When people find out I'm a journalist who covers AI, they often ask about the drastic energy consumption of AI data centers. Are these centers using up all of our drinking water? How is this tech affecting the environment? Is AI going to kill us all? The questions range from curious to downright dystopian.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently faced criticism after calling some of these concerns, particularly those around water, "totally fake." It all stems from a Q&A session hosted by The Indian Express newspaper. Around the 26-minute mark of the interview, Altman was asked to defend certain criticisms of AI, including the amount of natural resources it takes to power large language models like ChatGPT.
Altman responded, "(criticism of AI for overuse of) water is totally fake," saying that while extreme water use "used to be true," OpenAI no longer does evaporative cooling. He said estimates that 17 gallons of water are used for every chatbot query are no longer accurate.
"This is completely untrue and totally insane, [and has] no connection to reality," he said. He then goes on to address AI energy consumption, calling the concerns "fair" but arguing that it should be evaluated as a whole, not per query, since some queries, like videos, are more intensive to generate than text conversations. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Still, Altman says, "we need to move toward nuclear or wind and solar (power) very quickly."
Questions involving data centers and water are complicated.
Do AI data centers strain land and power systems?
Altman's remarks come amid timely, ongoing debates over data centers and their energy use.
CNET's Corin Cesaric dove into the issue of AI's energy use last year and found the cost of training and running ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other generative AI tools to be "staggering." The US accounted for the largest share (45%) of global data center electricity consumption in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency.
As for water: Two Google data centers in Council Bluffs, Iowa, alone used 1.4 billion gallons of water in 2024, enough to fill about 28 million standard bathtubs. Google has 29 data centers worldwide. Meta's data centers also accounted for about 1.39 billion gallons of water used in 2023.
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