www.theguardian.com/technology/2... the EUROPEAN 🇪🇺 has been developed to target such complex issues. I urge all at the legislative bodies on the EU to analyse if our current regulations are sufficient, or more is needed, and to start working on the „Brussels effect“. @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu
theguardian.com
I worked at Google DeepMind. You should listen to the warnings about AI | Alex Turner
We must stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence
![Once he figured out how much electricity these AI systems would likely consume, he could use that to forecast the amount of planet-heating pollution that would likely create. That came out to between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons annually. For comparison, New York City emits around 50 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Data centers can also be big water guzzlers, an issue that’s similarly tied to their electricity use. Water is used in cooling systems for data centers to keep servers from overheating. Power plants also demand significant amounts of water needed to cool equipment and turn turbines using steam, which makes up a majority of a data center’s water footprint. The push to build new data centers for generative AI has also fueled plans to build more power plants, which in turn use more water and (and create more greenhouse gas pollution if they burn fossil fuels).
AI could use between 312.5 and 764.6 billion liters of water this year, according to de Vries-Gao. That reaches even higher than a previous study conducted in 2023 that estimates that water use could be as much as 600 billion liters in 2027.
Related/Google says a typical AI text prompt only uses 5 drops of water — experts say that’s misleading
“I think that’s the biggest surprise,” says Shaolei Ren, one of the authors of that 2023 study and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. “[de Vries-Gao’s] paper is really timely… especially as we are seeing increasingly polarized views about AI and water,” Ren adds.
Across the US, which has more of these facilities than any other country in the world, there’s been a surge in local opposition to new data center projects that is often driven by concerns about water and power usage.
Even with the higher projection for water use, Ren says de Vries-Gao’s analysis is “really conservative” because it only captures the environmental effects of operating AI equipment — excluding the additional effe…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:66lbtw2porscqpmair6mir37/bafkreiang6squ2hxjetevuwfbi2hgymtmmyoalny36rhieodyhwh6624wy)
