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‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought
(www.thetimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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Yes, the vast majority are closed loop systems and the water isn't really used up, like a lot of these headlines imply.
That's not to say the energy being used can't be put to better uses, though.
Not used up per se but sequestered. It's water that nobody will ever get to drink or use for crops, etc.
The math on this doesn't really check out. The USA uses 322 billion gallons of fresh water per day. A hyperscale datacenter uses only 5 million gallons per day.
There are about 1,000 hyperscale datacenters in the USA, so that comes out to 5 billion gallons of water every day.
That's 1.5% of our annual freshwater usage, half of which is in closed loop systems and not going anywhere, and the other half being returned to the atmosphere where it will rain back down as fresh water again.
And of course, the water cycle doesn't really care about national borders or annual evaporation rates so much, and there is about 1 quintillion gallons of liquid fresh water available worldwide, so its not like sequestering 5 million gallons really offsets the available freshwater needed for hydration and agriculture.
It could be used for other things like district heating at least.
Datacenters are usually not located where this would be useful. They're placed where space and energy are cheap, because everything they do only needs Internet access. At most they'd heat the rest of the building for whatever office space there is.