It makes sense with the context in the article, but “triples that of 650 million” is a very strange way to say “almost 2 billion”.
Also funny that the other big number, 1.3 billion, is literally double 650 million. Maybe they split it it up because the numbers are tied to specific geographic areas with specific water/energy quantities but yeah it does not read very well
Written by ai?
Why mix units? Match 1.3billion for water. Why not say match 1.95 billion for power, instead of 3x650 million.
Maybe they did the text with an AI.
Probably because they refer to the bottom 650 million and the number gets less impressive as you move to people who actually have daily access to a power grid.
triples that of 650 million
Wouldn’t saying
nearly as much as 2 billion peoplebe the same and more efficient?Not if they’re referencing a specific 650 million. North America has about that many people but punches well above its weight in power usage per capita.
Perhaps it was written by AI
In other news, 20% of people use 3 times as much water per year as the other 80% do in a month.
A note: “AI” doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s not using evaporative cooling out of necessity. It’s just the absolute cheapest, fastest way to cool en masse. Just like slamming a gas generator down on a site, or housing servers in tents:
They could take an extra second to build something efficient, and they did not.
Or, they could just not use waste so many GPUs on “intelligence scaling” that does not scale. Like most non-US firms do, just fine. But FOMO.
In other words, non technical decision makers, who don’t understand how transformers models even work, dictated this would happen. It’s not even a sane business planning decision, and they’re too rich to face any consequences now.
Makes no sense. (I know that there are countries without proper regulation, but) around here they would simply not be allowed to use that much water.
They would need to build them in a way to not use that much water for cooling, and this would be controlled by officials during planning,build and operation.
Tech bros in general always seem to do it anyway and deal with complaints afterwards, preferably after lobbying or sueing to remove regulations.
do it anyway
Not possible here, cowboy.
They don’t use that much water through cooling. Or rather, evaporative cooling is rarely used because it’s unreliable outside of dry, desert climates.
Rather, most of the water footprint comes from electricity generation (e.g. coal, gas, nuclear) which evaporate freshwater to spin turbines.
Normal radiators are the goto option to cool down heated water which can then be re-used.
Why is the article using “match” and “triple” in the same sentence for things that are pretty much in the same order of magnitude?
And it will be our fault that there aren’t enough resources for the data centers just like it’s our fault the climate is changing. If only we didn’t use AC when it was needed, we could have saved the world /s
The Epstein class will never be at fault.
What if we as a society decided to just not?
That would be truly a modern miracle then
This completely ignores that fresh water production is regional. I’m tired of that shit. It’s something else to use x amount of water in Amazon jungle and something else to use same amount in the desert. The notion that you could just provide third world countries with water from US is moronic.
Why don’t they make this the first problem AI should solve?
They sort of claim AI is going to do that. Someone said AI could solve climate change. Which is hilarious because it’s actually accelerating it currently.
Don’t forget to shower less and only use paper straws
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Then they’ll “lay off” those people.
You’ll tell people that and then they keep using AI…
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That depends how much control of the world we all surrender to our betters.
