“Water is life. AI and data centers are not.”
Artificial Intelligence has become nearly impossible to avoid. If you read or watch the news at all, probably not a day goes by that you don’t hear something about AI. If you are on social media, you definitely see it every day in at least one of its forms, art being the most common, but music and text are right up there now. The Big Tech firms pretty much force it on you, or at least try to. If you write something for social media, you get prompted to let AI do it for you. Do a search for anything and the first thing you’ll see is what AI has found for you.
But far less attention is paid to the environmental and economic costs behind it.
I personally will not use AI in any form. I see how it can have some useful applications, but mostly it is used to deceive people with fake pictures or comments on social media. It basically plagiarizes anything that goes online, such as this column. It uses photographs and paintings created by actual people and places them in other contexts. Also, tech giants are increasingly using AI to replace people, particularly in white-collar jobs. It makes people lazy. Why do research when, with one click, there is AI to summarize things it has found? This can then lead to control of what information is found. The companies can manipulate the output.
An even bigger issue is in the AI data centers themselves. Data centers have been part of the tech world since the beginning. Some are only about the size of a closet or small room. Some are larger. But the growth of AI demands new, industrial-scale data centers. The largest one I have found so far has just been approved in northwestern Utah. It will cover over 40,000 acres. Sixty-two square miles. It will require more than twice the electrical power the entire state uses now, necessitating the construction of a large natural-gas generating system. In Nevada, the power company is cutting off power it has been supplying to towns and rural communities, including the Lake Tahoe area, to feed the new data centers around Reno. As energy demand grows, prices will increase for everyone.
These data centers also need massive amounts of water to keep the systems cool. Medium-sized centers can use up to 110 million gallons of water a year. That is equivalent to the usage of 1,000 households each year. The larger centers can use up to 5 million gallons a day, about the same as a town of 20,000 to 50,000 people. The water can come from surface and groundwater, purified water, reclaimed water or recycled water. Water drawn from rivers and groundwater can seriously deplete our supplies of potable water for personal use and agriculture. Here in the arid Southwest, this becomes a bigger issue. According to the people who work on these projects, our warmer climate will push water use toward the higher end of the averages. This is especially problematic because we have been in a long-term drought and water levels are already low.
I am not proposing that we stop developing technologies that do have useful impacts on society. But I do question why we are diving ahead, knowing the issues, without finding solutions. The developer of the Utah data center claims we must do this now, or China will beat us. As long as we view everything as a zero-sum competition rather than a cooperative effort to help all humanity, we are doomed to repeat the wars and disasters we have been dealing with for decades.
Scott Perez is a former working cowboy, guide and occasional actor. He earned a master’s degree in natural resource management from Cornell University and lives in the Animas River Valley.