AI uses less water than the public thinks

The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect.

It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage.

Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.

How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at.

1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.

If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.

This comment could have been someone's hamburger!

Based in Colorado.

The important difference WRT beer is that the water used in the process likely in a larger part goes towards... the beer itself. This in turn is going into the person who drinks it. So, the water here is actually hydrating human beings.

This can be argued as one of the 2-3 absolutely necessary uses of water. Hydrating people.

So, spending less than the beer industry is not that great of an achievement.

However, a casual reader may see comparison to "beer" and think "oh yeah, beer, just a random thing out of a million, so yeah AI is totally ordinary".

Which is a very incorrect conclusion to reach.

This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods.

Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.

Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen

They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.

We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to.

This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it.

Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system.

[0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.

Now measure the amount of electricity the same prompt will use in 6 years when both algorithmic efficiency and 3-4 generations of silicon lower that by 95% (or more).

Will your microwave become 95% more efficient over the next 6 years? No.

Also how many video prompts will the average person run in a given year? Almost certainly 0. I heavily use AI daily and have probably played with AI video less than 4 times, ever.

Yet certainly the average person will use 20,000-100,000 microwave minutes over their lifetime. I use my microwave for 2-3 minutes every day at lunch for example.

From first principles, the idea that electricity use = bad is wrong. If your electricity comes from burning coal or lignite, then obviously yes using that electricity has bad externalities.

But a french person running their microwave on Nuclear powered grids? This is good. Dirty energy sources is the problem. Not energy use itself.

> U.S. specific estimates put beef water use at 317, 441 and 808 gallons per pound of boneless beef when precipitation water is not accounted for in calculations.

So, let's just say around 400 gallons of water per pound of beef if you don't include rainfall use.

Each almond takes about a gallon of water to grow: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise

A "drop" is not well defined, but some math says there's about 75,000 drops in a gallon: https://www.quora.com/How-many-drops-of-water-can-fit-into-o...

Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.

That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.

In other words, bringing up some anecdotal, hyper specific (how many meat eaters just "have a few cows"?) information says absolutely nothing about the truth of the matter, but a lot about what you believe constitutes an argument.

So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.

> Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.

Sure but we are talking about whether the enormous investment into AI infrastructure is prudent or not. Also I reckon most people on here made a living just fine before everything moved to remote data centers, and many if not most HNers workloads could run on individual machines... But that's another conversation.

My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out.

But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/industrial users, in a way that pushes them toward non-potable sources wherever possible.

A fun Texas water fact I always bring up: the entire state’s monthly freshwater use is roughly a week of freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay. Texas would be the 8th-largest GDP in the world if it were a country, and its whole monthly freshwater demand is basically a few months of water that the Chesapeake just dumps into the ocean. (Of course, estuaries make use of the water so it's not just wasted but it's illustrative imo)

Another fun comparison point is yearly Texas uses 0.08% the volume of the Great Lakes in freshwater but ~ 30-50% of the volume of all the lakes in Texas.

We've got a lot of water but it's not distributed evenly and we should probably build some sort of water pipeline eventually so water rich states can sell to water poor states.

Again, this is all just speculation by someone who knows not a damn thing about municipal water management.

In a far science fiction future, I could e.g. imagine connecting LLM inference data centers to a global data network instead of always having to drive up to them to ask my prompts.

When that water source is underground wells, this can take years (on the fast end) or decades (on the moderate end) to get back down. Look at California's water issue -- so many wells extracting water for farming has changed the land topography.

Also, when water 'comes back', it might come back in the ocean and not on land... reducing the available fresh water without desalination.

Data centers need the water to cool... but maybe there's room to find incentives for them to do so while making sure our water bills don't go up like our electric bills are because of the extra load they are putting on utilities.

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/virginia_datacenter_w...

"Since the technology uses synthetic fluids, it requires significantly less water than other approaches." This is like saying that a new car radiator uses less water than an old water-based one, like yeah technically it requires water to work but you aren't boiling it away.

It does mention the real ways to use less water too, either chillers (which use way more power) or running in a colder climate.

FWIW the comment is just at +2 at the moment, I think it is just at the top of the thread because it is recent and has discussion.

This suggests a simple fix: charge more to the datacenters (not people) for the water, to make the other option competitive.

No need to throw baby with the ... erm, bathwater.

There are already have a couple in Calgary and they're hooked directly to the grid. The cost of electricity for the city shot up at the same time. Also, there have been a few brownouts caused by them not being ready to handle late night draws from those data centres.

That's at least what I'm seeing. Though, admittedly, it's from older project articles. Maybe something has changed in recent months?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ai-data-centre-albert...

That doesn't seem to be an unusual state of affairs at all; it instead seems like a very normal way of doing things.

> shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe.

Is rare earth mining specifically for semiconductor manufacturing actually a significant driver? My intuition is that rare earth and most raw material mining would be driven much more by EV car motors and batteries.

Certainly you can say all energy use is indirectly responsible for the pollution of the oil, solar, wind, etc. I don't disagree at all! I'm say in-addition to the pollution of raw inputs like energy - contemporary industries have additional and unavoidable side products.

> are earth mining harms millions around the globe.

Those mines are going to operate day after day because it's unfortunately the best economic opportunity in those areas. Those areas deserve our support to improve their socioeconomic realities but opposition to data centers in rich countries does not suddenly provide better opportunities to those regions.

Ah yes, those invaluable tens of jobs created by DCs....