In a study published on Monday by the peer-reviewed journal Patterns, data scientist Alex de Vries-Gao estimated the carbon emissions from electricity used by AI at between 33 million and 80 million metric tons.
That higher figure would put it above last year’s totals for Chile (78m tons), Czechia (78m tons), Romania (71m tons), and New York City (48m tons, including both CO2 and other greenhouse gases).
I mean, we can and do mass produce potable water from seawater right now, but there is an ugly problem to the distillery method: seawater has a lot of unwanted stuff in it, and if we just dump it back in the ocean, it raises the toxicity locally for that area.
Data centers can also use closed-loop cooling, air cooling, immersion cooling, etc; they’re just using potable water because it is the cheapest (for them). But even if they didn’t innovate at all, the high end of that estimate is like 0.02% of yearly global freshwater withdrawals. As you say, the devastating part is that location constraints determine who bears the externalities.