[arthurjj]

I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the story broke. I remember there were a large number of Memegen posts about it, but no one I spoke with knew about her, so I assumed it was brigading.

I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x

[NeutralCrane]

What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous

[arthurjj]

I like this summary https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fak...

And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173

[scarmig]

The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

[yellowapple]

> Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

To drive this point home: if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year, it would entirely offset the annual water consumption of all US datacenters (including, therefore, the water footprint of AI).

[heresie-dabord]

> if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year

I fear that you have unwittingly led us further into the inevitable Environmental Hamburger-Cost Continuum.

Wherein we will use EHCC units to inform the hamburger voters about a) the nobility of even the smallest hamburgerian sacrifice, and b) the gentle, loving hand of industrialisation.

[zzrrt]

> the annual water consumption of all US datacenters

How many hamburgers will it be if all the proposed/pending datacenters are completed and running?

[yellowapple]

I would expect within the same order of magnitude. Worst-case, skipping a burger once a month instead of once a year is hardly some insurmountable sacrifice (and I say that as a fatass who loves himself a good burger).

[jimmygrapes]

I prefer to use the hospital analogy. Locally, the water concerns are a big deal but a lot of people in my community are riled up about the potential need for diesel backup generators because of the noise pollution. They are not wrong and it's good to consider, but they are at this point grasping for reasons that would not (and have not) been concerns for other large footprint projects like hospitals with similar infrastructure needs.

[fluoridation]

And you don't understand why what's tolerated of a hospital may not be tolerated of other kinds of buildings?

[yellowapple]

Here in Reno the anti-datacenter crowd has been extending that tolerance to the local casinos and golf courses (of both of which there are many more than we arguably need). If the choice is between running servers to keep the Internet going v. letting poor schmucks get swindled out of their money on the slots, I'm picking the servers over the slots any day.

[agentultra]

Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable.

See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them!

They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes.

The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped.

I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”

[rdedev]

Putting things into perspective is not minimising the problem. We literally have to do this to prioritise where our efforts can be useful.

Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense.

Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for

[yubblegum]

I am guessing (not asserting) that there is a sort of cap on water used for agriculture. It's possible we've already reached it. (?)

So, on the matter of scale: there likely isn't a cap on water use of these datacenters. Both the heat emission and usage levels for these systems will likely go up unless there is a fundamental technical breakthrough.

On the matter of utility: As a sibling of GP mentioned, the utility of food is clear.

On the matter of polution: I am not remotely read on waste water and contamination due to industrial agriculture. Is this also something where the judgmental scale is tipped in favor of food production vs cooling systems?

[luckydata]

what is the utility of alfaalfa? Because as it stands it's essentially just a way to export enormous amounts of water from a place where there's little (California) to a place where there's none (the Arabian peninsula).

This is bullshit to be charitable.

[scarmig]

Everything we do has side effects. Some have more than others; in the case of water, even heavy users of AI have a relatively small AI water footprint compared other things they do.

There are ideological perspectives--another comment in this chain declares that anything that an LLM does has zero value, purely by virtue of being from an LLM. There's not much to discuss there: maybe I find alfalfa useless and LLMs provide a lot of value, maybe you do the opposite. Short of violence, either immediate or delegated, the best way to resolve this conflict is to incorporate costs for resources like water appropriately (accounting for externalities), and let market participants bid to determine who gets access to it.

Datacenter owners are highly likely to find this a reasonable process, because they believe that what they are investing in and operating will provide a great deal of value on the market. And other industries (like your alfalfa) are far more likely to throw a fit at this process.

Or if you think alfalfa farms have fundamental, deep-seated water rights that don't extend to data centers, then data center operators can just purchase water from alfalfa farmers, and everyone involved will eagerly make that trade.

[luckydata]

some might call it "perspective"

[agentultra]

Well the other thing is that agricultural uses are generally on a different scale and use different sources. And at least you can eat almonds and alfalfa. Probably more useful than asking an LLM to autocomplete your homework. Depending on your needs.

Even amongst municipal water usage, it seems hard to figure out how much DC usage factors in to other uses because often they’re not required, and therefore don’t, disclose their usage.

All I’m saying is that it’s not a closed case and not everyone complaining about DC water usage is a Russian propaganda bot.

[QuercusMax]

Or even better: the footprint of doing something like farming corn for ethanol

[shimman]

Nice false dichotomy you got there there, might as well calculate the entire water usage for a a single GPU in the supply chain too. Something tells me one is extremely worse than the other when you account for all the water that's used in a single supply chain for high end electronics, but if you want to plop the measuring stick where ever along the whole pony show that makes you look better people will notice.

Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices.

This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.

[jayGlow]

let's compare ai water usage with something even more useless, water leaking out of pipes. the United States currently loses about 2 trillion gallons of water annually to leaking pipes. this is in comparison to around 230 billion gallons used by data centers.

we're literally dumping several times the amount of water used by data centers onto the ground for no benefit at all. oddly enough I haven't seen any protests about this despite how concerned everyone is about water usage.

[gordian-mind]

It's because spilling water doesn't do anything: water evaporates, becomes cloud, rains down etc.

Meanwhile, datacenters sacrifice water by sending it to Mars in order to compute criminal deepfakes of innocent politicians.

[simonw]

This is a useful piece on that: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

[thx67]

How do you know this doesn't suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia? The first version had so many glaring errors that have been "corrected" (removed), and I don't have the energy to comb through this one.

I am highly skeptical of layperson debunking like this.

[simonw]

Andy has a good track record for writing about this. He shares plenty of credible citations - more so than most other people commenting in this space.

He also caught a major error in one of the most widely read books that helped kick off the whole data center water debate: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

[thx67]

The thing that is off putting about how he uses rhetoric is that it feels like and-you deflection (tu quoque).

> Claim that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city of 88,000 people, where it’s actually using about 0.22x as much water as the city, and only 3% of the municipal water system the city relies on. She’s off by a factor of 4500. This is the single largest error in any popular book that I’ve found on my own, and to my knowledge I’m the first person to notice it.

Yeah, she might be wrong. But a data center also using 1/5th of the water consumption of an 88k person city should still be what are debating. We also have a base rate fallacy, we don't know know how well or how poorly they are using water. Nearly all criticisms of AI data center criticisms boil (no pun intended) down to yeah, but what about almonds or rice or xyz. That isn't a healthy way to adjust how we talk about data center water consumption.

It is a classic debate tactic. Someone makes an argument, then buttresses that argument with a number. You attack the number, pretending that you didn't just correct the number, but also invalidate the original argument. We shouldn't be using these tactics to talk about the tragedy of the commons.

I worked for a hyperscaler, I poked around a bit about water usage both internally and externally and it wasn't good. There was little to no thought other than, "we can pay X to have water delivered, doesn't matter if it sourced responsibly." (to glibly paraphrase, company policy is to never write the honest part down)

Look at how hard Google fought to not have water data released in The Dalles Oregon for their DC there. Many DCs are supplied by water that is meant for humans, sourced from aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to fill, that are being depleted faster than they are filled, already.

I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.

[simonw]

> I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.

I really don't think we are. In the wider culture the idea that data centers use an absurd amount of water is baked in at this point.

It frustrates me because I think it distracts from energy usage, which is a much more real issue than water usage.

[yellowapple]

> But a data center also using 1/5th of the water consumption of an 88k person city should still be what are debating.

Why, when that's such a minuscule amount of water in the grand scheme of things? Why focus our energy there? Why not spend that energy on the myriad many-orders-of-magnitude-worse offenders?

[dannyobrien]

So I'm not sure if it's the first version of this doc, but I ran the first version of it that's on Wayback Machine[1] with the current version to see what the differences are.

Most of the changes seem to be because Masley found one counter-example (Newton County, Georgia) where AI datacenters do seem to be increasing water costs; the only deletions AFAICS is toning down language where Masley used to say "there are no examples" to "there is one counter-example". I don't see any other major corrections that have been removed.

Here's an annotated diff of the two texts: https://bafybeie7b3zs2gqifpvn7ee7y7326wcexwnsbhnur5coymu3m6w...

[lukewarm707]

in my agi doomer opinion the water argument is akin to a concern that dropping a nuke may endanger certain rare species in the area

[sureglymop]

What is interesting about it for me is: why would someone working on AI ethics choose to work for Google at all?

Did she really think Google cares about ethics? Such positions seem purely performative, we all know that ethics go out the window first to make room for more profits.