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Comment by simonw

6 months ago

See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268

Given the difference in water usage, more data centers does not mean less water for agriculture in any meaningful way.

If you genuinely want to save water you should celebrate any time an acre of farm land is converted into an acre of data center - all the more water for the other farms!

23 comments

simonw

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buellerbueller  6 months ago

the value of datacenters is dubious. the value of agriculture, less so.

  • simonw  6 months ago

    Once again, the key thing here is to ask how MUCH value we get per liter of water used.

    If data centers and farms used the same amount of water we should absolutely be talking about their comparative value to society, and farms would win.

    Farms use thousands of times more water than data centers.

    • buellerbueller  6 months ago

      Once again, you are ignoring my (implied) argument:

      Humans NEED food, the output of agriculture. Humans do not NEED any of LLMs' outputs.

      Once everyone is fed, then we can talk about water usage for LLMs.

      6 replies →

    • danaris  6 months ago

      Yes, it is worthwhile to ask how much value we get.

      And a whole bunch of us are saying we don't see the value in all these datacenters being built and run at full power to do training and inference 24/7, but you just keep ignoring or dismissing that.

      It is absolutely possible that generative AI provides some value. That is not the same thing as saying that it provides enough value to justify all of the resources being expended on it.

      The fact that the amount of water it uses is a fraction of what is used by agriculture—which is both one of the most important uses humans can put water to, as well as, AIUI, by far the single largest use of water in the world—is not a strong argument that its water usage should be ignored.

      7 replies →

Etherlord87  6 months ago

According to this logic the ideal situation is when there are no farms anymore because then each (out of zero) farm gets maximum water.

  • HPsquared  6 months ago

    Eventually people stop building more data centers as food becomes scarce and expensive, and farms become the hot new thing for the stock market, cereal entrepreneurs become the new celebrities and so on. Elon Husk, cereal magnate.