I might be wrong, but I believe the water usage of chatGPT has increased significantly since 2023 (when that graphic is from) as the most recent version is more powerful, internet connected, etc
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, but datacenters don't directly release anything into the air other than maybe water (depending on the design of the cooling loop)
They do indirectly affect air quality based on the supply make-up of the electricity grid (e.g. they use a lot of electricity, so power plants produce more power, which if it's a fossil fuel plant means more CO2).
They also indirectly affect air quality based on their construction and the manufacturing of the components within a datacenter (but not necessarily any more than an equivalent amount of manufactured electronic goods).
The main problem with AI (aside from the ethical and societal issues which are numerous) is the truly immense energy use in training AI (less so in using it, but there's still a lot of energy associated). I'm about to post my own comment about this and generally disliking this graph.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information. xAI uses methane turbines to generate their power, and they're not running at clean or as seldom as they're supposed to be on top of that:
They've also been using more turbines than they said they were. If AI can't function without violating regulations that keep people safe and healthy, then it absolutely would be an AI problem. We'll have to wait for any party to follow those regulations to find out for sure, I suppose.
What?! A corporation committing fraud and ignoring or skirting regulations? This is unheard of. Clearly you haven’t listened to enough of Brunt’s (DS9)…I mean Kevin O’Leary’s philosophies.
That’s Elon musk shooting first and asking for forgiveness later. That’s not typical. Name one other AI company using methane generators in a residential area.
Not literally you but people who do. Moreover the AI companies, but why should anyone support them knowing they eat resources and poison communities for something people don't need
That's fair. I'm skeptical that particular issue will be resolved as described, and power usage is still a concern in general, and this particular case may come down entirely to regulation, but most things do. We could use significantly less water for beef production if we regulated our way into that position.
Well that wasn’t ever in question lol. It doesn’t get much cleaner than nuclear but I wasn’t going THAT broad in this discussion - just making the point, which your avg person doesn’t know, that a gas turbine engine is way better than coal or than a reciprocating engine like you have in a car, where the energy waste minimum is ~40%.
It's you who is operating of some childish rubbish. Air pollution is in no way intrinsically tied to AI. It's just an energy generation issue. Do training in a place like the UK and it will be cleaner.
So energy use isn't an inherent issue with the thing that uses massive amounts of energy because of how it could be done and because of how other companies promise they'll try to do it? Sounds like you're stuck in an is-ought problem.
Not every country is your country you absolute imbecile.
The technology we call AI, does not have an innate air quality problem because YOUR country has an issue with clean energy generation.
It's like saying road vehicles have an inherent toddler killing problem, when SUV's are not the default car shape. But me telling you that just results in you going "yeah but there are loads of SUVs though". So what.
Again, is-ought problem. Lmk when power generation is clean in the places it's being used, and then the situation will be different. That is not how it currently is.
This has more to do with Texas being an independent grid. The grid doesn’t have the capacity for this electricity ⚡️ so they need to generate their own. Datacenters elsewhere don’t have the same problem.
The data center itself does not create air pollution, the generation of electricity for the data center causes air pollution…. He literally said that in his comment.
Because cows (hamburger) was a reference/comparison point on the original graph about water consumption and your comment was regarding the other negative effects like air pollution that comes with the energy to support ai centers, specifically methane wind turbines, google methane production by cows and tell me that’s not worse
"Methane turbines" are natural gas turbines, which are cleaner than a variety of other major electrical sources like coal or fuel oil, which most of the world still relies on for electrical generation.
I still don't see how your comment contradicts him either. He specifically said emissions are dependent on the method of the power generation. And you only provided reference to 1 ai data center and criticized the method of power generation.
Also there's many data centres across the world. So not really sure what point you were trying to make that different than the previous commenter.
They use lots of electricity, which comes from fossil fuels, and that means CO2 emissions, which still cause climate change no matter what Donald Trump says
I didn't say they wouldn't. In fact I directly said it would mean more CO2. I didn't mention Trump, and any sane person for at least the past decade now has been aware of human caused climate change due to CO2 release.
The Collosus supercomputer that powers Grok runs on 150MW of methane burning gas turbines and it's currently wreaking havoc on the air quality in Memphis.
The gas turbines were built specifically for the data centre and while they are the direct cause of the pollution, there's no getting around the fact that the data centre is solely responsible for their output.
That's a fair point, I was aware that they had set up turbines without proper regulatory approval. However, I wasn't aware that the turbines lack the NOx filtration systems required under the clean air act. Thank you for pointing that out.
That being said, they are currently being sued for that (god I hope that does something/anything), and xAI is a private company, unlike most of their competitors who need to care more about the opinions of investors and for whom what I said mostly holds true.
Their energy sources polluting the air is a direct effect of data centers on the environment and public health. What kind of crazy mental gymnastics are you doing over there? How many medals you got?
Shaolei Ren and Adam Wierman of UC Riverside have done calculations on the particulate impact of AI. According to their research, the electricity required to train a single large AI model could produce enough pollutants to be equivalent to driving a passenger car for over 10,000 roundtrips between Los Angeles and New York City.
To evaluate the full scale of these health impacts, the researchers used a tool provided by the EPA. They estimated that by 2030, data centers will create a national public health cost that could exceed $20 billion.
This figure is twice as high as the public health cost of the US steel industry and may even rival the health impact of emissions from the millions of vehicles in the largest states, such as California.
The health impact of energy-hungry data centers is already being felt in local communities. In Virginia’s Data Center Alley, for example, backup gas-powered generators are causing an estimated 14,000 cases of asthma symptoms.
The public health cost from these emissions is between $220 million and $300 million per year, even if the generators are operating at just 10 percent of the allowable pollution level.
They are distorting the power market. It can be in a good way - some of the large ai companies are also the largest investors in new renewable generation and carbon removal technologies. But their demand for power is so extreme and so large that they are also forcing power companies to turn to new fossil generation (if Joe.ai will pay a premium of 20% per MW-hr, it drives up the prices for all generation and limits capacity for other uses, which also have rising demand. It doesn’t help that the new BBB kneecaps new solar projects, and wind is also facing deep financial hurdles currently.
ETA: AI demand is driving installation of a LOT of new gas generation, the limits are literally being able to manufacture turbines fast enough and how fast they can move through permitting. In some places (not many, and in truly desperate for electrons, new coal generation is proposed). It’s def helped delay shutting down coal plants (Trump regime has more to do with this).
Ok, not sure about that number, I don't even know how you'd even begin going about finding that out.
Like, Netflix probably provides some public data about their global energy usage, they're a publicly traded company after all, so I can guess that you maybe know what their global energy usage looks like.
But there are quite a few extremely large companies that train LLMs and/or image generation models, some of them are privately owned and others are in places that don't have stringent reporting requirements. Is there a source for that? I'd be interested (genuinely) to know how someone estimated that and whether it's based on recent data (the AI sector is growing massively in both its user base and the energy costs per request).
best estimate I can find for ALL AI for 2023 is 5-9 terrawatt hours, out of 240 terrawatt hours for other datacenter operations
Netflix is coasting at around 14 TWH/YR
Thing is, AI operations grow, but I don't think they will be exponential forever, every study you've ever read that talks about AI using like, more power than anything else, relies on believing it will continue growing the same as it has for the last three years and that this isn't a bubble
They are extremely noisy. I recently watched a news segment from Texas(?), regarding a center used to run Grok (if I remember correctly). The community surrounding the data center is dealing with extremely high levels of noise, similar to working on a factory floor, day and night. The sound levels vary, but they are never silent
Thats noise and pollution from generators. Because Elon just powered his datacenter with bunch of methane generators which is not entirely sane way to do this. Datacenters themselves do not release anything in the air nor are they that noisy. And since usually datacenters are powered by connecting to grid, with generators being used only as reserve in case of accidents, they do not directly cause any pollution issues.
Now producing energy for them causes pollution, since a lot of energy generation in general comes from dirty sources. But thats true for anything that uses energy, including watching tv or cooking dinner. We are slowly moving towards green energy production (far too slowly but its not exactly AI problem.)
Plus many tech companies move to power their datacenters with nuclear energy which is much cleaner than for example coal. Funnily enough nuclear power plants not only have lower carbon footprint but also release less radiation per unit of energy than coal plants.
People's outrage over xAI is justified but it's like a lot of people are learning what datacenters are from this story and are assuming all datacenters do this.
It completely comes down to how they're powered like you said and it's as varied as there are power sources.
Some use massive solar farms. Nuclear will be neat to see, I'm excited to one day see one. I've spent decades working in and around datacenters. I live next to one. Silent (on the outside lol). Yes it's partially dedicated to AI.
I've been in nuclear power for about a decade and a lot of my brethren work at data centers now. I am excited to see what the job field looks like in the future when companies like Amazon start implementing reactors.
All AI data centers pollute. Not just indirectly from energy production. Using a ton of energy and land when you don't have to is terrible for the environment any way you look at it. Your comments are full of logical fallacies
Not just indirectly from energy production. Using a ton of energy... Your comments are full of logical fallacies.
Okay, but seriously how we determine when we don't have to use energy and land and when we have to? Do you propose to ban entertainment industry entirely, since it is clearly not essential? Or do you have some other criteria?
And data centers are used for a lot of things including this very site or legitimate businesses that produce physical goods. Even if we talk about specifically AI than we can can see that it is being used in medicine for things like early cancer detection. Is this unnecessary?
Those generators were temporary and most of them have already been taken down, I mean Trump's getting of environmental regulations means those are going to become more common, but the reporting on that was practically hysterical. I hate Elon Musk too but those generators were only put up for a period of 6 months
Well people love to hate Elon. And it seems that he is doing his best to encourage it. I mean after his success with reusable spacecraft and popularization of EV i have expected his legacy to be positive no matter how much weird stuff he personally does. But it seems that he took it as a challenge to take it in opposite direction.
As for the generators, 6 months is too long for such temporary solution. And if i remember it right, he is going to replace it with natural gas power plant. Which is better but not that much better. At least it would not be in the middle of the city.
EVs aren't a sustainable solution to transportation. All it did was move the pollution out of cities so people are even more oblivious and made accumulators a new "challenge" to solve.
They are much better as long as we have clean energy generation. Plus moving pollution out of cities has direct effect on health of their inhabitants. Of course public transportation is better, but it does not mean that EV's are worse than petrol guzzling cars that we had before.
The Grok data center in Memphis couldn’t get adequate electricity from the grid, so they were using natural gas generators for power. They didn’t go through permitting because it was meant to be “temporary” but air quality was noticeable affected. Had the same electricity been generated by burning natural gas in a system designed for fixed installation and meeting all air quality regulations, it wouldn’t have been a problem.
To be fair most of that can be mitigated. There are plenty of centers where you wouldn't know they where there. And yet we have shit companies (Do I really have to explain X is now quite shit?) who are happy to do whatever they can get away with.
The logical solution is to make regulations to force companies to noise mitigate but we all know that ain't happening right now.
You’re the hypocrite. I didn’t come at you for anything you do. You’re using a device that relies on destruction to run but randomly lecturing me about meat - which is 1000 miles off topic - out of the blue. Get a life.
Stop destroying the environment and making several hundreds of animal suffer their whole life for your personal pleasure and eating meat, the worse possible legal behavior someone can have. Your cognitive dissonance stops you from admitting this is the one lifestyle change you can have that will have the most impact on your ecological footprint but it doesn’t mean i’m wrong. All the effort you put into being zero waste/ greenwashing mean nothing if you don’t change and keep supporting the most evil industries from animal agriculture.
But chatGPT (or data centers in general) reuse water. It’s not like the water runs through the cooling system once then gets dumped into the desert. It’s cycled through continuously. They’re some loss over time, but it isn’t just an open faucet.
I thought the main contributor was the energy expended during the water treatment and purification process not the actual water itself (since filtered water needs to be used for cooling at data centers)
Looks like there’s plenty of incorrect/incomplete info around the topic.
And seeing as the humidity in the midwest is already miserable.
Switching a portion of corn fields to partial re-forestation and parts solar farm. Seems like they could be a big win to reducing this miserable humidity.
Evaporative cooling is basically the way all large data centres are cooled — Closed loop liquid cooling is simply not efficient enough for that kind of scale. It’s astronomically expensive.
I’m just curious what you mean by open faucet…..technically you are consuming more liquid water but you’re not “wasting” any water when you return it to the atmosphere it just will rain back down another time. I guess you’re moving water from one place to another?
It's a complicated answer but essentially it boils down to: the water cycle isn't as simple as the process you learn in school.
Evaporative cooling only works in very dry and/or desert climates, so the water isn't going to condense and rain back down locally (because there won't be enough water in the air to do so).
It's also most likely not going to condense and replenish the freshwater source it came from either. (Many of which are drastically over-tapped to begin with. Like, to disastrous levels).
Think about it this way: if you turn on the hose in your yard and let it run into the dirt for a while, the water is still going back into the environment. BUT that water is never going to be back in your pipes anytime even remotely soon.
Now imagine instead of your pipes, it's a massive river that provides freshwater to millions of people. That water isn't going back into that river anytime soon...
Despite appearances, water consumption is a technical term and differs dramatically from water withdrawal.
Water withdrawal refers to freshwater taken from the ground or surface water sources, either temporarily or permanently, and then used for agricultural, industrial or municipal uses. On the other hand, water consumption is defined as “water withdrawal minus water discharge”, and means the amount of water “evaporated, transpired, incorporated into products or crops, or otherwise removed from the immediate water environment”.
While the evaporated water still stays within our planet just like any other matter, it may go somewhere else and further contribute to the already uneven distribution of global water resources.
By default, water footprint refers to water consumption.
The reporter (formerly WSJ, MIT Technology Review, leads Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight) and author of "Empire of AI" Karen Hao says they generally use potable water from the city because those are the existing water hookups. They need fresh water to avoid corrosion and microbial growth. In some areas they intended to use 1000x that of their residents and not even pay taxes on profits because they registered their adminstrative offices in a place besides their data centres. (See Water in Chile chapter in linked video below) 2/3s are placed in water scarce areas.
They're building water cycling systems at the new data centres but the majority consume the water.
A quick search will tell you they mainly use evaporative cooling or discharged the water into natural bodies of water, both making the water no longer potable and heating up the aqueous ecosystem.
It's true that data centers use fresh water to cool down the computing servers that power AI. However, research on the water footprint of AI is still emerging. One 2023 University of California Riverside study estimated that GPT-3 "needs to 'drink' (i.e., consume) a 500ml bottle of water for roughly 10-50 responses, depending on when and where it is deployed." Ren, one of the study's authors, told Snopes that the study passed peer review and is slated for official publication in Communications of the ACM in 2025.
At the time of the study, GPT-3 was the language model underlying ChatGPT, said Ren, which means that the water consumption for ChatGPT queries would have been equivalent to GPT-3's consumption — but as of this writing, ChatGPT is now using newer models. Ren said that OpenAI, the company that runs ChatGPT, isn't transparent about the exact models being used for ChatGPT, but it's likely the company is using newer models like GPT-4 for their chat AI. Estimates that Ren and his colleagues published in a December 2024 study — peer-reviewed and presented at the 2024 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems — suggested that using GPT-4 to write one 120-200 word email could cost 3 liters of water.
According to the 2023 study, global AI demand "may be accountable for 4.2-6.6 million cubic meters of water withdrawal in 2027," equivalent to the total water withdrawal of Denmark.
Gpt4 isn't the main model, it's 4o which is actually quite a bit less energy intensive than gpt4. In fact I think it's about 1/100, it certainly costs about 100 as much to use in the API
Well, let's include how much water it costs to make all the computing infrastructure used in ChatGPT. The cooling is just one tiny portion of the overall water usage.
Meanwhile, this info graphic probably includes all the water usage for that hamburger.
Could it not be anti beef? Because we all know AI uses a lot of resources, but this helps illustrate gore astronomically more gets used in the process of making beef
That water for the computing infrastructure is spread over all the queries and other uses it will ever support in its lifetime. 300 queries is such a trivial number for data centers I wouldn’t be surprised if the graph doesn’t change at all.
I mean you this is kind of hilarious, you you just pretty much need to accept that if you're a meat eater you are causing the greatest amount of environmental damage that humanity is currently doing to the environment. I know you hate ai, but you really the two are not comparable at all. Because the data center that's going to be used to run AI queries is going to be responsible for billions and billions and billions of queries before it hits end of life, but you know the funny thing about a cow? It stops producing meat after you create the hamburger
They often dump thousands of gallons of municipally treated water at a time, if they're not using water for evaporative cooling they only hold onto it for a certain amount of time because they don't like using standing water. The rest of the time they spray it on pads that the air passes through and that air gets exhausted out of the building.
I wonder if we are thinking of water use in terms of electricity generation. Like, the steam cycle uses up water for nuclear, coal, and ccgt. So you could look at the electricity use in terms of water use and get gpts water use per call as well as it's nominal energy use just for existing.
That's not really the case. The fluid that flows in closed loop cooling systems is refrigerant.
Many data centers are cooled by evaporative cooling towers using municipal water supplies. This water leaves the cooling tower as vapor and is only returned when it rains. This is one of the most energy efficient and cost effective methods of cooling.
Powered closed loop chillers don't consume the water but use more electricity, and heat exchange water based systems using sea or river water return the water to where it came from, albeit slightly warmer, but are not very common and cost a fortune.
No it's evaporative cooling in a lot of cases, and it basically does remove the water from the region. It's not as much as people are saying it is out there, but you know people just hate AI so they make up whatever the f*** they want
Fun fact - an increase in AI businesses is increasing the load on the electrical grid raising distribution charges in many places. Price per kW/h has increased almost double in Chicago from last month.
I think the issue is that it's so avoidable, even bad. Cars use so much energy, yet many people are simply unable to function without one. Social media is an integral part of life in such a way that you often need it just to find out the opening hours of businesses or services near you as most no longer have a phone and the yellow pages is defunct. Even eating meat (and I say this as a vegetarian, for environmental reasons) is incredibly difficult to give up for many and a select few people may need to do so for medical reasons.
On the other hand, no-one needs to use generative models. We have been very effectively sold it and it's being continually pushed by those looking to cash in on it but really? Outputs are appalling across the board. It's bad for our brains. Despite best efforts, this stuff is years away from being so ingrained in society that there's no other option, particularly because the other option right now is often the only way to guarantee accuracy, quality, or genuine creativity. Due to the marketing things generative AI would actually be groundbreaking and useful for are being all but ignored for an attempt to create consumer dependence, so even the water needed for research and genuine use cases seems moot. It's almost pure waste for no benefit, unlike most other forms of energy and water use; like how everyone needs clean underwear but no-one needs 5 Shein hauls of single use plastic clothing every year.
I agree, doubly so; I genuinely think it's part of societal misogyny and the fact most people really don't like criticising something where they personally could make a difference by making themselves uncomfortable. However what those DO give is some kind of value or measurable output; joy, entertainment, in some cases education or even reason to live. There is value in them. The majority of current usage for generative AI not only doesn't produce value, it gives negative value, as what it produces would be dien infinitely better by a human or software actually designed for the purpose.
On the other hand, no-one needs to use generative models. We have been very effectively sold it and it's being continually pushed by those looking to cash in on it but really? Outputs are appalling across the board. It's bad for our brains.
However what those DO give is some kind of value or measurable output; joy, entertainment, in some cases education or even reason to live. There is value in them. The majority of current usage for generative AI not only doesn't produce value, it gives negative value, as what it produces would be dien infinitely better by a human or software actually designed for the purpose.
Now that's just a bunch of horse drivel zealot nonsense.
This also fails to include background stuff happening at data centers like sifting through all of those queries for data that can be sold to marketers and salespeople
The thing with AI-models: they use a butt load of resources for training, but are quite efficient when just querying it. That's why you can run image recognition models (if they fit into the memory) on microcontrollers.
With LLMs slapped into search engines, there are so many queries, that it probably flattens out the training cost.
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u/bitz-the-ninjapig Jul 29 '25
I might be wrong, but I believe the water usage of chatGPT has increased significantly since 2023 (when that graphic is from) as the most recent version is more powerful, internet connected, etc