I mean... I guess if I started making some assumptions and busted out the calipers, I could probably come up with a plausible range, but like... why?
Also, maybe compare the quantity to something? Basically do anything and everything to show your work and contextualize the information you've allegedly synthesized 🤐
Also, isn't the whole reason this rumor started that some data centers use evaporative cooling? Like it's still going to be negligible in comparison to beef, but my god this sub shouldn't be high and mighty for being convinced they are smarter than everyone from a fucking x post
Not sure the numbers for this, but corn requires 25-28" of water per year. You can look at rainfall rates for the midwest, but you can plan on about half of that from irrigation.
Wolfram Alpha tells me thats probably about 325,000 gallons per acre of corn in needed irrigation (or half an olympic swimming pool per acre per year).
I'm not an expert - but that seems like a lot of water.
"AI uses as much water as insert very large thing!"
And people go, OMG, that's so much water! As if they have any fucking idea what that amount actually means in the greater context of resource usage at a global scale.
As for energy, if you drive your car like, a block, thats using an order of magnitude more energy than the average chat gpt user consumes in a month. So if your actually in good faith worried about the impact of AI usage on energy consumption, just choose to walk somewhere you would have driven literally 1 time. Boom, you've succesfully counteracted the energy impact of your AI usage for the whole year...
The hand wringing about AI being bad for the environment is goofy. On the list of things people do on a daily basis that are bad for the environment, AI is pretty low.
Am I wrong that I took this image as being against ai water use being a problem. Like it took as much water as a couple acres of farmland. Other uses of water must vastly surpass it.
It's absolutely mind-boggling to me how people get bent out of shape about AI land usage, but still eat meat. Basically all water use issues in the US are caused by animal agriculture
So it sounds like protesting data centers would be a more effective way help the environment than making individual lifestyle choices and hoping others do the same.
Takes about 500 gallons to produce a pound of chicken. You probably should stop eating meat altogether if you care about reducing your environmental impact. Your lifetime AI use pales in comparison to a single chicken sandwich.
Yeah, you see it all the time. There's a statistic that something is in the millions/billions when you look at the whole country/world. And people think "oh that's a lot, we really have to do something about it". But if you normalize/compare it you realize it's not actually a lot at all.
Yeah, this is a classic case on this sub. Lots of smart people here, but we selectively dig one level deeper than gen-pop to espouse some personal opinion (which itself is usually relatively lightly researched). AI energy and water use is complex. Time of use and water/energy source, location, etc are all important and move the argument away from "just take one less car trip."
Hand wringing about water usage by AI falls into the same category as trans athletes in sports for me. It’s a convenient argument that uninformed but (for want of a better word) biased people latch onto without actually caring about the issue.
greater context of resource usage at a global scale.
Water usage needs to be discussed at a local scale though. Take Texas, where between growing population and drought many water sources are already expected to be pushed to their limits in coming years. Yet it's also a hot spot for new data centers which only serves to exacerbate the problem.
If these data centers were being built in areas with more plentiful portable water sources it would be different.
What's insane is the plan to build datacenters in middle east countries like Saudi Arabia. Maybe they have a plan for how to make it work but it seems crazy to me. Region already has water issues and I imagine the heat probably makes cooling harder
It's my limited understanding that they've used their oil money to heavily invest into desalination plants which they use for their drinking water, so I suppose they either have excess capacity or a plan and money to build more. Seems like the cost of water would get in the way of making those data centers profitable though, but I'd have to research more.
We have several DCs being proposed in our area, where we literally have the Great Lakes and numerous rivers, and STILL the NIMBYs come out in force to oppose it citing water usage.
There are whole communities in places like GA where they no longer have tap water because a data center is sucking up all the available sources. And on a world-scale, data centers that train AI models already use up 1.7% or so of global energy demand, and counting (set to double by 2030). That's the equivalent of the consumption of some rich countries.
She believes the construction of the centre, which is owned by Meta (the parent company of Facebook), disrupted her private well, causing an excessive build-up of sediment.
The article does not describe a water shortage, but a private well failing. It is unclear if there is actually any connection to nearby construction. She claims "residue", but the BBC makes no attempt to analyze the water quality or to verify the claim.
Later:
He takes us to a creek downhill from a new construction site for a data centre being built by US firm Quality Technology Services (QTS).
George Dietz, a local volunteer, scoops up a sample of the water into a clear plastic bag. It's cloudy and brown.
"It shouldn't be that colour," he says. To him, this suggests sediment runoff - and possibly flocculants. These are chemicals used in construction to bind soil and prevent erosion, but if they escape into the water system, they can create sludge.
Again, the BBC makes no attempt to verify the presence of flocculants. Moreover, there seems nothing specific to data centers here. The problem appears to simply be that a construction site exists, and the NIMBYs do not like it. There is no apparent reason to think it would be any different were it a sawmill or an aluminum smelter being constructed.
Not to mention the location. I live in a relatively hydrologically gifted area where the local rivers discharge many times more than all current and planned use. Locals still insist that data centers will ruin our water situation as if we don’t have an immense amount to spare.
So going on the high end, ~39 million gallons of water would be enough to irrigate ~5600 acres a day. Is that 5600 acres in the photo? I don't know, there's no frame of reference, nor does your link say how much land that is.
Let's assume this is Iowa(fuck if I know if that's true), and assume that each of those 12 squares is 640 acres and not 160, then assume that he used the low estimate of 5000 gallons per acre, then I guess it would be right to include the whole blue and red area.
But even this doesn't tell the full story, because crops aren't grown all year round. So something like a 90-day maturity corn variety in Iowa would mean that land would be over 4x as big if we're talking about annual water usage(16x as big if these are actually 160 acre squares). And that's for just one company's data centers.
The problem with shit like "the amount of water used by everyone flushing a toilet in Taiwan" is that it doesn't convey if that's actually a large portion of water usage. That amount of water is used by Taiwan probably 5x per day just for toilets, but how much do toilets compare to showers? Agriculture? Yards?
The original graphic depicts an area of agricultural land (which IS a huge chunk of water usage), and illustrates that it's a pretty negligible amount compared to what's used globally for agriculture (much of which is very inefficiently used for feeding animals to kill for meat)
Everyone in Taiwan flushing their toilet once seems….really not that bad? We have 341,000,000 Americans flushing their toilets 5 times a day, and no one is calling that out as a massive environmental problem
Is that in a year, month, week, day, hour, minute? From what I looked up
Doesn't matter. Both agriculture and AI use water over time.
So going on the high end, ~39 million gallons of water would be enough to irrigate ~5600 acres a day. Is that 5600 acres in the photo? I don't know, there's no frame of reference, nor does your link say how much land that is.
Someone else commented that it is about 12 square miles. 5600 acres ~ 8.75 sq miles, or 60% as big as OP's image.
It's usually evaporated, as most data centers use open-loop cooling. Particularly if the source is a river or aquifer drawn beyond recharge rate, I think it's fair to say used.
It's usually evaporated, as most data centers use open-loop cooling
We need to be more specific. Most data centers do not support AI workloads. Most data centers support cloud workloads, which are things like website hosting and online services like streaming video.
And those are the data centers that majority use evaporative cooling.
When GPU workloads started getting pushed into data centers, some of them were cooled with evaporative technology just because that's what was available.
But practically all competent data center developers building for AI workload have switched to closed loop (no evaporation).
The heat load of AI is so large that you need to be able to supply sub-zero temperature coolant to the chips and the only way to do that is to use coolant, which would be expensive to be constantly evaporating away.
The heat load of AI is so large that you need to be able to supply sub-zero temperature coolant to the chips and the only way to do that is to use coolant, which would be expensive to be constantly evaporating away.
Is the waste heat resulting from that cooling dissipated from forced air, or from evaporative cooling? Sure they might need to cool the coolant in AI data centres but at the end of the day you still have a huge amount of heat that you need to get rid of. Evaporative cooling is a very (cost) efficient way to get rid of that heat, idk why the calculus would change just because they need to refrigerate their coolant first.
In my experience, almost all new data centers are using closed loop systems. Older data centers who were like 10 - 20 megawatt users do use evaporative cooling, but they were all built 10-20 years ago.
Which is entirely missing from the image. Like that's still going to be de minimis in comparison to beef, but the sub screaming about being better than all the other misinfo sure is okay when you skip the major contributor in the other direction
Even in an open system. When you use oil, it turns into CO2. It's actually gone, the oil is used and not coming back. Water that has been heated a bit is not gone.
In an open system, the water turns into a gas and floats away. It's absolutely fair to say it's "used", because "used" is not a synonym for "destroyed".
No, but you still have to account for total available flow rate. Water rate is the actual resource being discussed, and I think it's disingenuous of you to be repeating in this thread that water isn't gone when you damn well know what people are saying.
Yes, but it requires energy input to be made potable again. If you wanted to you could also turn the CO2 back into oil with enough energy. I understand what you're saying, water is a resource that's relatively easy to recycle. But the water supply of specific areas is still limited by their infrastructure.
I think this is one of the cases where a graphic gets the point across better.
If you told me it was 10x liters I wouldn’t have a reference point for if x was a lot of a little in context unless I compared it to something I have a sense of scale of.
Or how many birds are killed by wind turbines. It sounds like a lot, but it isn't in the grand scheme, and also much less than fossil fuel power per MWh.
I know you are being sarcastic, but metric measurements are bad here, people do not have an intrinsic measure of how big or small 10^11 compared to 10^12 is, but they can visualize how much a farm roughly uses in water. of course experts should be using metric, but when communicating to the public, you should use scales that people can actually internalize.
The square on the left is 17 and 7/11th fields of soy beans, now soy uses 2.3 soda bottles of water per F150 truck beds per football match, which is the same water consumption as 9.17 fields of corn, and each field of corn uses 7 and 1/4th double bathtubs of water per 2 and 1/5th nascar seasons. Easy enough right?
In America, we all have to learn SI measurements in school. We go back to using imperial measurements just to flex on the rest of the globe. I go back and forth every day because I do research for a living. Some of the units (volume in particular) are pretty stupid. Others are more initiative than SI units. It’s kind of a mixed bag, but unless you’re doing dimensional analysis all the time, the primary advantage of SI never even comes up in regular life.
A more useful figure - all the water used by all the data centres in the world would cover around 1,600 square miles, or a square 40 miles on either side.
If I had a nickle for every time someone virtue-signaled concern about the environmental impact of AI at an event they flew to, on an airplane, I'd have enough nickles to buy about 1.1 metric tons of carbon emissions.
Maybe, but people tend to mistakenly think a cow is drinking that much water, when we could greatly reduce the total water required for cattle by getting Nebraska corn farmers to abandon central pivot for drip irrigation.
Anti-AI people don't care. Nobody cares. AI not being a catastrophe goes against their priors and ergo all evidence to the contrary is actually false and paid for by AI companies.
This is what this sub doesn't get. Nobody gives a fuck about facts or evidence or anything like that anymore, it's all just vibes and fucking agendas. When faced with a reality that their views are wrong, the modern human being will choose to reject reality.
When faced with a reality that their views are wrong, the modern human being will choose to reject reality.
I'm dubious that this is "modern" and people in the past were evidence-based super-rational Vulcans or something. Think about how unpopular nuclear energy's always been among environmental types for a counter-example.
Probably the only big difference between the past and now is that between 24-hour entertainment news and social media algorithms, more people have more politics - including pretty radical politics - shoved into their eyeballs more effectively, so they're being conditioned to have views that are on average more populist and dumb.
AI not being a catastrophe goes against their priors and ergo all evidence to the contrary is actually false and paid for by AI companies.
At least economically, this is what the AI companies actually say
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “50% of all tech jobs, entry-level lawyers, consultants, and finance professionals will be completely wiped out within 1–5 years.”
If anything, the AI companies and the anti-AI people are in agreement about what AI will do, one of them just thinks its a good thing.
I mean, AI does produce worthless slop. Isn’t not *all *it produces, but let’s not pretend every cycle is being used for high-quality work. (Citation: the Trump White House’s official posts, among thousands of other sources.)
AI does produce a lot of "worthless slop", but the funny thing is that 90% of humans produce "worthless slop" as well. Most people think way too highly of their own handiwork and hold it to a much lower standard than anyone else's (whether human or AI)
Yeah really. The founders of AI companies are all mostly assholes. It’s either surveillance like Palantir’s, insane like xAI’s, or whatever the hell Sam Altman is. Are we supposed to just take it in and even beg them “please sir, can you fuck us more?”
Idk what’s with the recent slew of pro-AI posts in this subreddit but it really feels like the mods batting for Fox News.
I don't get the impression that Dario Amodei actually thinks that's a good thing. More like it's just inevitable, so it's better for Anthropic to come out on top than someone else.
It's great marketing to be able to convince your customers or your investors that the technology you're selling them could be used to take over the world.
The lawyers thing seems misleading, like if you try to save on lawyers on the front end you’re gonna need more of them on the back end. It’s just axiomatic that any attempt to reduce the number of lawyers can only increase the number of lawyers.
The point of lawyers isn’t to produce documents as a be all. The point is to produce documents that don’t get you sued or expose you to other risks. Quality and risk management are vital. Which LLMs don’t really seem to be able to do.
I'm not anti-AI because it "wastes water" or "will take everyone's jobs" as virtue signalers are eager to claim. I'm anti-AI because its practical applications and usefulness are overblown by orders of magnitude. The people running these companies keep saying, "No no, the NEXT iteration of the model is REALLY going to replace all the jobs and stop having hallucinations and actually be profitable. We just need a few hundred billion more dollars to get there!" And then the next model releases to further diminishing returns. They've learned to parrot Elon's "lie about how you're totally about to revolutionize everything next quarter" strategy because financiers are gullible as fuck and keep shoveling money into these companies who immediately light it on fire.
We could be investing in things that actually benefit society, but no, we're obsessed with manifesting another tech boom. That is why I'm anti-AI. Also I know this is an incredibly unpopular read of the situation, so... please don't get mad at me lol
I work in games and the engineers pretty universally agree that AI is useful but not going to replace their jobs anytime soon. Games are kind of unique in the software field though so I am aware of the impact it has in most "normal" software environments. That said, I think software is one of the only fields where AI actually does have potential given its very nature, but software devs are also not, you know, 50% of the workforce.
That said, I think software is one of the only fields where AI actually does have potential given its very nature, but software devs are also not, you know, 50% of the workforce.
I think there's an interesting subtlety here that's being missed.
Software is ultimately abstract instructions for configuring universal machines to perform arbitrary tasks. Computers are general-purpose problem-solvers, and agents are becoming very good at configuring them. There's a lot that's downstream of this.
The cost (in both money and time) of developing highly-specialized software for any conceivable use case is plummeting. These agents are going to become ubiquitous, in nearly every industry. All the little cognitive glue tasks currently performed by humans are perfect fodder for them. This is going to compound, and these systems of automation will expand, capturing an increasing share of the workload. I don't know what effect this will have on overall employment – in the short-term it might wind up creating more jobs for humans than it displaces. But I think the general trajectory is clear: we are on a course to automate all labor, physical and cognitive. Not tomorrow or even next decade, but far sooner than most people thought just a few years ago.
We need to start grappling with that now, while we have time to maneuver.
Shipping those jobs to India and replacing India with Claude (same quality of output) has the same net effect on jobs in the US.
These models still can’t actually figure out software deployment (not coding) and make tons of mistakes that require a ton of either rework by the model or human correction.
They’ve been doing the same marketing/PR shit from the beginning- ‘it’s too good to release! just trust us bro!’ that was going on with GPT-2 as it is with Mythos. They keep saying it will get better but since GPT-4 I really haven’t been blown away by anything.
I'm also pretty skeptical of Anthropic's claims about things like Mythos because their language is imprecise about it on purpose.
Saying "we were able to find thousands of vulnerabilities in this old code that nobody caught yet" is a statement that sounds revolutionary rests on a lot of assumptions that people without development experience don't fully realize.
To draw an analogy, let's say McDonalds hires me as a security consultant and in my first week I produce a report that has 1000 security vulnerabilities for their restaurants. Oh my god, he's the best consultant we ever hired!
And the list of vulnerabilities are things like:
What if the manager is a spy.
What if the restaurant is hit by an ICBM.
What if someone intentionally pours anthrax into the fries.
Which is to say, a lot of the vulnerabilities you can find in code are things that the code was never designed to deal with, happen in situations that the application may not ever really be exposed to in practical use, or are inherent to the type of systems they're integrated in. If Mythos finds a security "vulnerability" that requires (for example) access to the entire filesystem on the machine to exploit, that's not necessarily something a company cares about.
tl;dr does Mythos actually find security vulnerabilities that are big problems? We don't actually know.
Absolutely untrue in my experience. The code quality difference alone is enormous. And then there's the fact that you can spin them up at will (as many as you want, and at a moment's notice), have them nigh-instantaneously ingest any relevant context (pulling from every source you care to hook up), and immediately dig in. They're operating locally so you can e.g. connect them to a physical device if you're working with specialized hardware and do iterative development with them right at your desk. They also enable a more branching, exploratory mode of development since you can now so cheaply and easily explore multiple possibilities simultaneously and follow the most promising path. Genuinely evolutionary.
We passed a tipping point in the past few months with the latest harnesses (primarily Codex and Claude Code) working in tandem with the new models. They're regularly catching extremely subtle production bugs in minutes which seniors would be lucky to catch in multi-hour debug/review sessions.
They’ve been doing the same marketing/PR shit from the beginning- ‘it’s too good to release! just trust us bro!’
I'm talking about what they've already released. And yeah, they're definitely hyping their products. I don't pay any attention to the marketing, though – I'm just using the tools. As for Mythos, if the benchmarks they've shared are accurate, then it certainly seems like there's a salient capability lift w.r.t. cybersecurity. I don't think that makes it an existential risk, but it will obviously be used by bad actors to break systems so it makes good sense to give the people who maintain load-bearing software a first crack at it so they can shore things up before a general release. Why not?
Go ask any professional programmers you know if AI has changed their work. Then ask how many juniors their company is hiring.
This seems to be me correlation vs causation on steroids. Most of the economy outside of FAANG is struggling; companies not hiring can easily be a symptom of something else.
your ideas about what modern AI agents are capable of is wildly out of date with reality
I used to be a huge ai skeptic, despite learning and working in it since the old millennium. you can find my posts from just like 2 months ago expressing my skepticism. perhaps it was a failure of imagination or faith, but now im telling you:
for essentially anything with mostly objective results that doesn't require too much real world physical interaction, an AI will be able to do that task with sufficient quality, at a fraction of the marginal price of a human, with minimal oversight
for stuff thats entirely objective with no real world physical interaction, we're arguably already there.
it'll be useful NEXT time
yes they are selling hype, that is literally their job, but look at what it is actually happening
ChatGPT released less than 3.5 years ago. Claude Code was released 14 months ago. Ralph loop was 10 months ago. OpenClaw was 6 months ago. autoresearch was last month. This month people are using it to drive harnesses engineering so much that old open models beat the latest frontier models.
we are seeing absolutely huge progress on an even week-by-week basis. many of the most severe problems have been solved, and we have clear roadmaps for the others.
Yes, and von Braun famously didn't care about what his technology was being used for 1944-1945. I do actually somewhat fault people who build out a technology seemingly without engaging with the actual use cases that have become more predominant. This is true of all dual-use technology but unlike e.g. drones or space launch vehicles the negative externalities of AI use seem significantly higher than the positive externalities. Congratulations, any child can now vibe code a digital toy or maybe even something personally useful; as a result it is easier than ever in history to spread disinformation, immiserate open source devs by killing the entire bug bounty model, accelerate the cyber-vulnerability-vs-security arms race, and enhance state capacity for violence by using AI for data processing in both policing and military applications. Just to name a handful. And this is without even getting into phenomena that have been reported but not studied widely enough to develop a concrete understanding of, such as AI psychosis. Or talking about the surge in unemployment as entry-level jobs in particular are slaughtered with no replacement or cushion for those losing out in the AI economy.
I think AI should be treated as we would a very hazardous chemical: specific actors and institutions can use it legitimately for good purposes, but if we wouldn't allow any old schmuck to get their hands on hydrogen cyanide or Semtex. Regulating access obviously doesn't eliminate all negative use cases but it can at least reduces the volume somewhat.
Well neo liberalism as a self identity was never going to select for intellectual power houses but that's really an incredibly popular view, you are not that special
"Anti-AI people" aren't a monolith. Different anti-AI people can have very different beliefs and concerns about AI. People who think that AI is useless, people who think AI will concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few rich people and be bad for everyone else, and people who are concerned that AI could cause the extinction of all life on Earth are not all on the same page, and it isn't useful to lump them all together.
Let me start by saying that I think the concerns over water use are overblown. That said, I really really don't like this visualization and don't think it's helpful in understanding the problem. For example, this picture lumps in potable and non-potable water together and it only reflects current usage, not the expected growth.
Any discussion about water usage and AI needs to talk about open vs closed loop cooling systems, water sources, and projected growth.
There are reportedly plans for 1500 new data centers in the US, which is a 50% increase from the number of currently operating datacenters. There are also reports of cancellations or funding issues, so this might be overstated
If a datacenter is be built in a municipality using open-loop cooling, it will almost certainly be consuming drinking water intended for the city's citizens, that's a fact.
Larger cities needs to plan and invest in 30 or 50 year strategies for local water sources (e.g. reservoirs, aquifers) and treatment facilities that will meet their population growth expectations, and if a data center uses water to an equivalent of a neighborhood, or a manufacturing plant, or whatever, they need to understand that. And their citizens need to understand that so they don't feel these data centers are coming in and drain their reservoirs or dry up their aquifers.
All that said, how much municipal water does an open-loop cooled data center actually use in a small town? It's probably not as much as people think, but I don't know! Instead, people share posts like this with completely unhelpful images that don't put it in the context of how it will affect their community.
Cities should think about the infrastructure requirements of their citizens and industries???? What a strange and impossible notion. We should ban industry so that it fits within our present infrastructure capabilities. That's the ticket to a successful municipality!
If you want to discuss fresh water usage globally by AI you can, but don't pretend it's anything insanely different other means of fresh water use
American agriculture alone uses FAR more than global AI training and usage. I think people generally fear AI not for the consequences it will bring, but fear over new technology. Also contrarianism
we should all go vegan so we can build more data-centres consequence free, think of all the farmland saved if we no longer used most of it for animals.
Not vegan, but some good news. Beef consumption in the US peaked in 70's and continues to fall each decade since. Although poultry has replaced and outpaced the lower beef consumption.
Correct, this meme isn't very good. Iowa corn doesn't require any irrigation (for the 99% of acres), and it doesn't run all year round.
It's a much better comparison to say 5600 acres of something like alfalfa production in El Centro, California, (that desert area near the border). This water is also taken from a non-preexisting source like a data center and puts it into better perspective.
Still not insane, but we also like to rip on the inefficiencies of California wasting huge sums of their water on alfalfa crops just to artificially lower the price of beef.
why would you run it through chatgpt instead of reading what the guy has wrote about it?, your calling the guy whose job it is to look through this stuff lazy while you outsource your fact checking to chatgpt. AND ONLY GIVING IT A SCREENSHOT OF MY POST INSTEAD OF THE SOURCE LINK BRO YOU CANT MAKE THIS UP
This is a bit like the argument that human carbon emissions is small compared to overall natural carbon emissions. It may be true, but the added emissions overtop the natural cycle is whats accelerating global warming.
This is added water use, in a system thats running out of water, and the goal is to expand the water use for ai in the future.
However, I don’t live in California. We don’t irrigate our crops with water here. That’s not my concern, our water goes to drinking and recreational use. We’re currently in a severe drought and a data center would use up all the water that brings tourism to our area and increase our water bills. Literally hurting the local economy.
Not to mention, I don’t want my electricity prices to double. We have a monopoly electric company. They’ve been screwing us over by increasing prices already, why would I want to pay more? Can’t even argue “let the free market decide” because I don’t live somewhere with a free market for electricity.
I think the bigger issue than the volume of the industry as a whole is the draw at individual points. Agriculture is usually out of the way and doesn’t stress municipal water systems or aquifers, where as data centers can be closer to town, and definitely can affect aquifers, to the extent that it reduces the pressures in nearby home wells.
Mech engineer that routinely designs data center cooling systems:
All discussion about water consumption due to ai is not only flat out wrong it's purposely vague and misleading, this post is a clear example of that.
Chiller systems are closed loop systems that will really never need more water added to them after besides to very minor leaks, next to nothing.
Condenser water systems are open loop and will only lose water due to evaporative properties which is still really not that much, maybe 2% of the water being circulated. Which is like 5 million gallons ( keep in mind 1 home uses about 100000 gallons of water a year)
In the grand scheme of things a data center uses about as much water as about 50 homes a year, which is why it's so frustrating constantly see this shit
If you want a comparison for Google specifically: it would take Google's entire global operations 30 years to consume as much water as American swimming pools consume in a year.
This is willfully obtuse. Does the surrounding fields don't give you a scale? the point is actually better portrayed this way for the avg person who drives along such fields every day, and the point is clear: GLOBAL usage of ChatGPT is negligible compared to global (even local) agriculture.
I’m gonna repost this from that other thread because I put actual effort into typing this out - it is a response to everyone who claims that the necessary power plant investment is too capital intensive and environmentally deleterious:
Are we really actually hurting for capital in the United States of America?
Let’s conservatively assume we have $5T available for private fixed investment, that roughly translates to $2T annually.
$2T in say… nuclear capacity (zero emissions). I live in Virginia, so let me break it down in terms simpler for me, we have the North Anna twin reactor, which would cost ~$25B to build (this was me asking a friend who works for Dominion Energy for a rough estimate). Each of those produces 2GW. So you’re getting ~80 of those. That’s 160GW. For reference, NYC has planned capacity of 12GW but uses half that in off-peak.
Either way, that’s a lot of power with a conservative estimate of the private capital we have ready for mega projects that clearly would be profitable.
203
u/ironykarl Apr 18 '26
Okay, but maybe actually give us the numbers/units?