Post #3879616

You can offset carbon on a spreadsheet. Yet you can't offset thermodynamics in the real world. Big tech is bragging about "water-efficient" AI data centers while intentionally omitting the power plant. Read this article. In the US, generating the electricity to run these clusters uses roughly 12x more water than the data centers use on-site. Buying "water credits" in Michigan does not change the physical reality that you are boiling off the local municipal water supply in a desert area to dissipate the thermal load of an LLM. Kinda sus to call it an engineering breakthrough. Looks like thermodynamic gerrymandering to me. Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-data-centers-water-use-901e2902?st=o4wXMk&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink #infrastructure #greenwashing #technology #genai #noai #climatechange #datacenters #sysadmin