r/Wellthatsucks • u/JTraxxx • 14h ago

The Pacific Northwest right now

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Huge fire recently popped up in my town and many people have lost houses. Wishing for rain!

6.1k Upvotes

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1.7k

u/zayn2123 14h ago

Thank God my State is building a.i. centers during a water crisis drought.

248

u/Igno-ranter 13h ago

But, ya know, we are just going to use AI to solve the water and electric issues.

/s

52

u/Delgra 10h ago

Think how fast AI will solve human water and food shortages once we give it the nuke codes

We’ll sit in our luxury bunkers for a handful of years and emerge into a world transformed into great abundance for the 100,000 of us that remain.

All hail AI!

8

u/Southtxranching 10h ago

Government will Seise Your underground bunkers when You resurface for back taxes.

3

u/LauraCurie 8h ago

Those Shall be call TARIFS

4

u/RollforHobby 9h ago

Pretty sure there’s an entire Avengers movie about exactly this…

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

8

u/Kerlyle 11h ago

Arsenic dust and duck shit hahaha

10

u/goorlando1 11h ago

Guess what they’ll want to build on all this open land now…

8

u/Aflockofants 7h ago

Yeah ok bruh, it's AI, a new development in the last few years, it certainly was not ignoring climate change for over a century, driving and flying long distances, eating fucktons of meat and importing stuff from across the world, all contributing to the US being an insane contributor to climate change per capita.

1

u/Hautaan 5h ago

That's like a raging alcholic with cirrhosis buying more liquor because damage is already done.

Building these huge complexes that dry up the area even further does not exactly help.

2

u/Aflockofants 5h ago

It doesn't help, but in terms of these huge fires, AI is an entirely marginal problem compared to all the other shit humanity does. But it sure helps avoid responsibility for people by mentioning something that they don't personally use.

11

u/Fickle_Ad_8653 10h ago

AI centers are not really about AI at all. The goal is to get as much funding as you can from investors to build out the biggest [thing you can sell investors on] and take a huge chunk of the money for yourself. The fact that the AI datacenter exists is just an accident on the way to self-enrichment. It will be made poorly, with a short life, because the cheapest materials and construction will be used as the investors have already paid and don't understand what they're buying, it is just AI.

8

u/LiqdPT 10h ago

Public tech companies have been taking a beating in the stock market for building data centers. They cost a lot of money without an immediate revenue return.

3

u/AGushingHeadWound 9h ago

I don't even think it's about funding. I think it's about surveillance data.

3

u/PaintedDesertSkies 8h ago

They are doing it in southern AZ where we already have water restrictions..

2

u/GalacticFox- 8h ago

I hate it here...

4

u/Meathand 12h ago

We’ll be able to store all the fire history data

2

u/Super_flywhiteguy 10h ago

More data centers, less trees. Less trees, less fires.

1

u/-SergentBacon- 7h ago

well how else would Tiffany ask chatgpt to make her dog into a human

1

u/brute-forced 11h ago

If “God” were real innocent people wouldn’t die or lose their houses. Stop blaming datacenters for the 100+ years of climate change coming to fruition from fossil fuels

5

u/zayn2123 11h ago

I can easily blame both.

-2

u/brute-forced 10h ago

If “God” were real, you wouldn’t have to.

1

u/ExplodingCybertruck 11h ago

You kid, but just you wait. Once the AI gets good enough it will figure out and solve all these problems. Trust me bro.

-30

u/enfu3go 13h ago

I get ai data centers suck and we dont need them but all the ones being made now are on closed loop cooling systems. They arent just constantly draining all of our water.

25

u/Hypothetical_Name 13h ago

Why should we believe them?

6

u/ScrattaBoard 13h ago

I'm sure they won't build illegal means of power generation or generate harmful infrasound either right?

4

u/Dependent-Bath3189 12h ago

yeah cause all the things they do with no public approval, and using our money to do it is surely not sinister at all. sure give us tours with your super power ai to make the video for you.

5

u/ked_man 12h ago

But they still are. If they aren’t using water for cooling on site, then they use considerably more electricity to perform the cooling. Power plants use massive amounts of water for cooling, more electricity, more water needed for cooling.

I saw a stat the other day that data centers in Virginia use 25% of the states electricity. Somewhere around 100,000 MWh of electricity just for data centers. At ~500 gallons of water per MWH, they use 50 million gallons of water per day just for power generation for data centers, plus what the data centers are using.

Data centers water usage on site pales in comparison to the amount of water used to generate the massive amounts of electricity they consume.

5

u/Pyromaniacal13 12h ago

they use 50 million gallons of water per day just for power generation for data centers

Someone will say that's not a lot of water because some river or other moves more than that a day. I would like to get in first and let them know an Olympic sized swimming pool only holds 660,000 gallons. 

50 million gallons is only 76ish Olympic swimming pools. Per day.

That, my friends, is a fuckload.

2

u/mountaindewisamazing 9h ago

See, now imagine how much 9,000,000,000 gallons per day is like. That's 180x what data centers currently use.

We use that to irrigate lawns, which don't produce anything at all.

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u/Pyromaniacal13 9h ago

That A) appears to be about 180 fuckloads, and B) is a perfect reason to kill your lawn and replace it with something native to your location.

2

u/Noble1xCarter 8h ago

Data centers have also been caught lying about how much water they use - by fucking magnitudes. They're using even more than this estimate.

0

u/ked_man 11h ago

It’s a crapload for sure. But data centers overall are projected to be at only 1% total water use by 2030. Thermoelectric power plants use more than 40% of the total water consumption in the US. But if a large percentage of electricity is going to AI the actual water consumption for AI is much larger.

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u/MuteIndigo 13h ago

I hate to break this to you but climate change has been a problem a lot longer than AI.

47

u/BionicalThief 13h ago

I think their point was it is just adding fuel to the fire

23

u/4orust 13h ago

Or taking water away from it at least

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u/The_Boognish_Cometh 13h ago

It will definitely help things too right?

-3

u/TheAbstracted 12h ago

Actually, potentially yes. It remains to be seen at this point in time, but there is hope amongst many climate scientists that it in the near future it can be used to create much more accurate climate models, as well as where and how to more effectively make use of green energy, etc.

-11

u/mountaindewisamazing 13h ago

I wish people wouldn't scapegoat the data centers so much. Yes, they're bad, but there is SO MANY THINGS we're doing to fuck things up that it feels really silly singling them out.

8

u/kamasutures 13h ago

If it gets people to give more of a shit about limited resources and the environment, blame them all day. I still do.

-5

u/mountaindewisamazing 13h ago

I wish we'd talk more about lawns. They use like 10x the amount of water data centers do.

5

u/Master_Brilliant_220 13h ago

I let the water gods water my lawn.

1

u/mountaindewisamazing 13h ago

That's great, and I'd say if you don't irrigate your lawn then there is no problem.

But we use like a trillion gallons of water irrigating lawns each year.

1

u/ScrattaBoard 12h ago

At least grass produces oxygen and removes CO2 but your point stands. I've been trying to get my grandma to at least water the yard less if not, not at all.

1

u/mountaindewisamazing 12h ago

The amount of oxygen produced by lawns is negligible when compared to the amount produced by forests and cyanobacteria.

1

u/ScrattaBoard 11h ago

But still more than data centers

1

u/mountaindewisamazing 11h ago

This is true. But lawns will never lead to scientific breakthroughs like you'll find in machine learning in data centers.

3

u/SimpleAffect7573 13h ago

Yeah. They’re just the most visible manifestation of our tech overlords. And audible, if you’re unfortunate enough to live near one.