Last month, one of Joe Biden’s generals said he wants to put America’s nuclear arsenal under the control of artificial intelligence (AI). Someone should write a movie about that! Oh, wait. It’s already been done. As if that idea wasn’t bad enough, JP Morgan Chase and consulting firm ERM say in a new report that the rush to AI is placing a catastrophic and unreported strain on America’s critical water supply.
It requires huge data centers to run all the calculations in an AI program. Those data centers generate a tremendous amount of heat, and it requires a ton of water to keep them cool enough to stay on. A mid-sized data center requires approximately 300,000 gallons of water per day to cool it.
A large data center, like the ones needed for AI, requires as much as 5 million gallons per day. That’s the entire water supply for a town of 50,000 people. It’s enough water to irrigate 1,100 acres of crops every day.
Data centers across the US used more than 75 billion gallons of water last year. About 20% of the water used for these centers is drawn from watersheds that are already stressed. As the rush toward AI needs more computing power and electricity, that demand is only going to increase. The report from JP Morgan Chase and ERM notes that this will put entire communities at risk, not to mention the environment.
The loss of water due to AI could also cause reduced crop yields, which in turn leads to food shortages and destroys the livelihood of ranchers and farmers. The report notes that without major improvements to the country’s water management systems, water scarcity will be one of the direct consequences of the rush to AI.
