AI Has a Hidden Water Cost—Here’s How to Calculate Yours
Artificial intelligence systems are thirsty, consuming as much as 500 milliliters of water – a single-serving water bottle – for each short conversation a user has with the GPT-3 version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT system. They use roughly the same amount of water to draft a 100-word email message. That figure includes the water used to cool the data center’s servers and the water consumed at the power plants generating the electricity to run them. But the study that calculated those estimates also po