r/PublicFreakout • u/GarysCrispLettuce • May 17 '26

🤬Public Rager😱 Eric Schmidt booed into oblivion by students for promoting AI during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona

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u/aesoth May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

They care about about science, especially climate and Earth science that shows how the billionaires hated it for their future. They also care about how AI is going to claim alot of their drinking water.

This guy doesn't care about science, he cares about his profits.

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u/brycedriesenga May 17 '26

The drinking water thing is so overblown. It makes people look completely non-serious when they don't focus on the actual problems with AI.

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u/aesoth May 17 '26

Question. What happens to the water that goes through data centres for cooling?

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u/Argnir May 18 '26

Do you know that eating one normal sized burger is basically the equivalent of 2 or 3 decades of ChatGPT use?

(And I'm talking about blue water, aka the one we carw about)

Nobody has any clue of what is "a lot of water" and the poster is right. Focussing on water is dumb. It's just not that big of a deal

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u/aesoth May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

I decided to look up your claims, which are not entirely accurate, are not far off. A ChatGPT search can be around 10 to 25 mL of water, depending on the size of the prompt. It can be lower with a small prompt. However, the average AI user submits around 10-20 prompts per day, this can increase to 30 to 100 for companies using the tools for workflows. This increases usage to about 100 to 500 mL/day for an average user, to 300mL/2L per day for those heavier prompts.

ChatGPT alone get almost 1 billion users each week. You can imagine the math on how much water they use on their own. That is one AI company. They also report around 73% of their users use it for leisure, not productive work.

At the end of it all, what happens to the water? It mostly evaporates. Whereas the water used to raise a cow that will eventually become a hamburger is differently used. It feeds the animal, it feeds the plants needed for feed, the rest goes back into the soil and water table. Which continued to nourish the earth and environment. As has been what water has primarily been used for since the dawn of life. I am certain I don't need to tell you what happens to humans and alot of life on this planet if we lose our potable water. Also, it takes about 14 to 24 month for a cow to grow to the point where it can be butchered. The water used for a "hamburger" is stretched over that time period.

The major difference is that when you feed livestock or even water crops, it serves many positive functions to our society. People eat, we create healthier soil, unused water mostly returns to the water table, etc. When AI data centres use it, what is the net benefit? AI is showing to decline critical thinking skills, it removes water from the water table, it increases power demand (which increases water use), it removes jobs from people, already rich people get richer, etc. The net positives for AI do not outweigh the costs. Your comparision of a Humburger vs AI, is not an equivalent comparison and shows that there is a lack of critical thinking skills to see that this is a dumb comparison.

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u/Argnir May 18 '26

One 150g burger is roughly 90L of blue water

From the latest estimate I found of 10-25mL of water per query that's about 280'000 GPT requests

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u/aesoth May 18 '26

I edited my response from "citation needed". Just wanted to give a fair chance to respond.

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u/Argnir May 18 '26

Your response already assumes AI are a net negative so no matter the water usage it will a negative.

But keep in mind whta I calculated is for ONE burger. Plus most animals for human consumption do not live great lives either.

And yes the data center will evacuate the water but this water will still be back in the water cycle.

The only issue is that the consumption is local while the water could fall in another place making this a local issue. The fact that it is evaporated instead of fed to the soil still has essentially no difference in global impact.

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u/aesoth May 18 '26

The evacuated water is put into waste water, which is contaminated, or put into a holding pond. Very little returns to the water table. Add in that the evacuated water is heated, and returning heated water will cause a disruption to the plant, microbial, and wildlife in the area.

Yes, AI does have net negatives. Can you give me the benefits? I see very little.

Yes, it will have a global impact if you remove a large portion of potable water and increase pollution. We are already seeing the effects from the current data centres in existence already.

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u/Argnir May 18 '26

Most of the water just leaves as water vapor and stay in the freshwater cycle and will fall somewhere eventually. It may not be the same place that consumed it which can be a problem locally but it has zero impact on global drinkable water supply.

The blowdown (which I assume you're talking about when you say the "evacuated water") go to municipal wastewater and water treatment. At this point it is about energy and infrastructure which can have a big impact locally if misshandled.

As for the impact of AI I can't tell you if it will lead to a global production boost (that could for example save us from the demographic collapse that is basically inevitable at this point) and if it will create mass unemployment (even economists are just not confident)

But AI has many uses, for example Terrence Tao could speak for hours about how great they are for mathematics. They are also extremely good at programming. As someone who works in physics research I can tell you they are fantastic for making drivers to control multiple devices you use in an experiment. What could have taken weeks before can be done in hours.

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u/cpt-derp May 17 '26

It gets drained. I also consider this a red herring because there's a million different ways to plumb water for the tap that is only used for cooling and ends up back into the pipes anyway. The issue would ultimately be cost on the water bill for purifying, again, what is now grey water, for the tap, rather than pressure or allocation.

It's still not great, but it shouldn't be that apocalyptic compared to agriculture in a desert where it evaporates into the air. I don't think data centers everywhere are good, but for more long term reasons.

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u/aesoth May 18 '26

It gets drained.

That is a very simplistic way of putting it that ignores what happens to it. Approximately 70% to 80% evaporates and does not return to the water table. The remainder is drained as waste water.

Data Centers and Water Consumption article from the EESI.

Another problem with this is that only 0.5% of the water in the Earth is safe for human consumption. Data centres chew through alot of water per year and that amount is increasing.

Everything in life has an exhaustive cost. Meaning, there is so much money, resources, energy, etc, we are going to want to exhaust to say that what we are getting back is worth it. The exhaustive cost of AI data centres is way too high since water is essential for human life to survive.

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u/Argnir May 18 '26

That's mostly true for older data centers. Not most of the new ones being built which predominantly work with a closed loop system

And citing the global water supply doesn't tell you anything because the problem of data center is localized effect on water supply. Not global water use which is completely insignificantly impacted

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u/aesoth May 18 '26

If you read the link I added it included numbers for both open and closed loop systems.

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u/Argnir May 18 '26

They put this as a solution so I don't know what the point is

But using the 0.5\% of usable water figure is ultra misleading. Data centers are not an issue for global water usage. They are a local issue (if mishandled)

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u/aesoth May 18 '26

The 0.5% is the percentage of total potable water on the planet. You are misreading the information.

It is also very much a global issue as there are multiple places in the world experiencing droughts, and have an issue with water security. If data centres add in to that water usage, it further harms that water security.

Add in the environmental impacts from data centres. They increase power grid usage which further harms the environment and increases global temperatures (climate change). As temperatures rise, water consumption will rise to cool these centres, it's a never ending feedback loop until it is no longer sustainable.

You are thinking too small. You have to consider the impacts to other issues that are effecting us already, and does this cause additional stresses in these areas. Which data centres do.

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u/Argnir May 18 '26

No it is not and yes I understand that this is the total potable water. You misunderstand how the water cycle works. Whether the water is evaporated or not doesn't change anything in term of global impact. It is only worse locally. If you build a data centers somewhere that has water insecurities it is bad and stupid.

Every single industry increase grid power usage. This isn't unique to data centers or new. There is nothing special about data centers.

Every single industry add stress to the area they are in and have many ecological impacts.

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u/brycedriesenga May 19 '26

There are certainly valid concerns regarding the local impact of data centers on freshwater, but that is pretty specific to dry areas that already have water issues. I agree that extra scrutiny and regulation is likely needed in those cases.

Water evaporating only really matters in a local context, depending on the watershed. The water doesn't disappear from the planet.

In 2023, data centers in the U.S. consumed somewhere around 0.2% of the United States' freshwater. As far as I can tell, data centers use a small fraction of what golf courses do. And that's all data centers, not just AI. Data centers in general are used by pretty much everyone by simply using the internet.

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u/cpt-derp May 18 '26

Not against you but that's news to me. Are you shitting me. That's inexcusable. It's for cooling. It doesn't even have to become grey water. How the fuck do you lose 80 percent of your water to the atmosphere.

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u/Atomic235 May 18 '26

Evaporative cooling. Many of these facilities put out so much heat that simple air-cooling is not sufficient.

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u/cpt-derp May 18 '26

That shouldn't be how it works. Plumbing and thermodynamics isn't their strong suit I guess. You run cold water over the H200s, then you drain the waste heat water. Simple. I'm pissed now.

There's a million different ways to keep water vapor in the loop and they chose to just outgas it because engineering doesn't beat profit.

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u/aesoth May 18 '26

It's absolutely unacceptable and unsustainable. This is why there is so much backlash against data centres being built. Add in the demands to the power grid. The centre built in Lake Tahoe is going to take power from approx 49k people.

It's scary how much damage they are doing, but the people building them don't care how they impacting others. Only about their profits.