Comment by munk-a
8 hours ago
To be fair to people's objections - agriculture is significantly more important than AI model training when it comes to improving the average standard of living - and to be fair to model training a lot of the water usage in agriculture is used on extremely water inefficient crops.
Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord.
There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.
Marginal agricultural water use is alfalfa / nut farming in the desert and ethanol corn, not products consumers actually care about. Consumers aren't clamoring for E15 fuel over E10.
Consumers care greatly about the products that alfalfa is used to make.