ChatGPT told me that their hallucinations are worth it, and outweighs their negligible environmental impact. I'm not smart enough to do the maths, but it sounds like no worries, boss!

having not looked into it at all: it probably doesn't "need" to be fresh water, but it'll probably be rivers anyways.

i assume it works similarly to other large scale cooling operations: you have a closed loop for the heat exchangers and the cooling towers are fed by a local source of flowing water.

doesn't need to be all that clean, or fresh water, but since rivers are pretty much the only source of moving water in most places, there's not really many other options. (for the cooling towers, not AI datacanters...they could just NOT build them, if they weren't fuckwits)

same as nuclear power plants, or any other industrial application that needs a lot of cooling!

It doesn't need to be potable, but since it's using evaporative cooling, it does need to be somewhat clean. You don't want to leave gunk all over your cooling equipment.

If only we knew if there is critical mass that can make it run away so we will end up like Mars.

that costs more money

The water gets dirtied and they'd need to add in a filtration system.

those numbers are inflated to fuck, or else the people studied for it are just wasteful as fuck

I take long showers often multiple times a day, wash a lot of stuff by hand, do a lot of garden watering, fill a kiddie pool when it's hot, and wash my hands very often. I still only reach a max of 60 gallons a day on average in the summer. typically half that in the winter. and I wfh so all my shitting is done at home, too.

who the fuck is flushing 15 gallons a day just by themself? and who the fuck is doing multiple loads of laundry every single day?

the incredibly low quality of that blog post pisses me off. garbage like that makes the world a worse place, and whoever published that should be ashamed of their work

Copilot told me that they need fresh water to survive, just like us.