Comment by hootz
2 hours ago
If the way capitalism works is by responding to the excesses of a few with unbounded growth and destruction to meet that demand, isn't that also an issue with capitalism itself? Capitalism does not demand permanent growth if you only define it by private ownership of the means of production, but in reality, it seems like the supply and demand dynamics result in some extremely inefficient allocation in relation to the masses just so a few can have their riches and, apparently, their massive water-hogging datacenters for SOTA LLMs.
Water hogging? Show me the data. This is a lie that the socialist continue to peddle. It’s a very sticky idea completely resistant to facts. Data-centers use 48m gallons a day in the USA. Total water consumption is 322 billion a day. So 0.015% of water use. Golf courses use 30x that and Almonds 80x that.
Okay, those are the global stats, but what about local impacts? Water is often a local resource, not a country-wide one, so the impact of a large datacenter will often be much higher around it. For example, we have some datacenters gobbling up 10% of all the water consumption of a town (https://www.waterverge.com/news/data-centers-ai-water-consum...), with most of that coming from potable water supplies. That's considerably higher than the global stat you provided of 0.015%, and that affects the entire town.
That, and also local heat generation. Data centers heat up neighborhoods from miles away. (https://interestingengineering.com/science/data-center-phoen...)