The Hated One

AI Will Wage Wars Over Water

Added 2024-04-04 12:09:01 +0000 UTC

This is a secret, but the future wars over water, will be waged by the big tech and AI.

For decades, experts have been warning us that we are running out of available fresh water. Some even suggested that a few major conflicts in recent history may have been spurred up by water scarcity. [0]

Water scarcity

Don’t be fooled by this whole blue planet thing! Earth is lying to you! 98% of the water on this globe is saline, and much of the fresh water is locked up in glaciers. That are now melting into oceans. The fresh water that’s available to us is unevenly distributed and many reservoirs are being depleted faster than they can be replenished.

Now we’ve been using water very irresponsibly for all of the industrial era in agriculture, manufacturing or mining. But today big tech’s thirst for this most precious resource is growing unquenchable pushing additional pressure on the already cracking camel’s back. It may seem unlikely. And if you’ve never heard this before, it’s intentional. It’s because the big tech has kept it a secret. But I went down the rabbit hole and was able to find the ticking time bomb that is the big tech’s water consumption. I’ve found how much water the big tech and AI actually use up and I’ve seen the disastrous consequences this AI hype is gonna have in the future. And I am gonna share it all with you. This will change your whole perspective on the modern world. I’ve covered big tech water consumption before, but things much much worse than I previously reported. [1, 2]

How much water

Could you imagine, how much water the big tech actually uses?

Think about this very video you are watching right now. It has been brought to you by water. A lot of water.

On site

This video was uploaded to YouTube.com/thehatedone. Which means it sits somewhere in these giant warehouse-sized data centers. In multiple of them at once, in fact. Each of these data centers is hosting copies of every single Internet user’s data. They deliver that data to other users, clients and third parties. There are petabytes of information sitting here in an endless cycle of perpetual backups. This process is very resource intensive and expensive. Which is why YouTube doesn’t really have a competitor.

Data centers run very hot and to improve efficiency, they cool them down with water. Like entire cities worth of water. The on-site consumption of an average data center amounts to up to 5 million gallons of water per day, which is as much as 50,000 people use in an American city. Or about 5,000,000 Fremen with a proper water discipline. [3]

A lot of the coolant water ends up evaporated and doesn’t immediately return to the local water cycle. In 2022, Google, Facebook and Microsoft consumed 1.5 trillion liters of water in on-site cooling. And despite efficiency improvements, their total water usage keeps growing. [And that’s important, because I am foreshadowing something dangerous] The primary driver of this growth is AI. For instance, to train GPT-3 in Microsoft data centers, 700,000 liters of clean freshwater was evaporated. On average, data centers evaporate 1 – 9 liters per kWh of server energy, depending on weather conditions and operational settings. [2]

If you’ve never heard of this before, that’s on purpose. The big tech has been intentionally hiding this information from the public. Their water withdrawals are considered a trade secret and official figures are proprietary. In some cases, they go through hoops of shell companies to set up their data centers so that they wouldn’t easily trace back to their parent company. It’s only recently that they’ve started opening up. But if they talk about any water consumption at all, it is only the water they consume directly for cooling. But there is a much greater scope of water consumption most of these big tech companies fail to admit to. [2, 4 – 8]

Off site

Data centers need a lot of energy to run. Energy that is supplied to them from the power grid. This differs from place to place but in the US, 73% of utility-scale electricity is generated from thermoelectric power plants. Which is plants that use water to create steam, which turns turbines that generate electricity. To be more efficient with the fuel, these power plants also need to be cooled down, which they do with magnitudes of water. [2]

So remember how data centers consume 1 – 9 liters of water per kWh? For electricity generation, additional 3.1 liters per kWh is consumed on average and up to 43.8 liters per kWh is withdrawn. Most major big tech companies do not report on this off-site usage number at all. Yet they are starting to consume more water than entire nations. In fact, Google, Microsoft and Meta with their combined on-site and off-site water usage withdraw as much water as two Denmarks. AI is projected to be withdrawing up to 6 Denmarks of water annually in just three years. [2, 4, 9]

Sam Altman from OpenAI has recently said the quite part out loud. That the energy demand of AI has vastly surpassed expectations. He warns that this may shove energy systems in a crisis. But energy crisis is a water crisis. Especially if like Altman, you hope to solve the problem with nuclear-fueled thermo-electric power plants. Well, he may have said this because he had invested into nuclear fusion startups… [2, 4]

This is how much water data centers consume on site for cooling. And this is how much water they consume from electricity generation. And yet this is not the whole picture. This is just scratching the surface. Because I am gonna follow up with the part where it starts to get really scary. [10]

Manufacturing

Earlier I mentioned that this video was brought to you by water. Well, whatever you are watching this on has also been manufactured with astounding volumes of water. All of the crucial components in your phone, computer and by extension, server equipment in data centers, were manufactured in large semiconductor plants withdrawing millions of liters of water every day. That’s what’s used to cool the plants down, but wafer fabrication also needs ultrapure water. Ultrapure water is made through an intensive process, which by extension consumes even more regular water during purification. Exact numbers on water consumption and withdrawal are largely obscure. But research estimates are immense. [1]

There is some water recycling that can reduce water usage, but that isn’t a widely adopted practice. Even so, the water discharged from semiconductor plants is toxic and contains hazardous waste, rendering local water resources unavailable for other uses. I am foreshadowing something here.

[2]

Still, the water life cycle of the big tech hasn’t come to an end yet. There is still one more scope of water consumption. Perhaps the most enormous one of all. The great grandmother of all water usage. Mining. [11]

Resource extraction

Every single IT component is made with expensive and often times rare minerals and metals. Cadmium, gallium, tantalum, lithium or cobalt. Modern extraction and processing methods consume colossal masses of water at monumental levels of pollution. With more and more intensive mining practices, the quality of ore is only decreasing with time. But the demand isn’t slowing down and as it grows, more aggressive extraction practices will be required. And the demand grows on a galactic scale. By 2040, the global demand for lithium alone will rise over 40 times. Not 40%. 40 times. [1, 12]

The cost of resource extraction will go up anytime there is disruption event, like a weather disaster or supply chain failure. Flooding and droughts are forcing plants to shut down and factories to halt production. The entire chain of the IT industry is extremely vulnerable to these disruptions. [13]

Many of the big tech data centers, the very homes of AI, reside in drought stricken regions. Why there? Because of many incentives, such as cheap land, tax breaks and municipal subsidies. They are increasing pressure on the already stressed water levels, which is beginning to clash with farmers and local communities. [3, 8, 14, 15]

Competition

The big tech is gonna be competing for water with other major industries and that’s where clashes will spark conflict. 70% of human water usage comes from agriculture, which is already stressing water levels across the globe. The big tech sees that but they build their data centers anyway because that’s their prerogative. That’s how they grow their business. [8, 1, 16]

And now they are relentlessly pushing the AI hype train at full steam. It’s now a whole movement to promote AI adoption into every single product. AI that is going to multiply their water consumption and energy demand yet they have no way of making AI sustainable. The propaganda just keeps selling AI as the ultimate solution for all of our problems. Like a cult.

But AI is often just a needlessly expensive substitute to an already viable solution. Search engines today are now offering AI chatbots, but an AI-assisted search consumes up to 5-times more energy than a conventional search query.

Military

It’s like religious fanaticism. And it worries me. Those that push for AI adoption are those that invested their wealth into it. And this is what I mean that the big tech will wage water wars. It’s not that the big tech will literally raise armies. It’s that they will be lobbying for foreign policy decisions to take control of key mineral deposits, through peaceful means, economic coercion or militarily. We’ve seen this happening in other resource conflicts throughout history. Now military tech is heavily computerized. Military AI is being massively adopted. The big tech is slowly but surely becoming a contractor to defense departments. They already have long established relationships with the intelligence community, which is an extension of military.

There is a great push to privatize access to water. I can see billionaire philanthropies pushing for this idea and suddenly YouTube videos and media content will flood the Internet promoting it. We are just one step away from making that argument openly acceptable. [17]

This whole lore about how in the future AI might destroy humanity if left unchecked… that’s just a sci-fi hypothetical that is very successfully distracting from the very real and very immediate consequences of AI and big tech adoption right now. We don’t have infinite water and we don’t have infinite energy. So why do we assume we can have infinite growth? It’s because of them. They are telling us that we can have that. Until we reach a point where we’ll have to decide between water for AI and water for growing food, and they’ll lobby the former.

End

That’s why I am making these videos on billionaire influence. Because it’s powerful. Because our leaders had no reservations about sending thousands of young soldiers to die on foreign land while the elders were raking in record profits. Please watch at least one of my videos on these issues. You might not agree with me, and that’s fine. But at least hear this perspective. None of my videos so far have been sponsored so if you find value in this work, support me on Patreon, please. Thank you.

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