This isn't an argument for permitting heavy AI usage, it's an argument against eating meat.
If you think AI usage is bad for the environment, but you eat meat, you need to understand the cognitive dissonance at play.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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show your work!
It's kinda hard to show work because the exact usage for LLM's has a lot of variance.
But even with the most liberal values, this is absolutely true.
A single beef burger can take 1500-2500 litres to produce.
Sending a few hundred queries to your chosen LLM could be 1-5 litres, depending on model, and complexity.
I'm more afraid of energy usage and the resulting emmissions TBH.
Additionally, USING any kind of AI causes issues, but as far as I know the biggest issue is TRAINING the models.
I'm open to what you're presenting, but I'm not sure the data you are showing is comparable.
It looks like dairy is 1555T (trillion?) liters of water per ? (daily glass of milk?). That doesn't sound right. Seems like it could be the entire annual water use in the dairy industry is 1555T. I have no reference frame for that, so could be, I have no idea.
The annual water use per person who heavily uses an LLM is shown as ~20B liters.
If those are the are the metrics being compared, they shouldn't be, because they aren't comparable. One would be water for an entire industry, the other is per user.
If you can provide more context, I'd appreciate it.
Edit: missed the "B"s in the LLM numbers, thought they were "8"s. Holy shit that's a huge waste of water, for daily LLM use.
That is not to say anything about the animal farm use levels which are astounding, but having no reference frame for those numbers, so I can't really place them in my mind.
I think they just posted two unrelated pictures. The first one is for one burger, the second one shows water usage of industries and companies and those numbers are not for individual users. The numbers are also consistent with numbers I’ve seen elsewhere.
Data centers do consume a lot of energy and water, but nowhere near the cattle/dairy industry. One point to keep in mind though is that this is a direct comparison of primary water use of these industries. If they’re building nuclear power plants specifically for data centers, maybe their water use should be included too - a nuclear power plant uses more water than a data center by orders of magnitude too so that component becomes dominant.
(Cattle/dairy also uses insane amounts of energy, but not as much electricity specifically - mostly fossil fuels -, and much less locally concentrated. It would still be much worse than AI but the numbers for AI water use specifically would be more upsetting.)
That's helpful. Thank you for pointing that out.
Yeah, I have no doubt the LLM companies are BSing their numbers and using caveats.