FRIEDERIKE ROHDE and PAZ PEÑA
BERLIN/SANTIAGO – AI is often portrayed as the harbinger of a prosperous, more efficient future. But the machines driving this revolution depend on a resource far older – and far more contested – than data or electricity: water.
As the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s recent Water Atlas makes clear, AI’s rapid growth is depleting local water reserves around the world, from drought-stricken Chile to South Africa. Its physical footprint reflects a new form of colonial extraction; instead of silver and soy, now it is the cooling water that keeps the digital economy running.
While the debate about AI’s energy use focuses on the power needed to train and operate large language models, what is often overlooked is the vast amount of water required to cool data centers, not to mention the water used in energy production and hardware manufacturing.
ChatGPT is a prime example. Training GPT-3 required roughly 700,000 liters of water for cooling alone. A Greenpeace study estimates that data centers will consume 664 billion liters annually by 2030, compared to 239 billion liters in 2024.
AI’s benefits are concentrated in the Global North, yet its environmental costs increasingly fall on the Global South. In 2023, mass protests erupted in Uruguay over a proposed Google data center as the country suffered its worst drought in 70 years. With reservoirs running dry, authorities began pumping brackish water from the Río de la Plata estuary into public systems, granting Google permits to draw from the remaining freshwater reserves even as working-class families boiled salty tap water to drink.
No comments:
Post a Comment