Just for perspective, since this anti-AI meme handwringing about water won’t die.
The US Corn industry alone uses 8x more water than all of the AI datacenters on the entire planet. 40% of that production is used to make fuels which are shipped around the country to be burned, injecting carbon into the atmosphere.
The water used by datacenters is evaporated and remains part of the local hydrological cycle. Unless they are placed in an area with water shortages, like a desert, the amount of water used by a datacenter isn’t significant.
Local power usage, local noise pollution, unsustainable investments made by capricious capitalists… those are all legitimate areas of criticism for AI datacenters. Water use is not.
Can you point to the justifying? If your argument is “AI bad because water usage”, then you have to actually demonstrate it’s a problem, and that you’ve always cared about water usage.
In the post they very EXPLICITLY state that there are many real issues with AI, just that water is the worst of them.
Do you know how psy-op for a movement works? Simple, you start focussing the movement on obviously false or irrelevant topics. That way, nothing useful gets accomplished, and the movement looks like a joke to anyone with a brain.
Important Edit: Our existing energy production does not exist separate from AI industries. AI Data centers are built on TOP of our current energy and fuel production and they are actively leeching energy at projected rates that displace human consumption. Making them orders of magnitude more wasteful. Which makes this whole argument about corn and ethanol incredibly disingenuous.
Then there is all that we already know: AI tech oligarchs in general are the ones primarily lobbying and kissing trump’s ass to remove regulations from the energy industries, and more wasteful and harmful technologies will be used to push the massive scale of datacenters they need to secure their unreal funding rounds. All this corruption is built ON TOP of already harmful energy systems and it’s not meant to fix them for the better.
With that said: The corn industry in part feeds people, my country has a rich culinary tradition that stems from corn and it’s derivatives.
Generative ai is wasteful useless crap. Also gen ai is projected to scale many times more just to become profitable. The corn industry already is. Also generative AI not only uses a lot of water; It uses an exorbitant amount of electricity and infrastructure costs, that based on the hype cycle for untenable and physically impossible “AGI” it will continue to ramp up more costs related to infrastructure and training that will bleed other more useful industries and infrastructure ventures dry.
Gen AI is a problem that is particularly capitalist. But there is no country in the world that has the socialist logic to humanize the use of AI. (Not even china.) Our reality is corrupt capitalist oligarchy and we engage with it that way. not in hypotheticals.
Open source models are the spearhead of a disruption cycle. The initial part of the business where corporations subsidize their costs and loose money to hook you in and de-skill you. When that cycle is over, open source models will become more scarce, unsupported and potentially ilegal, foreign companies that provide local models will become outlawed with the argument pf “security risks” and AI corporations will increase their prices many times over to allow the plebs access to their technology that monopolizes, centralizes and promotes government control and approval across culture and most industries. For this reason the argument of open source models is useless.
As a final note; The meme is too soft in order to be funny; A more accurate messaging would be that “the king wants to use the people’s resources to have a mechanism that can be unnacountable for bombing schools full of children and funneling money into mass surveillance of it’s subjects.”
@Ilixtze@FauxLiving I’m sorry but you’re incorrect, the very large majority of corn in the US goes to fuel ethanol to feed cars. Only a small percent goes to food, and its shit like corn syrup thats horrible for you anyway.
Corn industry is heavily propped up by subsidies. Its not small local farmers either. Its giant corpo farms, which need to dissapear.
Stop using millions of acres for corn, use some for panels and wind and let the rest return to natural prairie as it should be.
Not where i live: My country produced in 2025 around 20 millions of tons of corn and most of it was used for food production. And most of our culinary products are derived from corn; i write as i put some eggs and chilorio into a tortilla and shove it in my mouth.
Also interesting that for a country like mine that consumes so much corn , corn syrup is only commonly used in the manufactured food industry. and even corn syrup that is bad for your health is ten times better than a technology that is used as an excuse to bomb children and impose mass surveillance. Corn is awesome dude , come have some tacos and stop coping.
As commented above Our existing energy infrastructure does not exist separate from AI industries. AI Data centers is build on TOP of our energy and food production making them twice as wasteful. Our whole industries exist to support human life, not useless chatbots. What is worse, in your case, the United States: The endemic corruption; lack of energy infrastructure funding and the fact that energy regulations have been systematically destroyed with the help of lobbying by the AI tech Oligarchs themselves will make it so that more wasteful technologies than just Ethanol are used to power The useless AI bubble.
So it’s insulting to hear people suggest that our current industries are separate from AI data centers. It is an anti-human attitude. Our industries can be improved, made more clean and human and AI in it’s current form and logic is doing the oposite.
also i must push the point forward that no mater where you live; AI data center industries are not separate from existing energy and food infrastructure; but built on top of it and leeching from it, which makes the whole corn argument invalid. That aside from the fact that is inherently anti-human to try to try to compare our existing food and energy infrastructures with an emerging technology that not only hasn’t proved itself, it is plagued with corruption and manufactured hype funded by the worst oligarchs in the world.
which are shipped around the country to be burned, injecting carbon into the atmosphere.
While I broadly agree with your comment, this line is a stretch. The carbon released is only from transportation and fertilizer production. The carbon inside the ethanol itself is actually pulled from the environment, so that part is actually carbon neutral.
The big problem with ethanol production is that it takes 5 gallons of fuel to produce 4 gallons of ethanol. It’s literally just pissing away time, money, and resources just to subsidize farmers.
I should say that the corn is carbon neutral but the other inputs, such as the fertilizer and the machinery used to irrigate and harvest it do product net positive carbon. In addition, the opportunity cost is that we’re not using that water and land to grow food creating secondary affects for the people that need to eat food.
At least corn has a use. AI still uses shit tons of water and still doesn’t produce anything of note. Corn fuels industries and also humans, while AI just draws hands wrong.
Human artists can produce actual art correctly and original on one chocolate bar for breakfast and an energy drink for dinner. The cost of AI was and is never justifiable, regardless of scale.
At least corn has a use. AI still uses shit tons of water and still doesn’t produce anything of note. Corn fuels industries and also humans, while AI just draws hands wrong.
40% of corn is used for fuel. Instead of using the fresh water in farmable areas to produce food, we use almost half of it producing ethanol for fuel which we then burn into the atmosphere.
In addition, the fuel isn’t burned in the corn fields. All of that water in the corn gets shipped away from the are where it was pumped. Datacenter water goes right back into the atmosphere and becomes rain in the area where it is consumed.
Human artists can produce actual art correctly and original on one chocolate bar for breakfast and an energy drink for dinner.
If they were spontaneously created out of thin air at breakfast that would be true. Otherwise you’re glossing over the decades of chocolate bars and energy drinks required to create and train that person.
Fuel is still useful, no? I’m all for combatting climate change and pollution, but fuel is needed and the cost of producing corn is offset by the use of it. My point being that regardless if AI uses less input, the useful output is minimal and thus not worth it and water use we could’ve saved.
I’m not disagreeing that corn can be or is a bad fuel source, just that it is still better than AI at the thing it is supposed to do.
As far as I’m aware, the water used by data centers is not going back to where it came from. It’s either recirculated right back into the data center or discarded contaminated (microplastics and other chemicals), creating extra pollution. The amount that enters the atmosphere is not that large and might travel away from the original location, as clouds do.
The efficiency of human artists is more a societal problem. We got plenty of talented people, they kinda train themselves, it’s just that we underfund them.
I don’t think we should replace human artists with AI and I also think this whole AI bubble built on LLMs and diffusion models is a capitalism hallucination that will end in a market collapse.
I just think that we should not stray from reality in our criticisms and engage with misinformation simply because it aligns with our goals. There are plenty of valid criticisms about the current AI bubble, but water use isn’t one of them, outside of the short sighted billionaires building them in water-limited deserts… those are destructive to the local people.
The problem with ethanol that both of you seem unaware of is how energy intensive it is to create ethanol. It takes about 5 gallons of fuel to produce 4 gallons of ethanol.
Let me repeat that: when producing ethanol, you have to spend more fuel than you produce
Ethanol is also used in food and as a disinfectant.
I don’t disagree with how bad the production of Ethanol and such can be, just the comparison to AI data centers in terms of cost and usefulness in return.
I’m not defending the dumbass capitalists exploiting AI and causing a bubble with their bad decisions… but outside of places like deserts the water usage is largely trivial.
A few do. You draw in cold water from the depth of a lake or fjord and pass that through a heat exchanger before dumping it back in the reservoir. It’s more common in power plants. There’s only so many places where the geography works out for this though.
Funnily enough, if you actually look into the source of these data center water consumption memes, they typically count that circulated water as “consumed” by the data center despite the fact they, you know, it doesn’t actually go anywhere.
They could absolutely use seawater or brown water to cool a primary coolant loop of fresh water/coolant.
The reason that they don’t is because it would be expensive, salt water creates a lot of corrosion issues and because there are no laws or regulations requiring them to do so.
If a law was passed that said datacenters couldn’t be a net user of potable water, then they would use more expensive cooling immediately and ClaudeAI would cost an extra $0.38/mo. The solution is to pass meaningful regulations to protect fresh water.
This is a very solvable issue… even in deserts (which can use vapor compression cooling, like your home AC/refridgerator). It’s just more expensive and nobody is forcing them to pay that expense.
Just for perspective, since this anti-AI meme handwringing about water won’t die.
The US Corn industry alone uses 8x more water than all of the AI datacenters on the entire planet. 40% of that production is used to make fuels which are shipped around the country to be burned, injecting carbon into the atmosphere.
The water used by datacenters is evaporated and remains part of the local hydrological cycle. Unless they are placed in an area with water shortages, like a desert, the amount of water used by a datacenter isn’t significant.
Local power usage, local noise pollution, unsustainable investments made by capricious capitalists… those are all legitimate areas of criticism for AI datacenters. Water use is not.
I’m in NM, they’re going to build them here, next. Is it okay with you if I complain about data centers using water?
Lol I’ve never seen such a “whataboutism” used to justify AI
Can you point to the justifying? If your argument is “AI bad because water usage”, then you have to actually demonstrate it’s a problem, and that you’ve always cared about water usage.
In the post they very EXPLICITLY state that there are many real issues with AI, just that water is the worst of them.
Do you know how psy-op for a movement works? Simple, you start focussing the movement on obviously false or irrelevant topics. That way, nothing useful gets accomplished, and the movement looks like a joke to anyone with a brain.
Are you a secret pro AI agent?
Well, welcome to the Internet. Enjoy it before age verification regulations locks you out.
Important Edit: Our existing energy production does not exist separate from AI industries. AI Data centers are built on TOP of our current energy and fuel production and they are actively leeching energy at projected rates that displace human consumption. Making them orders of magnitude more wasteful. Which makes this whole argument about corn and ethanol incredibly disingenuous.
Then there is all that we already know: AI tech oligarchs in general are the ones primarily lobbying and kissing trump’s ass to remove regulations from the energy industries, and more wasteful and harmful technologies will be used to push the massive scale of datacenters they need to secure their unreal funding rounds. All this corruption is built ON TOP of already harmful energy systems and it’s not meant to fix them for the better.
With that said: The corn industry in part feeds people, my country has a rich culinary tradition that stems from corn and it’s derivatives.
Generative ai is wasteful useless crap. Also gen ai is projected to scale many times more just to become profitable. The corn industry already is. Also generative AI not only uses a lot of water; It uses an exorbitant amount of electricity and infrastructure costs, that based on the hype cycle for untenable and physically impossible “AGI” it will continue to ramp up more costs related to infrastructure and training that will bleed other more useful industries and infrastructure ventures dry.
Gen AI is a problem that is particularly capitalist. But there is no country in the world that has the socialist logic to humanize the use of AI. (Not even china.) Our reality is corrupt capitalist oligarchy and we engage with it that way. not in hypotheticals.
Open source models are the spearhead of a disruption cycle. The initial part of the business where corporations subsidize their costs and loose money to hook you in and de-skill you. When that cycle is over, open source models will become more scarce, unsupported and potentially ilegal, foreign companies that provide local models will become outlawed with the argument pf “security risks” and AI corporations will increase their prices many times over to allow the plebs access to their technology that monopolizes, centralizes and promotes government control and approval across culture and most industries. For this reason the argument of open source models is useless.
As a final note; The meme is too soft in order to be funny; A more accurate messaging would be that “the king wants to use the people’s resources to have a mechanism that can be unnacountable for bombing schools full of children and funneling money into mass surveillance of it’s subjects.”
@Ilixtze @FauxLiving I’m sorry but you’re incorrect, the very large majority of corn in the US goes to fuel ethanol to feed cars. Only a small percent goes to food, and its shit like corn syrup thats horrible for you anyway.
Corn industry is heavily propped up by subsidies. Its not small local farmers either. Its giant corpo farms, which need to dissapear.
Stop using millions of acres for corn, use some for panels and wind and let the rest return to natural prairie as it should be.
Not where i live: My country produced in 2025 around 20 millions of tons of corn and most of it was used for food production. And most of our culinary products are derived from corn; i write as i put some eggs and chilorio into a tortilla and shove it in my mouth.
Also interesting that for a country like mine that consumes so much corn , corn syrup is only commonly used in the manufactured food industry. and even corn syrup that is bad for your health is ten times better than a technology that is used as an excuse to bomb children and impose mass surveillance. Corn is awesome dude , come have some tacos and stop coping.
As commented above Our existing energy infrastructure does not exist separate from AI industries. AI Data centers is build on TOP of our energy and food production making them twice as wasteful. Our whole industries exist to support human life, not useless chatbots. What is worse, in your case, the United States: The endemic corruption; lack of energy infrastructure funding and the fact that energy regulations have been systematically destroyed with the help of lobbying by the AI tech Oligarchs themselves will make it so that more wasteful technologies than just Ethanol are used to power The useless AI bubble.
So it’s insulting to hear people suggest that our current industries are separate from AI data centers. It is an anti-human attitude. Our industries can be improved, made more clean and human and AI in it’s current form and logic is doing the oposite.
You are aware that the vast vast majority of people do not live where you live? That’s how living somewhere works.
also i must push the point forward that no mater where you live; AI data center industries are not separate from existing energy and food infrastructure; but built on top of it and leeching from it, which makes the whole corn argument invalid. That aside from the fact that is inherently anti-human to try to try to compare our existing food and energy infrastructures with an emerging technology that not only hasn’t proved itself, it is plagued with corruption and manufactured hype funded by the worst oligarchs in the world.
Whataboutism.
While I broadly agree with your comment, this line is a stretch. The carbon released is only from transportation and fertilizer production. The carbon inside the ethanol itself is actually pulled from the environment, so that part is actually carbon neutral.
The big problem with ethanol production is that it takes 5 gallons of fuel to produce 4 gallons of ethanol. It’s literally just pissing away time, money, and resources just to subsidize farmers.
Yeah it isn’t the strongest point, I’ll admit.
I should say that the corn is carbon neutral but the other inputs, such as the fertilizer and the machinery used to irrigate and harvest it do product net positive carbon. In addition, the opportunity cost is that we’re not using that water and land to grow food creating secondary affects for the people that need to eat food.
It’s valuable for reducing smog and makes great fuel for performance cars
@nBodyProblem @mnemonicmonkeys at a 40% efficiency hit yes. It is great for turbos!
At least corn has a use. AI still uses shit tons of water and still doesn’t produce anything of note. Corn fuels industries and also humans, while AI just draws hands wrong.
Human artists can produce actual art correctly and original on one chocolate bar for breakfast and an energy drink for dinner. The cost of AI was and is never justifiable, regardless of scale.
40% of corn is used for fuel. Instead of using the fresh water in farmable areas to produce food, we use almost half of it producing ethanol for fuel which we then burn into the atmosphere.
In addition, the fuel isn’t burned in the corn fields. All of that water in the corn gets shipped away from the are where it was pumped. Datacenter water goes right back into the atmosphere and becomes rain in the area where it is consumed.
If they were spontaneously created out of thin air at breakfast that would be true. Otherwise you’re glossing over the decades of chocolate bars and energy drinks required to create and train that person.
Fuel is still useful, no? I’m all for combatting climate change and pollution, but fuel is needed and the cost of producing corn is offset by the use of it. My point being that regardless if AI uses less input, the useful output is minimal and thus not worth it and water use we could’ve saved.
I’m not disagreeing that corn can be or is a bad fuel source, just that it is still better than AI at the thing it is supposed to do.
As far as I’m aware, the water used by data centers is not going back to where it came from. It’s either recirculated right back into the data center or discarded contaminated (microplastics and other chemicals), creating extra pollution. The amount that enters the atmosphere is not that large and might travel away from the original location, as clouds do.
The efficiency of human artists is more a societal problem. We got plenty of talented people, they kinda train themselves, it’s just that we underfund them.
I don’t think we should replace human artists with AI and I also think this whole AI bubble built on LLMs and diffusion models is a capitalism hallucination that will end in a market collapse.
I just think that we should not stray from reality in our criticisms and engage with misinformation simply because it aligns with our goals. There are plenty of valid criticisms about the current AI bubble, but water use isn’t one of them, outside of the short sighted billionaires building them in water-limited deserts… those are destructive to the local people.
The problem with ethanol that both of you seem unaware of is how energy intensive it is to create ethanol. It takes about 5 gallons of fuel to produce 4 gallons of ethanol.
Let me repeat that: when producing ethanol, you have to spend more fuel than you produce
Ethanol is also used in food and as a disinfectant.
I don’t disagree with how bad the production of Ethanol and such can be, just the comparison to AI data centers in terms of cost and usefulness in return.
so those datacenters Iran is blowing up in the desert then… hooray?
Yeah.
I’m not defending the dumbass capitalists exploiting AI and causing a bubble with their bad decisions… but outside of places like deserts the water usage is largely trivial.
i just wish we had a good way of using, i dunno, seawater or something.
A few do. You draw in cold water from the depth of a lake or fjord and pass that through a heat exchanger before dumping it back in the reservoir. It’s more common in power plants. There’s only so many places where the geography works out for this though.
Funnily enough, if you actually look into the source of these data center water consumption memes, they typically count that circulated water as “consumed” by the data center despite the fact they, you know, it doesn’t actually go anywhere.
They could absolutely use seawater or brown water to cool a primary coolant loop of fresh water/coolant.
The reason that they don’t is because it would be expensive, salt water creates a lot of corrosion issues and because there are no laws or regulations requiring them to do so.
If a law was passed that said datacenters couldn’t be a net user of potable water, then they would use more expensive cooling immediately and ClaudeAI would cost an extra $0.38/mo. The solution is to pass meaningful regulations to protect fresh water.
This is a very solvable issue… even in deserts (which can use vapor compression cooling, like your home AC/refridgerator). It’s just more expensive and nobody is forcing them to pay that expense.