Final month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread wherein she acknowledged that there was a considerable error in her blockbuster ebook Empire of AI. Hao had written {that a} proposed Google information heart in a city close to Santiago, Chile, may require “multiple thousand occasions the quantity of water consumed by your entire inhabitants”—a determine which, because of a unit misunderstanding, seems to have been off by a magnitude of 1,000.
Within the thread, Hao thanked Andy Masley, the top of an efficient altruism group in Washington, DC, for bringing the correction to her consideration. Masley has spent the previous a number of months questioning among the numbers and rhetoric frequent in fashionable media about water use and AI on his Substack. Masley’s major submit, titled “The AI Water Problem Is Faux,” has been linked in latest months by different writers with massive followings, together with Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith. (Hao stated in her Twitter thread that she could be working along with her writer to repair the errors; her publicist informed me she was taking day off and was unavailable to speak with me for this story.)
After I known as him to speak extra about AI and water, Masley emphasised that he’s not an knowledgeable, however “just a few man” inquisitive about how the media was dealing with this subject—and the way it was shaping the opinions of individuals round him.
“I might generally carry up that I used ChatGPT at events, and other people could be, like, ‘Oh, that makes use of a lot power and water. How will you use that?’” he says. “I used to be a little bit bit shocked when individuals could be speaking so grimly about just a bit little bit of water.”
As native and nationwide opposition to information facilities has grown, so, too, have issues about their environmental impacts. Earlier this week, greater than 230 inexperienced teams despatched a letter to Congress, warning that AI and information facilities are “threatening Individuals’ financial, environmental, local weather and water safety.”
The AI trade has began preventing again. In November, the cochairs of the AI Infrastructure Coalition, a brand new trade group, authored an op-ed for Fox Information that touched on environmental worries. “Water utilization? Minimal and sometimes recycled—lower than America’s golf programs,” they wrote. One of many authors of the op-ed, former Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, is at present advocating in favor of an information heart mission within the state that has prompted native pushback, together with due to issues about water use. The coalition additionally approvingly retweeted a submit from Masley on the influence of AI on power costs. (Masley maintains an exhaustive disclaimer on his Substack refuting allegations that he’s being paid by trade to share his opinions.)
