I am feeling quite negative towards the water argument as I suspect a number of data centers use systems that loop the water a few times and on top of that the source for "The waters bad!" always seems to be that one lady complaining about her well water.
Eh, I'm not gonna beat a dead horse, there's studies that I've read that suggest the water usage is high and the possibility of contamination is high and as far as I know the only sources to "debunk" this have been from OpenAI themselves and I don't trust a "we studied ourselves and found nothing wrong," but I'll admit the science is still early and I could be wrong.
Of course, with Nvidia's advances in chips, there's a likely chance that hyperscale datacenters are extinct by the end of the year just as a business model when we can cheaply and efficiently run most AI models locally and so the bigger corpo push for "we need these things built yesterday" argument is continually falling apart.
Meta AI Data Center Linked To Rare Bacteria In City’s Water System
some of these data centers that are going up are trying to leech the water/electricity/etc from small towns because it's easy to buy the city council in these places. like a "give us discounted utilities because we will bring jobs here" type arrangement
in terms of environmental hazards, they also produce infrasound which is very damaging to humans and animals alike
That bacteria I was aware of, and the sound; plus the usage on electricty is equally concerning, we're already seeing
prices climb near places where they've been built.
just dont obviously take any data provided by LLM providers as fact because they have incentive to lie about it. the AI companies that currently stand are all run by very obviously evil people so...
That all being said, at the end of the day I too am most worried about the usage of AI for surveillance as well.
What Aide said is ultimately also my sentiment, I won't harp on what's likely semantics as long as we're all on the same page about big tech doing evil big tech stuff and it does seem like we're all on the same page about this issue at least
