The cattle industry is a HUGE HUGE HUGE problem, yes it’s true and it’s a global problem. It uses a ton of water, land and resources, makes a ton of methane that contributes to greenhouse gases. THAT SAID, everyone is talking about the water usage of data centers but no one is talking about the way they generate electricity, disposable fuels, they use fossil fuels to power generators to create the huge amounts of electricity they use. They are hugely polluting due to this, their water usage is problematic and it’s the only problem we are talking about because the media has yet again dropped the ball at the behest of the billionaire class. Data centers water usage is problematic but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to their emissions. They have other serious problems too like sound pollution and wastewater runoff that is a direct result of running generators.
The water usage of data centers is “reasonable” (I personally disagree but this chart illustrates the trap) compared to other industries, literally everything else about data centers is wildly unreasonable and the media is essentially silent about it.
Yes. I'm not sure that even includes feed. 100x the water on lawns, 30x on golf courses. 1 lb of consumed beef equals around 650,000 prompts in terms of emissions. You are being lied to and manipulated so that only the elites use this technology!
Yes, people got mad at me for pointing out the land use for data centers is also minuscule compared to any suburban development.
That doesn't make it any less of a concern, but one of the major issues of data centers is that they are bypassing costs by unloading them onto average citizens. They don't want to pay taxes and higher costs for energy and water so they offload electric costs onto everyone else and then abuse the water supply to avoid making a closed loop system.
I keep quoting the exact stat wrong, but most of the world's freshwater goes into agriculture and farming.
It seems that the majority of the water consumed by the beef industry would be "used" when it falls from the sky on to the soil which then grows a plant that a cow eats.
While I don't think this argument, er, holds water for other reasons, it is worth noting that a lot of cattle feed comes from irrigated crops which are grown in areas where they are draining water from underground aquifers and overdrawn rivers faster than they're being replenished. This video, for example, though it is not wholly about this topic, discusses the common cattle feed of alfalfa, which is a water heavy crop grown widely in the Colorado river basin.
I genuinely don't know how much US beef is fed alfalfa grown with water drawn from rivers.
My intention with the following is not to throw any shade on the US, but I just don't know what the farming practices are elsewhere in the world.
In my state, there are no "feed lots" and cattle exclusively graze in paddocks. Their feed is supplemented with silage and hay but none of which is irrigated, even from a local on-property dam. That is to say that the entirety is their feed is grown with direct rainfall.
I'm just pointing out that while some water inputs may be from rivers, it's not the entirety and I doubt it's the majority.
Also, assuming we trust these numbers: what are these values "per capita"? The beef industry is absolutely massive and AI data centers are new. How many cows/cow farms are dividing that number? How many compute farms/data centers for the others?
It's like saying we should be able to leave babies in the swamps with gators because the numbers show gators kill less babies than humans. Neglecting the fact that humans and gators don't have equal hands-on time with human babies.
fuck elon musk. he promised to build a water treatment plant in memphis to cool grok and then ‘paused’ the planning. not the construction, the planning.
To be clear: I am a vegan and think it's a great choice to make for both the environment and moral reasons if you have the ability to do it. I don't really proselytize about it, but it makes me very happy when people choose to go vegan. I absolutely do think the huge environmental impacts of animal agriculture, especially industrialized cow consumption, are things that should concern people and see real pushback on a major scale.
And yes, of course, animal agriculture and in particular cow consumption have so many more negative environmental impacts than just water usage, too. I am vegan. I actively condemn this shit. But in general, I have seen this argument used in a lot of "whataboutism" whose primary point appears to be, "this new unnecessary thing we're pushing may cause a lot of bad things, but if you look at these cherry-picked metrics, it's not as bad as this other thing that you already consume, so you might as well let us do whatever we want, too." "You are in blood stepped in so far that, should you wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er, so build those data centers" is not a good argument.
It also doesn't mention the amount of methane that cows produce either, which is insanely disproportionate and is destroying our climate. I'll continue using AI all I want as long as those who complain about AI continue eating beef, while I myself do not eat beef, because the benefit gained from using AI far outweighs the benefit of eating beef. So it pays for itself more than enough.
AfaIk, unlike power plants which use e.g. the water of rivers for cooling, data centers use either drinking water or ground water for their cooling needs and thus, contribute to a decrease of ground water level if it's not used in sustainable amounts.
It doesn’t come out clean. There’s a lot of additives added as part of the cooling system. While it can be cleaned up, like it’s theoretically possible to build an effectively closed loop, they’re not actually doing that. Also it’s often potable water from residential supplies that comes from reservoirs and it’s not going back in those reservoirs.
It's more about killing whatever aquifer if they get too much. But near-zero waste ones exist. There just isn't legislation pushing for it. Which is what we should be arguing for. Sustainable data centers.
It is the heating up of waterways that can devestate ecosystems but it is way more problematic of course if ground water is wasted on that. Anyhow, if they don't do that, the main issue with AI data centers is insane pollution by illegal emergency gas turbine power planrs and noise.
Yes. Water consumption has and always will be a dumb ass argument against data centers. There are PLENTY of good reasons, especially power consumption, that it baffles me that the movement hangs on this one.
Interesting I'm of the we have figured the power consumption (technically the issue is now political) issue but the water consumption is a problem. Wanna compare notes?
(The noise is a massive huger problem)
I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to me that you claim that the energy consumption issue of datacenters has been solved.
In what way has it been solved? The only way to solve it is after all by not having AI datacenters consume energy at all, being superflous things and all since: 1. we can easily live without AI datacenters. 2. we desperately need to cut back on energy consumption in every way possible on account of climate change.
Those factors seem at odds with your (possible) claim that the energy consumption of those centers has been solved.
Impact on the economy: AI and tech creates well paying, future-proof jobs, and AI tools unlock new levels of productivity for the entire economy. On the other hand, jobs in animal agriculture are declining over time, and many are low paid and back-breaking.
So they're paid off by big tech to push whataboutism about AI data center water use.
EDIT: They're literally citing themselves about the water usage claims!🤣
We really need to stop farming cows for health and climate reasons. I am more for vegetarianism than for removing data centers.
It has a serious effect that shouldn't be ignored. Everyone says "I can't eat slop" but you won't eat anything if the climate destroys agriculture regardless.
Meat should be a very rare thing for people, like it was in the medieval times. Or even just focus more on poultry, farmed in sustainable and ethical ways? They eat bugs ffs. We can turn bug protein to edible protein through... Farming chicken.
The point is that the beef industry, while consuming that water, provides a good that is useful. AI data centres do not. The logic that "this thing uses a lot of water so adding anything else that does" is kinda sus, to put it mildly.
That being said, pork belly slays any cut of beef. Beef is grossly overrated.
Agriculture as a whole plays a big part in pollution and wasting water. I personally think being able to get "out of season" foods is a huge waste of resources and extremely damaging to the ecosystem as a whole.
We had a really fucking bad year for crops in general, so bad even the hay died. And if you think about it, all that water was wasted just generating dead biomass. Which is worse than the usual over consumption concerns.
Idk where I'm going with this, so I'll just leave it at that.
Sorry, this is not the source. May I ask why do you share misinformation?
Not only the article is an entirely different case, has no such chart, but the "clickable links" on the website are fake, too:
They're complaining that the way "Source" in the image is highlighted implies it's a clickable link, which of course it's not.
Despite that, whether the links in the text are highlighted depends on the browser (which is odd). Using Firefox Focus they are invisible but are highlighted in my stock Andoid browser.
In Addition, the data in the text is global data, the data in the post is US only, so it's not the source of the data of the post.
You missed the part about wp-image-4776.lazyautosizes.lazyloaded. This is a critical part of the lore, because it means the author of that page used WordPress, and is lazy.
Ezra Klein just had an episode with Jasmine Sun who goes around and studies data centers specifically. She basically said they've figured water consumption out by having a closed loop cooling system. So they recycle the water reducing the needed to pull in outrageous amounts of water everyday. On the other hand they are fucking up the electrical grid big time. That's a problem they've yet to solve.
But they’re not using those closed loop cooling systems. It’s too expensive and they’re taking as many shortcuts as they can. Like xAI using „temporary“ converted jet engines as gas turbines for power.
69 replies
The cattle industry is a HUGE HUGE HUGE problem, yes it’s true and it’s a global problem. It uses a ton of water, land and resources, makes a ton of methane that contributes to greenhouse gases. THAT SAID, everyone is talking about the water usage of data centers but no one is talking about the way they generate electricity, disposable fuels, they use fossil fuels to power generators to create the huge amounts of electricity they use. They are hugely polluting due to this, their water usage is problematic and it’s the only problem we are talking about because the media has yet again dropped the ball at the behest of the billionaire class. Data centers water usage is problematic but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to their emissions. They have other serious problems too like sound pollution and wastewater runoff that is a direct result of running generators.
The water usage of data centers is “reasonable” (I personally disagree but this chart illustrates the trap) compared to other industries, literally everything else about data centers is wildly unreasonable and the media is essentially silent about it.
Yes. I'm not sure that even includes feed. 100x the water on lawns, 30x on golf courses. 1 lb of consumed beef equals around 650,000 prompts in terms of emissions. You are being lied to and manipulated so that only the elites use this technology!
Yes, people got mad at me for pointing out the land use for data centers is also minuscule compared to any suburban development.
That doesn't make it any less of a concern, but one of the major issues of data centers is that they are bypassing costs by unloading them onto average citizens. They don't want to pay taxes and higher costs for energy and water so they offload electric costs onto everyone else and then abuse the water supply to avoid making a closed loop system.
I keep quoting the exact stat wrong, but most of the world's freshwater goes into agriculture and farming.
What's missing is the plastic and steel industries, and the power sector, but it's pretty accurate
Yes, water consumption is a shit reason to argue against data centers. Power consumption is the real big issue
1 pound of beef equals 650,000 prompts in terms of emissions. Livestock is about 150x more emissions than AI.
I don't think this is a reasonable comparison.
It seems that the majority of the water consumed by the beef industry would be "used" when it falls from the sky on to the soil which then grows a plant that a cow eats.
No. These don't include that. 95% of water usage is from feed, regardless. Livestock also have enormous emissions, vastly dwarfing that of AI.
While I don't think this argument, er, holds water for other reasons, it is worth noting that a lot of cattle feed comes from irrigated crops which are grown in areas where they are draining water from underground aquifers and overdrawn rivers faster than they're being replenished. This video, for example, though it is not wholly about this topic, discusses the common cattle feed of alfalfa, which is a water heavy crop grown widely in the Colorado river basin.
I genuinely don't know how much US beef is fed alfalfa grown with water drawn from rivers.
My intention with the following is not to throw any shade on the US, but I just don't know what the farming practices are elsewhere in the world.
In my state, there are no "feed lots" and cattle exclusively graze in paddocks. Their feed is supplemented with silage and hay but none of which is irrigated, even from a local on-property dam. That is to say that the entirety is their feed is grown with direct rainfall.
I'm just pointing out that while some water inputs may be from rivers, it's not the entirety and I doubt it's the majority.
Also, assuming we trust these numbers: what are these values "per capita"? The beef industry is absolutely massive and AI data centers are new. How many cows/cow farms are dividing that number? How many compute farms/data centers for the others?
It's like saying we should be able to leave babies in the swamps with gators because the numbers show gators kill less babies than humans. Neglecting the fact that humans and gators don't have equal hands-on time with human babies.
I can eat a cow, I can’t eat a data center.
You can also not eat a cow, just like you would probably tell others not to use AI
I’ve seen hundreds of sexy cows and only one or two good-looking data centers.
chomps down on a piping hot gpu
Crunchy, yet delicious.
Talk about crunching numbers amirite?
Hey! That's my brain!
Milk cows need corn, alfalfa, and grass, because they need the extra nutrients, since they’re, y’know, raising a baby.
And before anyone goes off on me about how we shouldn’t have dairy cows, y’all can pry cheese and ice cream out of my cold, dead fingers.
To be clear: I am a vegan and think it's a great choice to make for both the environment and moral reasons if you have the ability to do it. I don't really proselytize about it, but it makes me very happy when people choose to go vegan. I absolutely do think the huge environmental impacts of animal agriculture, especially industrialized cow consumption, are things that should concern people and see real pushback on a major scale.
But this feels like a really cherry-picked 'whataboutism' graph and that raises my hackles. In the first place, this focuses on one very specific metric (water consumption) without considering the major other negative impacts of data centers like electricity rates, infrasound noise pollution of surrounding communities, and so on. Other people have also pointed out that this ignores things like the amount of water used in chip manufacturing. Recycling water for data center cooling makes data centers use less water, but, in a cruel twist, also concentrates pollutants already found in the groundwater, which means that the water that does get returned to the environment now has a higher concentration of pollutants.(And yes, in some cosmic irony, agriculture including animal agriculture was involved in releasing those pollutants in the first place). Meta had an incident where data center construction released bacteria-contaminated water into the environment.
And yes, of course, animal agriculture and in particular cow consumption have so many more negative environmental impacts than just water usage, too. I am vegan. I actively condemn this shit. But in general, I have seen this argument used in a lot of "whataboutism" whose primary point appears to be, "this new unnecessary thing we're pushing may cause a lot of bad things, but if you look at these cherry-picked metrics, it's not as bad as this other thing that you already consume, so you might as well let us do whatever we want, too." "You are in blood stepped in so far that, should you wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er, so build those data centers" is not a good argument.
It also doesn't mention the amount of methane that cows produce either, which is insanely disproportionate and is destroying our climate. I'll continue using AI all I want as long as those who complain about AI continue eating beef, while I myself do not eat beef, because the benefit gained from using AI far outweighs the benefit of eating beef. So it pays for itself more than enough.
Hello concern troll!
Are these benefits in the room with us right now?
Benefit gained from using LLMbeciles? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! wheeze
I don’t get the hypehate around water-„consumption“ of data Centers. The water goes in and in some way back out. It doesn’t vanish.
AfaIk, unlike power plants which use e.g. the water of rivers for cooling, data centers use either drinking water or ground water for their cooling needs and thus, contribute to a decrease of ground water level if it's not used in sustainable amounts.
It doesn’t come out clean. There’s a lot of additives added as part of the cooling system. While it can be cleaned up, like it’s theoretically possible to build an effectively closed loop, they’re not actually doing that. Also it’s often potable water from residential supplies that comes from reservoirs and it’s not going back in those reservoirs.
It's more about killing whatever aquifer if they get too much. But near-zero waste ones exist. There just isn't legislation pushing for it. Which is what we should be arguing for. Sustainable data centers.
It is the heating up of waterways that can devestate ecosystems but it is way more problematic of course if ground water is wasted on that. Anyhow, if they don't do that, the main issue with AI data centers is insane pollution by illegal emergency gas turbine power planrs and noise.
that's just the first law of thermodynamics
or maybe the law of conservation of mass
but you can't ignore the second law of thermodynamics
there's no less hydrogen and oxygen in the universe but the usability of it changes
Yes. Water consumption has and always will be a dumb ass argument against data centers. There are PLENTY of good reasons, especially power consumption, that it baffles me that the movement hangs on this one.
Interesting I'm of the we have figured the power consumption (technically the issue is now political) issue but the water consumption is a problem. Wanna compare notes? (The noise is a massive huger problem)
I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to me that you claim that the energy consumption issue of datacenters has been solved.
In what way has it been solved? The only way to solve it is after all by not having AI datacenters consume energy at all, being superflous things and all since: 1. we can easily live without AI datacenters. 2. we desperately need to cut back on energy consumption in every way possible on account of climate change.
Those factors seem at odds with your (possible) claim that the energy consumption of those centers has been solved.
Oh, a vegan AI slop user!🤣🤣🤣
Most AI providers are ran by far-right chuds, who don't care about animal welfare, and call animal rights/environmental activism "toxic empathy".
So, from a real source and not some reddit or linked in post: https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/
Yes, this is true. But, those numbers do not include:
Scrolled through the article, found this:
So they're paid off by big tech to push whataboutism about AI data center water use.
EDIT: They're literally citing themselves about the water usage claims!🤣
Yes beef is probably the least efficient massively consumed food.
We really need to stop farming cows for health and climate reasons. I am more for vegetarianism than for removing data centers.
It has a serious effect that shouldn't be ignored. Everyone says "I can't eat slop" but you won't eat anything if the climate destroys agriculture regardless.
Meat should be a very rare thing for people, like it was in the medieval times. Or even just focus more on poultry, farmed in sustainable and ethical ways? They eat bugs ffs. We can turn bug protein to edible protein through... Farming chicken.
Or just eat tofu.
Many parts of the world are mostly vegan until very recently, but that doesn't stop them from developing amazing cuisines.
Most people in non-herding economy simply cannot afford meat just a couple hundred years ago.
Gr8
b8
m8
I can't eat data
Then why do they call them chips?
Yeah, its ok to have just one byte...
It's because gallium arsenide is tasty. Yummy!
I don't use cows for data storage.
I would not recommend using an AI data center for storage either.
Cool, who gives a shit? That seems besides the point. Are you using that to continue justifying eating beef which is consuming way more water than AI?
Yes
I'll have what he's having
The point is that the beef industry, while consuming that water, provides a good that is useful. AI data centres do not. The logic that "this thing uses a lot of water so adding anything else that does" is kinda sus, to put it mildly.
That being said, pork belly slays any cut of beef. Beef is grossly overrated.
are these things related, or we changing the subject on ourselves for no particular reason?
yes, they both have an environmental impact
not in the same category though. eating meat can't be compared to using AI because the difference is so big
Agriculture as a whole plays a big part in pollution and wasting water. I personally think being able to get "out of season" foods is a huge waste of resources and extremely damaging to the ecosystem as a whole.
We had a really fucking bad year for crops in general, so bad even the hay died. And if you think about it, all that water was wasted just generating dead biomass. Which is worse than the usual over consumption concerns.
Idk where I'm going with this, so I'll just leave it at that.
"Guys where is source?"
https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/
Sorry, this is not the source. May I ask why do you share misinformation?
Not only the article is an entirely different case, has no such chart, but the "clickable links" on the website are fake, too:
I clicked all links. None of them are fake. So, what the shit are you talking about?
That is the original source I know. The content describes the content of the graph. Where is this misinformation? What did I miss?
They're complaining that the way "Source" in the image is highlighted implies it's a clickable link, which of course it's not.
Despite that, whether the links in the text are highlighted depends on the browser (which is odd). Using Firefox Focus they are invisible but are highlighted in my stock Andoid browser.
In Addition, the data in the text is global data, the data in the post is US only, so it's not the source of the data of the post.
You missed the part about wp-image-4776.lazyautosizes.lazyloaded. This is a critical part of the lore, because it means the author of that page used WordPress, and is lazy.
I prefer the cows.
I can't eat data
you also can not eat a cow
it's obvious which one of these 2 you should do
steaks > slop
Unless they're sloppy steaks.
Ezra Klein just had an episode with Jasmine Sun who goes around and studies data centers specifically. She basically said they've figured water consumption out by having a closed loop cooling system. So they recycle the water reducing the needed to pull in outrageous amounts of water everyday. On the other hand they are fucking up the electrical grid big time. That's a problem they've yet to solve.
But they’re not using those closed loop cooling systems. It’s too expensive and they’re taking as many shortcuts as they can. Like xAI using „temporary“ converted jet engines as gas turbines for power.
It's easy to solve that problem too. Shut off the power. It's not as if the AI data centres are actually doing anything useful.