Comment by arp242
2 days ago
> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.
To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.
As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.
A huge part of the American economy (to take an example) is information services. Yes, we're also incredibly productive farmers, etc. But, a huuugge part of our wealth as a nation is making 'stuff' that isn't really 'stuff'.
We shouldn’t take these numbers blindly, but even if you think the value that Anthropic is providing is inflated by 10x due to it being a fad, that’s still 100x more value than cotton.
Market prices can be wrong, but I think it goes too far to completely disregard them and cut back on AI rather than cotton in places where there’s relatively little water. You can buy cotton from somewhere that has more water, rather than growing it in a desert.
> A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.
The average American discards 80lb/year of clothing. That absolutely isn't serving a human need, that's plain overconsumption.
That number sounds impossible but I guess there must be some people that throw away a lot more clothes than I do.
I'm not sure I even own 80lbs of clothes.
Doesn't this value include unsold clothing?
Seems to me we need a better pricing system for water so the market can sort out if the application is valuable enough.
The water that cools the datacenter is one minor ingredient in the process. For the cotton plant it is one of the few, critical ingredients.
How is it a minor ingredient if the data center will not work without it? No datacenter can operate normally without a cooling system.
A cooling system can operate without water.
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