My views on AI are pretty easy to game out if you’ve been following my work for more than a couple of minutes, but I can narrow it down into a few key sound bites:
- AI should be emptying my dishwasher, not making the movies I watch.
- No matter what these CEOs tell you, the goal of AI is to replace you. Make you redundant at work, letting them lay you off and increasing their own profit margins. Any other stated goal is a lie.
- The AI bubble will burst.
- It will make humanity dumber and lazier (Watch Pixar’s Wall-e)
I’m also keenly aware of how much energy AI uses, and to say our grids are unprepared, well, they’re really fucking unprepared. This is already causing electricity prices to go up, as ever, we are ruled by the laws of supply and demand; and the never ending search for endless profit.
While it’s all a shit show, there was an aspect of it that I was ridiculously unaware of.
All these massive data centers they’re building? Besides the amount of electricity they consume, the stupid amount of water that’s evaporated to keep those CPUs cool is bloody insane.
How much water?
Estimates put AI water usage at between 300 – 800 billion liters of water in 2025.
To put that into context, the entire bottled water industry consumed 446 billion liters in 2024.
And if that’s not enough, a lot of these data centers are in water stressed locales, meaning this could affect people’s access to clean drinking water.
So yeah.
That future AI is promising us?
Looks bleak, and super dry.
-sohmer
