this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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The average for farm land is around 500,000 gallons per acre per year. Using the same amount of water as 5,000 acres of farmland to run >25% of the nation’s cloud resources isn’t enormous. Not that they couldn’t do better.
Imagine trying to compare AI to food production.
Do you really need someone to explain why they're different, and why one might be worth it while the other isn't?
The article is about AWS data centers not AI compute specifically. That’s the cloud infrastructure for a lot of the web. The comparison to agriculture is about scale, not the importance of the Internet vs. agriculture. Using 0.011% of the water as the farms in Kansas to power 25% of the Internet is nothing.
Yeah, I've stopped pointing out how relatively insignificant the water use is on Lemmy. That fact isn't met fondly here, usually.