https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271.pdf, via Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models
This is an update of this older post: https://www.bblloobb.com/2023/how-much-water-do-ai-prompts-use/
The first question you might be asking is “why does AI use water at all?” You might also wonder at the end of this, “we are using all of this energy and resources for really shitty “art” and straight up wrong answers to questions we ask? Seems silly and bad, huh?”
Check out the four questions and answers below!
How much water and electricity will A.I. use in the coming years?
Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year, for example, that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers’ electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden.
AI Is Taking Water From the Desert, by Karen Hao, The Atlantic
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To put that in perspective? Per the Atlantic, that’s approximately the amount that a total of 670 Goodyear families would consume in a year combined. And though that’s a lot of water anywhere, it’s especially material in a place like southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, where a drying Colorado River and property development loopholes have led to an increasingly dire water crisis.
Microsoft Is Draining an Arizona Town’s Water Supply for its AI, by Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurisim
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Academics suggest that AI demand would drive up water withdrawal — where water is removed from ground or surface sources — to between 4.2bn and 6.6bn cubic meters by 2027, or about half the amount consumed by the UK each year.
AI boom sparks concern over Big Tech’s water consumption, Financial Times
How much water do individual ChatGPT prompts use?
[…]has suggested that requesting between 10 and 50 responses from the company’s popular ChatGPT chatbot running on its older model GPT-3 would equate to “drinking” a 500ml bottle of water, depending on when and where it is deployed.
GPT-4 had more parameters and required more power, so it would likely use more water, said Ren. Detailed information about the model’s energy use has not been made available.
AI boom sparks concern over Big Tech’s water consumption, Financial Times
How much of the world’s overall energy use will be AI tools in the coming years?
“You’re talking about AI electricity consumption potentially being half a percent of global electricity consumption by 2027,” de Vries tells The Verge. “I think that’s a pretty significant number.”
But de Vries says putting these figures in context is important. He notes that between 2010 and 2018, data center energy usage has been fairly stable, accounting for around 1 to 2 percent of global consumption. (And when we say “data centers” here we mean everything that makes up “the internet”: from the internal servers of corporations to all the apps you can’t use offline on your smartphone.)
How much electricity does AI consume?, By James Vincent, The Verge
How has energy use by Google, Microsoft, and Meta increased since their AI tools became available?
In 2022, the latest period for when figures are available, Microsoft increased its water consumption 34 per cent, Google 22 per cent and Meta 3 per cent as a result of their growing use of data centres.
AI boom sparks concern over Big Tech’s water consumption, Financial Times
