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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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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.