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Nobody Asked for AI
(jacobin.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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Very few people all that upset about ML in general, it's technology that's been around a very long time and historically has not consumed 40% of global water supplies. But now it is.
If they could go back to not doing that I could go back to not being upset by it.
Source? This seems really, really unlikely. Last I saw total data center water use (only some of which is AI) was still much less than even things like golf course watering.
AI Data Centers’ Water Consumption Breaks 264 Billion Gallons in 2025 as Devastating Drought Hits Nearly 63% of U.S.
Golf courses reduce water usage by 31 percent according to national survey
(1 Acre-feet = 325,851.4286 gallons, so this is 531 billion gallons)
The golf course industry points out their use is less than 0.5% of the total water use of the US, but it's twice the use of all data centers.
So for just AI to be using 40% of all water seems… really unlikely?
Not that it's surprising you're under that impression, as even in the headline above, the gist many articles about this issue try to push is that the 264 billion gallons of AI water use is connected to a drought across the country. But the actual numbers reveal that as fairly manipulative as if we rewrite the headline to "golf courses use a little under 0.5% of total US water as drought grips the nation" it's pretty absurd to suggest the first thing is significantly impacting the second and yet we'd be representing twice the water use as the original headline is discussing.