Microsoft expects its annual water consumption to reach 28B liters by 2030, up from 7.9B liters in 2020 and 10.4B liters in 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/technology/microsoft-water-ai-data-centers.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/technology/microsoft-water-ai-data-centers.html
19 Comments
jaredwhite@humansare.social · 41 pts · 198d
Oh that's funny. I've been repeatedly told that AI is in fact negligible it comes to water usage.
Is it possible we were lied to, again? 🤣
kungen@feddit.nu · 10 pts · 198d
ChatGPT told me that their hallucinations are worth it, and outweighs their negligible environmental impact. I'm not smart enough to do the maths, but it sounds like no worries, boss!
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 198d
If it needs to be fresh water, then they need to pay in full to build a desal plant for ocean water, and a solar farm to power it, to be owned and operated by the state. And, that plant needs to send half it's water to the local municipal water system at no cost.
Because fuck em.
9bananas@feddit.org · 1 pts · 198d
having not looked into it at all: it probably doesn't "need" to be fresh water, but it'll probably be rivers anyways.
i assume it works similarly to other large scale cooling operations: you have a closed loop for the heat exchangers and the cooling towers are fed by a local source of flowing water.
doesn't need to be all that clean, or fresh water, but since rivers are pretty much the only source of moving water in most places, there's not really many other options. (for the cooling towers, not AI datacanters...they could just NOT build them, if they weren't fuckwits)
same as nuclear power plants, or any other industrial application that needs a lot of cooling!
VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 198d
You don't understand if it's not clean freshwater it will mean cleaning and maintenance of the equipment. It's much cheaper to use clean freshwater.
phil@lymme.dynv6.net · 10 pts · 198d
Techbros got a bit too excited with Moore's law: they want everything they touch to grow exponentially. Specially money.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 198d
Can someone explain to me why this needs to be potable water?
draco_aeneus@mander.xyz · 4 pts · 197d
It doesn't need to be potable, but since it's using evaporative cooling, it does need to be somewhat clean. You don't want to leave gunk all over your cooling equipment.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 197d
I mean you totally could leave gunk all over your cooling equipment, and then just have to clean it. It would just cost more money.
draco_aeneus@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 197d
Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of how these systems work. I'm basically just guessing
If the water is overly basic or acidic, and you concentrate it via evaporation, then you can damage the equipment at an accelerated pace. But even then, it's indeed a matter of money.
mech@feddit.org · 3 pts · 198d
I sure hope their devs can find something the AI is actually useful for, soon.
https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/microsoft-ceo-urges-ai-developers-to-get-to-a-point-where-we-are-using-this-to-do-something-useful-or-lose-even-the-social-permission-to-generate-these-tokens
Gsus4@programming.dev · 1 pts · 198d
Is this evaporative cooling? Why cant they use it in closed loop?
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca · 8 pts · 198d
that costs more money
xvertigox@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 198d
bfg9k@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 198d
Let's just skip to the end where we live on Rainworld after all the water has been evaporated into atmo
vane@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 198d
If only we knew if there is critical mass that can make it run away so we will end up like Mars.
SoupBrick@pawb.social · -3 pts · 198d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U.S._and_Canada
Edit: I guess the first link I put had some shitty info/estimates, my bad. Swapped it for a wiki article.
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 198d
those numbers are inflated to fuck, or else the people studied for it are just wasteful as fuck
I take long showers often multiple times a day, wash a lot of stuff by hand, do a lot of garden watering, fill a kiddie pool when it's hot, and wash my hands very often. I still only reach a max of 60 gallons a day on average in the summer. typically half that in the winter. and I wfh so all my shitting is done at home, too.
who the fuck is flushing 15 gallons a day just by themself? and who the fuck is doing multiple loads of laundry every single day?
the incredibly low quality of that blog post pisses me off. garbage like that makes the world a worse place, and whoever published that should be ashamed of their work
kungen@feddit.nu · 2 pts · 198d
Copilot told me that they need fresh water to survive, just like us.
SoupBrick@pawb.social · 1 pts · 198d
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption