The Thirsty AI
You’ve probably heard about the massive energy consumption of artificial intelligence, but there’s a hidden, and arguably more pressing, environmental cost that often goes unmentioned: water. As powerful AI models like ChatGPT become integrated into our daily lives, a new study reveals the staggering amount of water they consume, raising critical questions about the sustainability of the AI revolution. The Thirsty AI: Why Your Digital Assistant Needs a Drink When you type a query into a chatbot, you're not just communicating with lines of code. You're activating a vast network of servers housed in massive data centers. These servers are running sophisticated machine learning models, and all that computational power generates an immense amount of heat. To prevent the hardware from melting down, these data centers rely on sophisticated cooling systems—and that's where the water comes in. Data centers use massive cooling towers that function like giant swamp coolers. They pull...