Not to beat a dead horse, but the cabal of aisle-crossing objectors to AI is a stubborn lot. Ignore the threat represented by China and other America-hating international actors. Focus on the threat to privacy (not from China, apparently), logistics (water and electricity), and a corporatist cabal (but also not China.
AI is coming, and you’re not stopping it, no matter how many 21st-century wooden shoes you throw into the “machinery.”
Our enemies want to beat us to death with it and will, one of them being a communist country which operates like a corporatist cabal because it is one, outside any rules or laws you might consider domestically. No privacy, safety, or security, and if you keep ignoring that, you’re like the Dems denying that the DSA was always what they were working for.
The water and power problems can not only be solved but resolved to everyone’s benefit. Cheaper electricity and more of it, for example, and why not use AI to reach for that instead of complaining about problems we can overcome to our mutual advantage. AI has, after all, already done us a significant community service. Big tech can’t pretend wind and solar are any part of the future unless we want to stifle growth, impede advancement, or accept our increasingly tenuous grasp and the managed decline from our current levels of human flourishing.
Big Tech is looking to buy up nuclear capacity (or build it) to power their systems. This isn’t speculation; the bids and requests have been on the table, some for more than a year. They will pay upfront for energy generation, and local government will manage the arrangements, ideally to the benefit of the communities involved, because that’s what you elect state and local politicians to do.
If you tell your representatives no, Big Tech will create wealth, growth, revenue and jobs elsewhere. Facilities that have demonstrated the potential to reduce the total property tax burden, according to some studies. They will build them. You’re not stopping it and, ironically, you’ll still use it if they make it available to some other communities’ benefit.
The picture is bigger than you’ve imagined, and foreign money is working hard to make sure you can’t see all of it. And I’ve already reported on the foreign money feeding the fears and opposition. We’ve outlined the potential benefits to the grid, energy generation, and third-party technology development.
And I’ve hinted at the potential for engineers to resolve cooling/water “consumption” issues, but did anyone know just how little water AI actually uses?
It’s more than none, certainly, and not an issue to be dismissed, but this ought to be paradigm-shifting.
Nationally, direct water use by all U.S. data centers in 2023 was roughly 17.5 billion gallons: American farms used more water for irrigation every six hours than data centers consumed directly over the entire year. The figure is projected to rise, yet it remains a fraction of 1% of total U.S. freshwater use. A data center that uses less water in a year than a medium-sized farm does in a day is not a national emergency. The American answer to rising power or water demand should be to expand supply, not a halt to the infrastructure that needs them.
If you look a little deeper,
Assuming a 50 percent consumption ratio, that means 35 billion gallons of water withdrawal, or about 0.3 percent of the total public water supply for the contiguous United States. The same report projects that the U.S. data center direct water consumption could double or even quadruple the 2023 level by 2028.
If water “consumption” quadrupled, it would equal 1.2% of national agricultural water use. A year’s worth of cooling equals one day’s worth of irrigation for farmers. If we only use water to cool AI. There are other options. And what none of these reports or stories include is that evaporated water doesn’t disappear. It ends up in the atmosphere, where it eventually condenses back into water, which is then returned to the surface.
Water cannot be lost from Earth’s closed-loop system. Moved, yes, but it’s still here, so the problem isn’t water; it’s potable water, and the solution, where the natural system returns evaporated water to the surface, might be seawater, cleaned and desalinated (if necessary).
That adds cost and increases electricity demand, which also requires water for cooling. It also limits placement of facilities based on accessibility, but that problem is being addressed with Small Modular Reactors, so engineers are already thinking about cooling for the energy needed to power a modern America, with AI.
And yes, there are plenty of likely issues with any solution, but this leads us back to the opening.
Few, if any, of us are giving up our digital-age obsessions, which means AI is coming for us. It’s coming from China, Russia, the Middle East, anywhere they have the resources. We can choose not to be ready for that or to give up any advantage we have, but it’s still coming.
Advanced AI isn’t stopping because you held a sign and mobbed a town meeting. The narratives being fed to us are coming from foreign competitors who do not care about our privacy or security. They don’t care what we think or believe. They want dominance and will do and say anything to get that.
We don’t want to be them, and we want responsible development, but we don’t want to be victims of their development or of what they intend to do with it. Right now, they are convincing far too many people across the political spectrum that letting them lead on AI is better for America and the world, and that’s just the dumbest, most dangerous thing we could think.
