Big Tech Had a Water Problem Long Before ChatGPT
ChatGPT is making headlines for the enormous amount of water it uses, but water consumption in the tech industry has been an issue long before before the AI chatbot's November 2022 debut.
Microsoft and Google reported a 34% and 21% spike in water consumption, respectively, in 2022 compared with 2021. The main culprit? Data centers and the water used to keep their temperatures in check.
"In 2022, total water consumption at our data centers and offices was 5.6 billion gallons—the equivalent of what it takes to irrigate 37 golf courses annually, on average, in the southwestern United States," says Google's 2023 sustainability report. Meta's annual report notes that its operational data centers are responsible for the highest percentage of its water use.
Yet neither company launched their ChatGPT competitors—Microsoft Bing Chat and Google Bard—until Q1 2023. The computing power needed to run them, plus their widespread use, could guzzle even higher rates of water, though we won't see the numbers until early 2024.
What we do know is that ChatGPT is estimated to use the equivalent of one 16-ounce bottle of water for every 20-50 queries someone asks it, according to a study set to be released later this year by Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside and the corresponding author of the study, the AP reports.
Preliminary data released by Ren in April argues that "the enormous water footprint of AI models has remained under the radar."
"For example, training GPT-3 in Microsoft's state-of-the-art US data centers can directly consume 700,000 liters of clean freshwater (enough for producing 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles)," it says.
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