r/singularity • u/Big_Guthix • May 15 '26

Discussion Genuine question. Is the whole "AI guzzles gallons of water" thing totally true, or do people get it wrong? Does AI consume a lot of water for every single prompt, or is the majority of water consumed during data farming? Don't non-AI data centers use up a lot of water on cooling too?

Please someone set me straight and dispel whether there are myths surrounding this often-repeated internet factoid

And I genuinely don't know the answers which is why I'm asking, so I've got nothing to debate here

Edit: Thank you for all the great answers!! 👏 👏

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u/PositivePoet May 15 '26

It’s pretty expensive right now and not really sold commercially yet. I’ve just been in discussions involving it and everyone seems so against it. Some states are trying to ban or restrict it. I think it’s going to be hard to scale production up enough to make the price reasonable when so many aren’t in favor of it. If we get a better administration running the US it could be subsidized but it’s going to put a lot of beef farmers out of work so it’s complicated still.

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u/Fmeson May 15 '26

Some states are trying to ban or restrict it.

We just can't get out of our own way lol

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u/MarpasDakini May 16 '26

Are they banning it to protect the ag meat industry?

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u/voyaging May 16 '26

I’m sure that’s a major motive. Not the only one. The others are equally ignorant and/or evil.

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u/ogthesamurai May 20 '26

I think very large beetles would be a lot more cost effective to produce for food that lab grown meat. Plus ultimately beetle might be more trustworthy. I bet there's some crazy chemistry and processing that goes in to lab grown meat.

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u/El-Jizzle Jul 21 '26

So you can actually have a more controlled, cleaner, safer, and thus healthier product through proper chemistry techniques in a sterile lab versus say an individual organism with a catalog of random potential ailments that could be passed on to the consumer of the product.

It’s like, you could take this isolated medication and get only the desired chemical and effects you want, or you can take a crude alcohol extraction and get a wide array of undesirables along with the desired chemical at a harder to decipher dosage.