wouldn't saying nearly as much as 2 billion people be the same and more efficient?
Not if they're referencing a specific 650 million. North America has about that many people but punches well above its weight in power usage per capita.
Perhaps it was written by AI
In other news, 20% of people use 3 times as much water per year as the other 80% do in a month.
This completely ignores that fresh water production is regional. I'm tired of that shit. It's something else to use x amount of water in Amazon jungle and something else to use same amount in the desert. The notion that you could just provide third world countries with water from US is moronic.
And it will be our fault that there aren't enough resources for the data centers just like it's our fault the climate is changing. If only we didn't use AC when it was needed, we could have saved the world /s
The Epstein class will never be at fault.
Then they'll "lay off" those people.
You'll tell people that and then they keep using AI...
Yes ... Or maybe the bubble will collapse, and it won't. I'm thinking the latter is more likely, but who can say what the future will bring.
That depends how much control of the world we all surrender to our betters.
I might be going against the grain here but honestly it doesnt seem like that much. This article is really misleading in how it frames these stats.
It makes sense with the context in the article, but "triples that of 650 million" is a very strange way to say "almost 2 billion".
Also funny that the other big number, 1.3 billion, is literally double 650 million. Maybe they split it it up because the numbers are tied to specific geographic areas with specific water/energy quantities but yeah it does not read very well
Written by ai?
Why mix units? Match 1.3billion for water. Why not say match 1.95 billion for power, instead of 3x650 million.
Probably because they refer to the bottom 650 million and the number gets less impressive as you move to people who actually have daily access to a power grid.
Maybe they did the text with an AI.
Once again: stop letting them use potable fucking drinking water it makes no sense
I’m dumb as a brick - why can’t they build the AI centres in very cold regions and just pump air in and out?
Countries in cold regions have governments and laws.
The answer is always money
The infrastructure thats needed isnt always there, nor the people to run or build it.
You cant power it only off solar now because its so far north the array would need to be crazy big, and wouldn't be enough in the winter.
Also even as you go far north summers can still be hot and you'd still need a way to cool it during those times which will require the same water flow capacity even if its for less overall days, so you still need to build 2 cooling systems instead of 1.
It still seems crazy to build these things where they often do, but going somewhere really cold isnt simple.
Edit: also sovereignty of the data center. A US company would prefer to keep it in the US which would give Alaska as an option.
I thought the majority of their water consumption is indirect via electricity consumption. If we could stop burning freaking coal that would be a start.
But yes, also stop using potable water for evaporative cooling!!
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Fuck this.
I remember in the 00s imagining what AI might be like.
I did not imagine soulless chat bot that was going to steal all the water.
Makes no sense. (I know that there are countries without proper regulation, but) around here they would simply not be allowed to use that much water.
They would need to build them in a way to not use that much water for cooling, and this would be controlled by officials during planning,build and operation.
They don't use that much water through cooling. Or rather, evaporative cooling is rarely used because it's unreliable outside of dry, desert climates.
Rather, most of the water footprint comes from electricity generation (e.g. coal, gas, nuclear) which evaporate freshwater to spin turbines.
Normal radiators are the goto option to cool down heated water which can then be re-used.
Tech bros in general always seem to do it anyway and deal with complaints afterwards, preferably after lobbying or sueing to remove regulations.
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Many states with proper regulation would never allow this for literally any other industry without extensive permitting, and rightfully forcing the company to build its own treatment plants to support the increased load on existing systems
But somehow, nope. Fuck all that I guess.
A note: “AI” doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s not using evaporative cooling out of necessity. It’s just the absolute cheapest, fastest way to cool en masse. Just like slamming a gas generator down on a site, or housing servers in tents:
They could take an extra second to build something efficient, and they did not.
Or, they could just not use waste so many GPUs on “intelligence scaling” that does not scale. Like most non-US firms do, just fine. But FOMO.
In other words, non technical decision makers, who don’t understand how transformers models even work, dictated this would happen. It’s not even a sane business planning decision, and they’re too rich to face any consequences now.
Good use of our resources
What if we as a society decided to just not?
That would be truly a modern miracle then
Why don't they make this the first problem AI should solve?
It's stupid how much they are pouring into hardware that might be vastly obsolete. By the time AI becomes truly intelligent, there may be specialized chips that are efficient at running models that blow GPUs out of the water.
Look at how it happened to bitcoin mining. Nobody serious is using a GPU to mine when ASIC is available.
However, I don't see all this hardware hitting the second hand market once a better solution is found. I'm sure they will keep trying to make compute hard to get for the average person so they can rent out their servers for a crazy price.
Its worse. The expected life span of the compute server hardware is 2 years. The processors cannot be re-purposed and the memory needs to be re-packaged in a non-novel way. They will most likely send it too ewaste processing to get the precious and rare earth metals back.
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