The Water Footprint of AI: A 404 Error
A DOI link intended to point to a study on AI's water consumption returns a 404 error, highlighting the fragility of digital infrastructure. The DOI Foundation's site has undergone reorganization, and the requested resource is no longer available. This incident underscores the importance of persistent identifiers and the challenges of maintaining access to scientific literature in the digital age.
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- pcl
”AI's global water footprint could reach 4.2–6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027”
This is about as much as the annual consumption of the California almond farms.
(An acre-foot is approximately 1200 cubic meters.)
https://www.c-win.org/cwin-water-blog/2022/7/11/california-a...
- TSiege
Whether or not you think water use is bad for AI, another aspect hard to ignore with it is that the closed loop systems are mixing PFAs into the water for closed loop systems
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/04/pfas-pol...
- cannonpr
Did we somehow mass build pure lossy evaporatively cooled data-centres in the AI era while I was asleep ? Most of them im familiar with lose at best 3-4% of their water per day due to recovery systems even when they are evaporative or open loop to a lake. Yet nearly everyone I hear talking about this seems to treat it as if they lose 100% of their water loop contents per day as if it’s a matter-antimatter destruction system…
- shaky-carrousel
The issue with AI datacenters was never about water. Water is an easily dismissable strawman that sloppers love to bring on.
The real issue with AI datacenters is the huge amounts of wasted energy, after decades of energy efficiency efforts.
- sceptic123
Who could have guessed this would end up with many polarised "massive problem" / "not a problem" comments