https://www.techpolicy.press/why-we-dont-know-ais-true-water-footprint/
"If the artificial intelligence boom is felt anywhere in Europe, it’s in the
flashy coworking spaces of Barcelona. Home to the ‘second office’ of over 9,000
companies, the city is an ideal location for a work trip: year-round sunshine,
reasonably-priced restaurants, and plenty of tourism geared towards English
speakers. Spain is investing heavily in digital infrastructure and currently
has the fastest rate of data center expansion in Europe. One town in the
metropolitan area of Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Vallés, will shortly become home
to four new data centers, some of which are explicitly designed to be AI-ready.
But Barcelona’s thriving startup scene is only a small part of the picture. The
conversation no one wants to have is that it’s still impossible to calculate
how many resources the infrastructure of AI needs to run at scale—including
water, a resource Spain is rapidly running out of, with 78% of its landmass
threatened by desertification. By choosing AI industry-driven growth today,
will urban planners in Spain jeopardize their water tomorrow?
When generative AI first started dominating headlines following the release of
OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2021, concerning reports emerged about how much water and
energy it takes to train a large language model. Now that the technology is
being incorporated into increasing numbers of consumer applications, from
fitness apps to Google search, it’s becoming apparent that the problem is not
limited to the creation process but to its mass daily usage too. This is due to
the resource demands of data centers, the warehouses of computers that process
every click and scroll users make on cloud-based applications, including online
AI tools. Cloud computing takes little energy on the end users’ device not
because technology has evolved to a point where processing is ephemeral—though
it appears so to the end user—but because the processing is outsourced to a
computer in a data center. These “server farms” require power equivalent to
heavy industry and run without interruption, 24/7, 365 days per year. They also
depend on cooling systems to ensure their rows of servers do not overheat and
malfunction, which use electricity and water.
There are different techniques to cool a data center, and while the most
environmentally conscious choice will depend on its location, water or energy
usage generally sit at opposite ends of a see-saw: if usage of one is
decreased, the other must be increased to compensate. If operators use
evaporative cooling—whereby warm air from the data center is passed over water
and evaporated in a cooling tower—electricity usage will plummet, but
inordinate amounts of water are required. If they use a closed-loop
system—where water is cooled with air conditioning and piped to cool down
servers, returning to be cooled again—operators will use far less water but an
outsized amount of electricity. Most modern data centers combine one of these
methods with some degree of free cooling which, as the name suggests, involves
using fans to blow fresh outside air into servers. However, except in very rare
circumstances, this method is not sufficient on its own. In short, there’s no
getting around the fact that the data centers consume water."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
