Reducing consumer demand for water-intensive products is generally a good idea, but this article is woefully incomplete. It needs the water usage of other domains to properly put that into perspective. For example chocolate uses 1,700 liters of water to make a 100g bar, far more than pork or beef and a much easier sell to consumers than go vegan or even vegetarian. It also fails to note that AI specifically doesn’t need any water to run at all, the datacenter’s servers need it for cooling and water usage of an AI data center is more or less the same as a non-AI datacenter.
Reducing consumer demand for water-intensive products is generally a good idea, but this article is woefully incomplete. It needs the water usage of other domains to properly put that into perspective. For example chocolate uses 1,700 liters of water to make a 100g bar, far more than pork or beef and a much easier sell to consumers than go vegan or even vegetarian. It also fails to note that AI specifically doesn’t need any water to run at all, the datacenter’s servers need it for cooling and water usage of an AI data center is more or less the same as a non-AI datacenter.