Andy Masley

We've previously had e.g. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for?open=fa… TFA is light on statistics and can only describe the water usage in terms like: > AI data centers require vast amounts of water for cooling, with a recent study finding that the technology used as much water annually as people drink from water bottles worldwide. But that is a pretty small fraction of total water use. Even if you drink as much water as health experts recommend and get all of it from one-use plastic bottles (which the health experts probably don't recommend and environmental experts definitely don't) that would be far less water than you use to run the dishwasher (which to my understanding is more water-efficient than doing dishes by hand) or to take a bath or shower. To say nothing of agricultural use.

As we all know, agricultural areas use much less resources and are generally great for the environment. (Yes, this is sarcasm. See also [0], which is US-centric but still relevant.) [0]: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-are-fake EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm all for NOT building datacenters in nature that's worth preserving, or near residential areas where other areas would be fine. Farmland, don't care.

> ... emitting a NYC worth of CO2 in a year is dizzying Simplified comparisons like these rarely show the full picture [0]. They focus on electricity use only, not on heating, transport, or meat production, and certainly not on the CO2 emissions associated with New York’s airports. As a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate, a flight from Los Angeles to New York with one seat is on the order of 1,000,000 small chat queries CO2e. Of course we should care about AI’s electricity consumption, especially when we run 100 agents in parallel simply because we can. But it’s important to keep it in perspective. [0] https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-abou…

It's mostly not a real issue. I think it's holding firm because it's novel - saying "data centers use a lot of electricity" isn't a new message, so it doesn't resonate with people. "Did you know they're using millions of liters of water too!" is a more interesting message. People are also very bad at evaluating if millions of liters of water is a lot or not. My favourite exploration of this issue is from Hank Green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc - this post by Andy Masley is useful too: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for Sources are very well cited if you want to follow then through. I linked this and not the original source because it’s likely the source where root comment got this argument from.

A ChatGPT prompt uses 0.3 Wh, which is approximately how much energy a Google search took in 2009. AI energy use is negligible compared with other everyday activities. This is a great article on the subject: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-abou… The same author has published a series of articles that go into a lot of depth when it comes to AI energy and water use: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-environment

Their use does not come with a large environmental cost. The average American lifestyle has a “water footprint” of 1200 “bottles of water” per day. 10-50 ChatGPT queries == 1 bottle of water. If you decide to use ChatGPT but shorten your daily shower by a second or two you will more than offset your total water usage increase. Thus LLMs don’t have to be that useful to be worth it. And if used in certain ways they can be very useful. Source (with links to further sources): https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-abou…

Happy to provide. I will say that literally all these sources are already available in this HN thread, but its hard to find and many of the comments are down voted. So here you go: This link has a great overview of why generative AI is not really a big deal in environmental terms: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-abou… GenAI is dramatically lower impact on the environment than, say, streaming video is. But you don't see anywhere near the level of environmental vitriol for streaming video as for AI, which is much less costly. The European average is 56 grams of CO2 emissions per hour of video streaming. For comparison: 100 meters to drive causes 22 grams of CO2. https://www.ndc-garbe.com/data-center-how-much-energy-does-a... 80 percent of the electricity consumption on the Internet is caused by streaming services Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission. An hour of video streaming needs more than three times more energy than a HD stream in 4K quality, according to the Borderstep Institute. On a 65-inch TV, it causes 610 grams of CO2 per hour. https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/netflix-disney-und-… Here is another helpful link with calculations going over similar things:…

It’s not: the datacenter likely consumes less. Datacenters (1) use non-potable water during normal operation and (2) return most of the water they use to the water system, instead of consuming it (as opposed to, say, a golf course). I have yet to read anyone more compelling than Andy Masley on this: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading (This isn’t a topic I know much about personally, so am open to being persuaded otherwise!)

The talk about AI water usage exists because in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, she got water usage wrong by three orders of magnitude.[1] For data centers that use water cooling, it's almost always non-potable water, and it's usually returned to the body of water it was pumped out of (though slightly warmer). If you're worried about water consumption, things like golf courses and farm subsidies for water-intensive crops are much bigger issues. 1. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading

>The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion Can you cite a source for this? It's not in the video, as far as I can tell. I would be wary of Benn Jordan's videos. They are full of mistakes and misrepresentations, as Andy Masley has convincingly demonstrated: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and I recall seeing Benn Jordan's responses on Bluesky and thinking they were quite poor. He was unwilling to admit to mistakes, and kept trying to grasp at newly searched papers that didn't actually support his arguments.

The only one that's not entirely true is the water usage concern. The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive, and you can even use reclaimed wastewater. To be clear, I'm on your side-- I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

That video is completely fake btw. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and

Andy Massey writes about this stuff and is generally heavily disliked by the anti-data-center folks * https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-are-fake * https://blog.andymasley.com/p/i-might-have-found-the-specific-way

This video is pseudoscience https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and

Have you read the responses to (at least) the first of these videos? https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and Also, I thought the response by Benn Jordan on Bluesky was informative. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and?open=…

That post is mentioned at the bottom of what I linked. Andy has a full post about it here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/to-be-clear-i-do-understand-how-sound

I was going to comment about water issues, but of course that's already been covered as well [0]. [0] https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

I was really into Andy's blog when it first came out, but he might be doing the same motivated reasoning he complains about everyone else doing. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-not > The one remaining question: why the clean step change? In the middle of this piece, he runs into a critical flaw in his reasoning and just shrugs it off.

The book is "Empire of AI". This blog post explains it pretty well: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading Basically, the author (of the book) compares a data center outside Santiago to usage of water by humans, erroneously imputing that the average human uses only 200 cc of water per day.

Probably not very true. > The research exaggeration pipeline. > > -Unpublished paper > -One outlier: "min & max can be found at 0.3°C and 9.1°C" (95th pct "between 1.5°C & 2.4°C") > -No causal identification; just pre/post that could be result of many factors > > Do you really believe data centers are warming 10km away? Really? https://bsky.app/profile/brendannyhan.bsky.social/post/3mi7ikpvg622f https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-not?r=2qzyw…

Kind of sad to see AI water use as the first listed issue motivating this. It is a completely fake concern. See here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

This may help you feel better: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

>aquifers depleted Oh it's this thoroughly debunked talking point again. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

it doesn't have to be agreed upon but even the largest estimates don't come even close to how much corn farms use > The water usage of 260 square miles of irrigated corn farms, equivalent to 1% of America’s total irrigated corn. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?utm_sourc… Roughly 1% of corn is used for actual food consumption btw.

What are you talking about? He goes into plenty of data, domain relevant definitions, specific cases, etc? Links to reliable sources for every numbers claim, of which there's several per paragraph, shows graphs, pictures, and does a lot of math (all of which I manually checked myself on paper as I went through). Also, the writing style is very much not ChatGPT-like, especially with all of the very honest corrections and edits he's added over time, which an AI slop purveyor wouldn't do. The deep analysis starts at this section: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?open=fals… You can't just dismiss anything you don't like as AI.

I'm not here to hype LLMs but they don't used an outsized share of fresh water, that's essentially a myth hyped by social media. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

Most of the energy for AI does not go into chatbots. Using Gemini is not remotely close to driving a car for 2 hours. If a prompt is 0.3 Wh (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-en… https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-abou… each prompt is closer to using an e-bike for 50 metres. You could have your morning shower 1°C less hot and save enough energy for about 200 prompts (assuming 50 litres per shower). (Or skip the shower altogether and save thousands of prompts.)

Just as an example, Loudoun County has the most data center concentration in the world by a wide margin, and also has significantly lower water prices than the Virginia average. Seems like they've been able to build out huge new water capacity for data centers and that hasn't raised househould prices, or even kept them low. https://andymasley.substack.com/i/171855599/the-county-with-the-most-d…

The reported case about water wells running dry had to do with issues in construction rather than anything about the data center's regular operation: > But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater from construction. It had nothing to do with the data center’s normal operations (it hadn’t begun operating yet, and doesn’t even draw from local groundwater). The residents were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this is not an example of a data center’s water demand harming a local population. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake#%C2%A7loc…