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Well, if you compare against one of the known worst offenders you will always look better.
But also, the cattle farms at least produce food. For humans to eat. Like, we need food. We don’t need waifu chatbots.
This is the same argument as “a human baby takes years of nurture and training until it can do task too.” Like, yeah, but that’s a human. The reason we do all this shit.
In all fairness, while humans need food to survive, we don’t need beef and there are objectively better options for sustainability than animal agriculture.
Not saying AI isn’t abhorrent, but the argument that beef makes food so its water consumption is not appalling isn’t strong.
we don’t need beef and there are objectively better options for sustainability
Of course. It’s still of greater and more essential use to us than waifu chatbots.
the argument that beef makes food so its water consumption is not appalling isn’t strong.
I didn’t say it’s not appaling. I did say at least it makes something useful, and that comparing the two does not absolve AI.
Not just produce food but also material like hides for leather production. And leather can be used for clothing.
However meat production is not better in comparison. Both are polution centers. Meat farms AND ai
Per what?
This looks to be the total number of each category. If so, it’s a useless graph. How many L/day are used per single unit. Maybe per farm/datacenter.Edit.
I did the math
3,562 Cattle farms
21,617,069 L/day/ranch5,400 data centers
416,667 L/day/data center45 AI data centers
600,000 L/day/AI data centerThis does not take into consideration the heat produced nor fossil fuels consumed by each.
If water is your only metric, cattle ranches are worse. But this isn’t a good metric for many reasons, since livestock, being food, is a commodity, while data centers are not.
Let’s normalize to technology, ans ignore beef for a moment.
AI data centers consume about 33% more water than non-AI centers.
There is not a situation where this is fine.The other part I don’t see talked about is that evaporative cooling produces water vapour, and water vapour increases greenhouse effects. Normally we don’t worry about water vapour emissions because it tends to fall out as rain or snow a couple of weeks later, but this is continuous usage. Continuous plumes of 600 tonnes of water vapour per AI data centre per day.
I think that’s more of a localized pressure, like how corn sweat makes the Midwest super humid.
Water is a distraction. The heat and fossil fueled power consumption is the real problem. They will burn us all alive and we have to sit back and let it happen because the fascists are in power, I guess.
The largest mass of datacenters are still in construction. Using old data to pretend it’s not a problem is just gross.
They’re going to cancel all of them because the bubble is about to collapse. Using future predictions as verified fact is a stupid idea.
whats the source of your data?
The data center, duh.
- you can eat a cow. you cannot eat an llm.
- we should eat less cows.
- we should feed cows grass, not corn
- fuck elon musk. he promised to build a water treatment plant in memphis to cool grok and then ‘paused’ the planning. not the construction, the planning.
- pleas do not use grok.
- you should plant a garden.
I’ve seen hundreds of sexy cows and only one or two good-looking data centers.
That sentence does not read well, regardless the intent I put to it.
I am at loss if I should commend you or be horrified. If not both.
“Fuck one cow, and you’re a cow fucker. Fuck one datacenter? You’re a hero.”
“Burn a cow, you’re a monster. Burn a datacenter, become the monster monsters fear.”
- I beg to differ
chomps down on a piping hot gpu
Crunchy, yet delicious.
Hey! That’s my brain!
Talk about crunching numbers amirite?
grooooan :p
Milk cows need corn, alfalfa, and grass, because they need the extra nutrients, since they’re, y’know, raising a baby.
And before anyone goes off on me about how we shouldn’t have dairy cows, y’all can pry cheese and ice cream out of my cold, dead fingers.
No, cows do not need alfalfa or corn. They evolved to eat grass. They need grass. The rest is from intensive farming practices, partly because the USA has a culture where beef is better if the cow was so overfed that the muscle tissue is riddled with fat (it’s called marbling) and partly because you can raise cattle’s weight and therefore selling price more quickly if they’re overfed. This drives more profits at the expense of the cows’ health from eating food that they struggle with, giving them recurrent stomach issues and bacterial infections. They then solve that problem by routinely giving them low dose antibiotics, which is the perfect breeding ground for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, causing serious problems for human health - we’re rapidly running out of antibiotics of last resort.
There are plenty of countries that raise their cows in large fields instead of in barns, eating natural grass that grows purely from rain that falls from the sky, but it’s less profitable and needs protecting from American imported beef which is cheaper and more fatty.
The methane is a global problem with beef and dairy, though. Cows release a lot of greenhouse gasses however healthily or naturally they’re fed.
Yes, they do, it’s for PROTEIN so the cow can make enough fatty milk that it’s good for the calf and for butter, and so the cow stays healthy in the process. Do you have any idea how much extra protein and fat a pregnant and nursing female of any mammalian species needs in order to stay healthy?
Even the local dairy farms around me, that keep their cows on grass as much as they can, supplement feed.
Here’s an actual farmer talking about it if you want to hear from someone in the industry.
For more cow related content, here’s him on how the beef cattle industry are largely a bunch of whiny bastards who want to have their cake and eat it too, if you want to have something that is actually worth getting mad about.
An addendum, just for funsies: him talking about the silliest chicken myth he’s ever heard (and he’s heard a lot).
How did the cows discover agriculture and grew their own breeding supplements of maize and alfalfa before human husbandry? Should we tell the Moose, Elk, and Bison to go buy some tractors or do you think they’ll manage with just plows?
Yes, they do, it’s for PROTEIN
You clearly have no idea that grass contains protein.
You’re wrong, and instead of finding out whether cows are typically fed on grass alone, yes alone, in the uk and Ireland (but not America where they do it the cow-hurting fat and bacteria ridden way), your source is some American blogger?!
It does, just not enough to keep a pregnant cow healthy. And he blogs, yes, but he’s also a farmer, in case you missed that part. My source is also the farmers around me who keep their cows on grass as much as possible.
Why do you think farmers can’t blog, just curious?
Yes, they do, it’s for PROTEIN
You clearly have no idea that grass contains protein.
It does, just not enough to keep a pregnant cow healthy.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You’re spouting such a bunch of crap. Cows don’t need anything except grass, and that’s how they’ve been in the UK for centuries and centuries. They evolved eating grass. Grass is their natural diet.
Maize isn’t even indigenous to the UK, only really got going in the 20th century and yet cows have been living in the UK and cultivated for dairy and meat since before the industrial revolution! You didn’t even bother to look anything up, you just have the american perverse cow-damaging position as explained to you by what authoritative source? One blogger!
Why do you think farmers can’t blog, just curious?
Holy straw man, batman!
One US blogger’s ignorance can’t wipe out thousands and thousands of years of happy grass-eating cows without intestinal problems. Even when they’re pregnant! Duh.
- He’s a farmer
- You didn’t watch the video, did you?
- Are you a farmer?
plant a garden
Yes! My family has one and we have to give away zucchinis now, there’s no way to process them. If you’re concerned about water use, research what plants naturally thrive in the climate in your area. Check if a well can be dug so you don’t need to use expensive and treated tap water.
Rain barrels are a really good solution to water needs for home gardens, and usually pretty inexpensive.
I got a couple of flavouring barrels from a food plant I worked at, an adapter to hook them to my downspouts, and a submersible pump that lives inside powered by a solar battery. They’re sealed so no issues with mosquitoes, and the pump feeds a garden hose so I’m not carrying buckets around. I basically never use tap water in my garden at all.
Be sure to look up local laws before getting a rain barrel. For some reason some cities have laws against them.
This is sadly true. Some places are so dry that capturing rainwater can disrupt the local water table (this is a wild guess). Other places are governed by idiots.
My city gives out rain barrels a couple times a year.
yeah the plants really love the un-chlorinated in floridated water.
ok so check it - we started shredding the overflow squash and cooking it down into tomatoes to make a great pasta sauce.
also zucchini bread is awesome.
We’ve tried all kinds of recipes and now have an extremely high-zucchini diet and so do the chickens, yet the freezer keeps filling up. The plants are in overdrive this year. Luckily my parents work in the town and their colleagues gladly take the extras.
do you have a magic trick for battling the squash vine borers?
6 - a native species garden
To be clear: I am a vegan and think it’s a great choice to make for both the environment and moral reasons if you have the ability to do it. I don’t really proselytize about it, but it makes me very happy when people choose to go vegan. I absolutely do think the huge environmental impacts of animal agriculture, especially industrialized cow consumption, are things that should concern people and see real pushback on a major scale.
But this feels like a really cherry-picked ‘whataboutism’ graph and that raises my hackles. In the first place, this focuses on one very specific metric (water consumption) without considering the major other negative impacts of data centers like electricity rates, infrasound noise pollution of surrounding communities, and so on. Other people have also pointed out that this ignores things like the amount of water used in chip manufacturing. Recycling water for data center cooling makes data centers use less water, but, in a cruel twist, also concentrates pollutants already found in the groundwater, which means that the water that does get returned to the environment now has a higher concentration of pollutants.(And yes, in some cosmic irony, agriculture including animal agriculture was involved in releasing those pollutants in the first place). Meta had an incident where data center construction released bacteria-contaminated water into the environment.
And yes, of course, animal agriculture and in particular cow consumption have so many more negative environmental impacts than just water usage, too. I am vegan. I actively condemn this shit. But in general, I have seen this argument used in a lot of “whataboutism” whose primary point appears to be, “this new unnecessary thing we’re pushing may cause a lot of bad things, but if you look at these cherry-picked metrics, it’s not as bad as this other thing that you already consume, so you might as well let us do whatever we want, too.” “You are in blood stepped in so far that, should you wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er, so build those data centers” is not a good argument.
I have you tagged as “researches before blindly commenting”, thank you for staying true to that and the information.
I think the anti-AI protest should not focus so much on one issue, the water consumption was something that often filled my feed. This comparison to beef is kinda weird and ill-intended, as it takes the worst part (the biggest number) of one and compares it to datacenters saying “see, it does not matter, there are worse things”. In my opinion the discussion should be more about “do we even want datacenters including all the risks and problems coming with them”. And as you nicely put, there are more disadvantages with that and we should be careful.
I have you tagged as “researches before blindly commenting”, thank you for staying true to that and the information.
I am extremely flattered by this; thank you so much. You’ve made my day here.
Both of you made my day with this interaction. Beautiful stuff.
It also doesn’t mention the amount of methane that cows produce either, which is insanely disproportionate and is destroying our climate. I’ll continue using AI all I want as long as those who complain about AI continue eating beef, while I myself do not eat beef, because the benefit gained from using AI far outweighs the benefit of eating beef. So it pays for itself more than enough.
because the benefit gained from using AI far outweighs the benefit of eating beef
Are these benefits in the room with us right now?
Benefit gained from using LLMbeciles? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! wheeze
Hello concern troll!
This is one insane take. If you recognize that both are bad, why do choose between one or the other?
the benefit gained from using AI
They always tell on themselves.
Here’s an idea: no beef and no chatbots
Do the boots really taste so good as to completely lose any sense of self preservation in a vain attempt to proselytize sane and cognizant people?
OP is an AI booster, check their profile.
This is an attempt to disregard the damage that’s done by slop generators, comparing it to most inefficient food source.
Hope you have a terrible day, op.
Its post history is all over the place. To me it looks like an AI bot account.
I hate this kind of reasoning.
“Let’s ignore this big problem because there are other bigger problems”
The same people say shit like: “Why are you sad? There are so many people who have it even worse than you!”
All this makes us do nothing until the “smaller” problems become so big that the damage is done and then those people will say “Well, we are in too deep. It it what it is. Can’t change it now 🤡”
There’s a comet colliding with earth? Pff, the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with our galaxy, too!!!1
Yes beef is probably the least efficient massively consumed food.
yes agriculture and especially beef is a big problem. however, this does not mean we should ignore the newly emerging problems - just because they are not as big as the biggest problem (yet). i also doubt, that any agricultural business uses as much energy as datacenters.
additionally beef is edible. the only edible thing about datacenters is the rich owner.
I don’t necessarily disagree in general that AI water and power consumption is an issue, but a couple of nitpicks:
just because they are not as big as the biggest problem (yet).
It’s doubtful it’ll ever actually reach the scale of the beef industry. The problem is so tiny compared to the beef, it’s not even funny. It can also be regulated to demand more efficient water usage in future data centers instead of running evaporative cooling. Not likely to happen under current US admin, but perhaps the next one. The current one is also recommending excessive beef consumption unfortunately, but that’s beside the point.
i also doubt, that any agricultural business uses as much energy as datacenters.
Annual AI datacenter energy usage in the US is expected to reach 90 TWh this year. That’s 324 petajoules. Annual fossil energy use of cattle is 569 ± 53 PJ. Not sure how much extra should be attributed to cattle in non-fossil energy usage. AI datacenters use local fossil energy (gas turbines) and whatever’s in the grid. So for now, beef still requires more. However, data centers could quickly overtake it if forced to use closed loop liquid cooling. They use evaporative to save on energy costs.
Water usage IMO is the bigger problem. Energy generation is a solved problem, you just throw money at panels and batteries for clean energy. Just needs a competent administration and the benefits reach everyone, not just the AI industry. If it’s cheap enough and data centers are forced to pay more for water, they’ll start building closed loop cooling systems out of their own accord. You can’t, however, make cows drink less water or eat less (cow food is plants and plants take water to grow after all) or fart less methane.
I’m not innocent here myself, still enjoy the occasional burger but it’s got to be like 3-4 times a year at this point. Most of my meat consumption is chicken at this point, with pork in second place. Luckily my country makes it easier to avoid beef consumption by making it very expensive. Beef mince is now 3-4x more expensive than pork, steak prices are otherworldly.
maybe i should have been more specific: i did not mean the total energy usage of datacenters vs agriculture. i was talking about putting them into relation. not sure which relation makes the most sense: total PJ / total locations ? total PJ / ha land used ? total PJ / total employee ?
it doesn’t matter which relation though. the business of datacenters is to put lightning into magic minerals to make funny things…
while you are absolutely right in saying energy production is an engineering problem, it is not a simple problem. water is for sure more severe, as there is a finite amount fresh water to consume. but especially now, when communities are somehow expected to pay for the increased energy usage of the local datacenter, it seems cynical to me, when you say:
Energy generation is a solved problem, you just throw money at panels and batteries for clean energy.
as humans we generally need more and more energy. while we get better at producing it, we are still struggling at keeping up with the demand. so much so, that places that decided against nuclear energy are thinking about new reactors. i won’t go into the whole nuclear discussion. but i would say those discussions are telling how important and non-trivial a constant output of electricity is.
Yep one has a very important function while the other is completely useless. Of course, this doesnt mean we shouldnt look into other ways of sustainable sustenance.
Spending all day in the smoker would melt some of that richness out and make it nice and tender
We really need to stop farming cows for health and climate reasons. I am more for vegetarianism than for removing data centers.
It has a serious effect that shouldn’t be ignored. Everyone says “I can’t eat slop” but you won’t eat anything if the climate destroys agriculture regardless.
Meat should be a very rare thing for people, like it was in the medieval times. Or even just focus more on poultry, farmed in sustainable and ethical ways? They eat bugs ffs. We can turn bug protein to edible protein through… Farming chicken.
Or just eat tofu.
Many parts of the world were mostly vegan until very recently, but that doesn’t stop them from developing amazing cuisines.
Most people in non-herding economy simply cannot afford meat just a couple hundred years ago.
So, from a real source and not some reddit or linked in post: https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/
Yes, this is true. But, those numbers do not include:
- water required for Chip/GPU production
- the fact that datacenters are often build in areas with already little water
Scrolled through the article, found this:
Impact on the economy: AI and tech creates well paying, future-proof jobs, and AI tools unlock new levels of productivity for the entire economy. On the other hand, jobs in animal agriculture are declining over time, and many are low paid and back-breaking.
So they’re paid off by big tech to push whataboutism about AI data center water use.
EDIT: They’re literally citing themselves about the water usage claims!🤣
You mean their graph? That is common to mark your Images that can be reused.
And now. They are not paid by fucking Tech. And you can also watch Hanks video on this, or, do the math yourself
It’s at least 10x than what OP claims
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/ai-data-centers-water-consumption-140002428.html
AI data centers are currently consuming 550 million gallons of water per day
I don’t see a date at OPs data. But still the basic assumption holds.
550m gallons is 2B liters/day?
Roughly, yes.
Yes, people got mad at me for pointing out the land use for data centers is also minuscule compared to any suburban development.
That doesn’t make it any less of a concern, but one of the major issues of data centers is that they are bypassing costs by unloading them onto average citizens. They don’t want to pay taxes and higher costs for energy and water so they offload electric costs onto everyone else and then abuse the water supply to avoid making a closed loop system.
I keep quoting the exact stat wrong, but most of the world’s freshwater goes into agriculture and farming.
I can’t eat data
Then why do they call them chips?
Yeah, its ok to have just one byte…
It’s because gallium arsenide is tasty. Yummy!
Cool, who gives a shit? That seems besides the point. Are you using that to continue justifying eating beef which is consuming way more water than AI?
Yes
The point is that the beef industry, while consuming that water, provides a good that is useful. AI data centres do not. The logic that “this thing uses a lot of water so adding anything else that does” is kinda sus, to put it mildly.
That being said, pork belly slays any cut of beef. Beef is grossly overrated.
I’ll have what he’s having
I don’t use cows for data storage.
I would not recommend using an AI data center for storage either.
