"The final 47 page document amounts to a meta-analysis of existing data.
One immediate obstacle to the investigators was AI companies’ lack of transparency around their water usage. “Generative AI uses significant energy and water resources, but companies are generally not reporting details of these uses,” the GAO said. Things also vary greatly depending on where in the U.S. an AI model is trained. It doesn’t cost the same amount to cool a datacenter in Texas as it does in Oregon.
But what the GAO could figure out was startling.
“It is not unusual to see new data centers being built with energy needs of 100 to 1000 megawatts, roughly equivalent to powering 80,000 to 800,000 households,” the GAO said. It added that 40 percent of that cost is just cooling the data center, a cost that’s expected to increase as the planet heats up.
Geography mattered a lot. “If a model is trained in the northwestern U.S. where 44 percent of electricity generation comes from hydropower, the carbon emissions are lower than if the model is trained in the Midwest, where 38 percent of the electricity is generated from coal,” the report said.""
https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/
