In its latest environmental report, Microsoft reveals that its overall water consumption increased significantly last year. Its artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are to blame.
Artificial intelligence services, ChatGPT in the lead, are quite impressive, it must be admitted. Especially when we see how extremely simple they are to use. You type a query and get a response a few seconds later. What we imagine less, if at all, is all the infrastructure behind it. You need data centers, controls, servers… And of course enough to supply everything with electricity.
As you can imagine: all this gives off a lot of heat and the systems must be cooled. No miracle solution in this case, we use water. Lots of water. In its latest environmental report, Microsoft reveals that its water consumption increased by 34% between 2021 and 2022. This represents approximately 6.4 billion liters in total, or 2500 Olympic swimming pools. A huge leap due to AI, for Shaolei Ren, researcher at the University of California specializing inenvironmental impact of artificial intelligence.
Microsoft uses a lot of water to cool its AIs, the shortage threatens
If you want to bring this down to a more eloquent scale, tell yourself that every time you make between 5 and 50 requests on ChatGPT, it takes 0.5 liters of water to cool the systems. The estimate takes into account the indirect water consumption, such as that used for power plants supplying data centers. These figures are alarming and raise fears of shortages in surrounding towns. The Redmond firm is aware of this and says it wants to remedy it by 2030.
One of the solutions would be build infrastructure in cooler states, but this is not always possible. In the city of Des Moines, Iowa, where ChatGPT-4 originated, data center construction projects are on hold until Microsoft “demonstrates and [mis] implement technology to drastically reduce water consumption […] compared to current levels”. Google is not to be outdone: over the same period, its water consumption increased by 20%. There too, Bard would be strongly responsible.
Source: Fortune