Anonymous #1 6d

Not that much. Most of the claims about water usage were based on one paper that looked at plans for a data center in Chile but the author mistranslated the unit and was off by a factor of 1000 when converting it

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Anonymous #2 6d

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/i-cant-find-any-instances-of-data Pretty long article but this section is a key one

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Anonymous #2 6d

oh that’s the wrong article, sorry. That’s the issues with most claims about AI water usage. The issues with Empire of AI’s claims specifically got their own article 😭 https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading She has since updated the book and acknowledged the mistake

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Anonymous #2 6d

The other misleading trick many people use is that they say “data center use millions of gallons of water” with no other context. Most people think that most of that water is just for cooling equipment in the data center, but they’re actually including water usage during power generation. If they want to do that, they should make that clear so people know when they compare it to other water-intensive processes like denim and almond milk production

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Anonymous #2 6d

Even if you take the most extreme estimate and say that each query uses 500 mL of water, 20k queries uses slightly less water than the water used to manufacture one pair of jeans (taking into account the entire process, including growing cotton)

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