Water Usage of ChatGPT Explained

You know, I saw this thing going around about the,

the water usage of ChatGPT,

and it was like every time you run a single ChatGPT query,

it's like, you know, you run your shower for like six hours

and the water never

comes back and it's just, it's done.

I don't have the exact calculation in front of me, but I, I

think the real number is something like, doing this from memory, it might be wrong,

but it's close. For every 38,000

ChatGPT queries, um, that is the same amount of

water that is used in the production of a single almond in California.

Which is like really-- And this is like the full on, you know, total true

water accounting, not just what's running in one data

center.

There's a question of like where this came from because the people that

are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don't feel like they're doing

something horrible from a water perspective for the most part.

Um, it is true that data centers at one point

used evaporative

cooling, um, but they have not done that in a long time.

Like if you look at a modern very large data center, it uses the like

equivalent amount of water as an office building in terms of, you know, people

like running the sinks and the toilets and whatever.

Um, so that has been a, um,

robust meme and difficult to disprove, but I don't think holds up to any

scrutiny.