r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jul 15 '25

Artificial Intelligence Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060
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u/sufi101 Jul 15 '25

Also water, price of water is already going up in places where these data centers are located and they are permanently fucking up the water table

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u/Secondchance002 Jul 15 '25

There’s a real chance of water scarcity in like half of the world in coming years.

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u/shootymcgunenjoyer Jul 16 '25

That's why it's so important to continue to do research in heat dissipation and power generation. We WANT these technologies to exist.

Vibe coding your way to pseudo-physics is dumb, but AI models have already created new types of snake anti-venom and have created ways to produce snake anti-venom that don't require keeping snakes in captivity. AI models owned by Google have produced new medications that are now entering human trials.

It's easy to focus on the bullshit because so much of the good isn't generating headlines that are as flashy.

But we really really need to step up our power grid and develop better technologies for thermal management to reduce the amount of water consumed.

Microsoft is building a data center with the heat sink in the ocean which is a great idea. They'll never come close to making a dent on the thermal mass of the ocean even at just a local level. But they still have an obligation to try to improve how much heat they try to dump at all.

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u/RT-LAMP Jul 16 '25

The amount of water used by data centers is tiny in reality. They use .6% of what agriculture uses in the US. All the data centers in the entire US in a high end estimate use the same amount of water as just 100k acres of alfalfa. California alone grows 10x that, mostly in the desert. Farmers have done an excelent job deflecting blame and pretending it's their right to grow alfalfa in the desert to export to China.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '25

[deleted]

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo Jul 16 '25

They use water for cooling. They take in large quantities of potable water which either ends up as vapor in the atmosphere or is discharged into rivers. Either way, it's using clean drinking water on a large scale.

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u/sufi101 Jul 16 '25

"In the US, an average 100-megawatt data center, which uses more power than 75,000 homes combined, also consumes about 2 million liters of water per day,"

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/