During the 1986-1992 California drought, we were informed in the San Francisco Bay Area region that water service prices were going to go up unless we conserved strictly.
They said this to a bunch of California hippies, on account that we were in California.
So we way got on board. We stopped flushing. Any water that was rendered non-potable we’d repurpose for watering plants or filter it for second use. Japanese naval baths (weird tiny bowl seats and a sponge, used in the Imperial Navy, WWII) got popular so people were keeping clean via a tenth of normal water usage.
We conserved too much according to the water department and they raised prices anyway.
This sparked some investigations (by journalists, since investigative journalism was still a thing then) and found that agriculture got water for much cheaper, and was still using it once before flushing it (now laced with pesticides) out into the sea. Needless to say, we conservationist hippies were livid.
It’s still a problem, as the utility companies routinely lobby our congress and governor (and Newsom may know how to be a California liberal, but he’s still a Dianne-Feinstein-style ( / Nancy-Pelosi style) money-grubbing neoliberal. He just has game, especially when opposed to far right idiots. The setup in Monster’s Inc (power crisis in a city where scream is the principal power source) was inspired by the Enron fraud affair leading to rolling blackouts and Texas siphoning off California’s general fund. And our governments from Schwarzenegger (who I will never forgive) to Newsom are in the pocket of PG&E. (I’m on SMUD now and my bill is conspicuously less.)
Also, according to Climate Town, the Sauds own a lot of California farmland, where they grow alfalfa to import to the mid-east to feed their cows. Alfalfa crops are one of the most water hungry, and is one of the big ways beef is driving the climate crisis (and towards a massive food shortage and global famine!) and the water tables, to which they have access and first-tap rights, gets lower every year. 🕙
So I suspect that the Texas AI centers are getting water at a cheaper rate than private homes. Maybe it’s something to get active about.
Why the fuck do they alway pick the driest places to use the most water. Fucking morons
I always rant about tech moving to Austin.
They need low heat, reliable power, cheap / fast internet, and an abundance of water.
Texas is literally none of those things.
We have low regulations though. Which is why they do it.
Seems like the real problem is that companies aren’t being charged enough for their excessive water usage.
It’s no surprise this is happening in the Land of Useful Idiots and Dipshits, texas.
I’m not joking when i say that not using ai is mostly improving my reasoning. Probably, each time I used it, i had to subconsciously offset some thinking to that brainless machine. I’m fine the way I am, i know it’s being propped up as some ultimate solution but my creative output improved too.
We’re probably offsetting some thinking and memorisation to a computer with a complete lack of experience of the real world, and it’s somehow being presented as acceptable. I do n’t think it’s fine.
They deregulated shower heads just in time.
Stoopid Texans. You’ve got the guns, start using the things. If they need cooling, maybe aerate a few blocks of servers for them.
Now you got me wondering if we can shoot the heat away from AI datacenters. /s
You should complain whenever million gallons of water are wasted by corporations seeking profits or by governments for their shady operations. Not just when it’s about AI.
This but just the Microsoft logo lol
“Since Microsoft dropped its DEI initiatives, it’s good actually!”
So not only are Corporations… People
Now they are more important people than regular citizens?
Under capitalism they always were. Just take a close look at exactly who the “Founding Fathers” were.
I don’t understand why AI data centers would CONSUME water. Once they fill up their chiller loops, then… that’s it, right?
It’s hard for me to imagine them relying on the temperature of the incoming water, and dumping all the warm water as discharge.
From what I’ve seen it’s “not worth the effort or expense” to reuse the water. Some of them literally just send tap water through the cooling loops and then into the sewer drains
They’re probably using cooling towers, which cool through evaporation. They should be using reclaimed though.
This is the right answer. They use evaporative cooling. Which does save a lot of power so they can claim to be “green”.
Hmm, I wonder if that plays into the wild and frequent thunderstorms in Texas now.
Its got to be the data centers or global warming overall (and its shifting of the Jetstream’s).
As long as it is cheaper to buy water, then evaporate it, big firms will continue to do so.
With a COP of around 15 and up it is difficult to argue with the economy of this.
Local regulation would be required, but that would need politicians who don’t suck.
Because the massive stacks of high-powered chips that they use, tend to get very hot. They don’t use the kind of computers that work through passive cooling.
I say, as my Laptop burns into my lap.
I worked 10 years at a data center, all that water is recycled - it is very carefully chemically balanced so as to not corrode the pipes and pumps, no they do not use it once and dump it out.
Stinky teens need shirts that point the blame at Microsoft. Get ripe and hang out with old people.
The priorities are completly screwd up. If they found a way to power the AI datacenters with humans, Matrix style, would they ask Texans to sacrifice their first borns to do so?
Prerequisite to that would be banning abortions so that tracks
Narrator voice: in fact that is what they did
Google “Roko’s Basilisk”!
elon is currrently using the aquifer drinking water under memphis to cool grok. he’s also powering it with generators and smogging out the city.
please do not use grok.
I don’t care, nothing will come inbetween me and my boi, mecha hitler!
/j if that wasn’t obvious
mecha hitler!
So someone fed it Cards Against Humanity, huh?
Ol’ Muskie can’t the King of Edgelords unless Cars Against Humanity is feed into his LLM.
Can’t they just use seawater or use air cooling?
A lot of the need is due to the heat density of the GPUs used for GenAI. Could they build less densely? Yes, and they likely already are but need to go further. I have seen data centers with racks less than half (I think it was closer to one quarter) populated for energy density issues.
Could they use sea water? Sea water causes more corrosion. (I am uncertain if this data center is close to the ocean.)
Can’t they just make sub 75w GPUs that require basic cooling?
that can also do GenAI work for a similar “hardware cost per output”? No
FYI, the server hosts for the cards often have eight of the cards each. The power draw becomes the host server’s RAM and CPU, plus eight times 750w (or whatever). It scales up quickly.
Seems like optimization issue.
If they can’t train and run a big ass ai model on igpu power at very fast speeds then they are useless as developer companies.
So much bloat.
WTF don’t they just use a closed geothermal loop?
Im actually curious on how much energy can be reused from heat alone.
Move the operation to someplace cold, start up a little town around it and provide heat as a utility.
This is already happening in Iceland. Iceland is so cold, AI datacenters can just use the passive cooling from the environment.
Hopefully we’ll see more development in Greenland for similar reasons.
Start moving where it’s cold, people. That’s where the new ‘coasts’ will be.
I’m about 100 miles inland in a middle lat, I figure it’ll come to me.
don’t give them ideas, or they’ll thaw and colonize the antarctic
Frost punk has entered the chat.
I’m not sure that’s not already the plan.
