Is AI at this scale actually sustainable?

Reddit r/artificial News
sustainability ai-environment datacenter energy efficiency space-datacenters water-usage

Summary

This article questions the sustainability of large-scale AI datacenters, discussing water and energy demands, and evaluating potential solutions like orbital datacenters and efficiency improvements.

I build agents for work so I'm clearly not anti-AI, but the numbers keep bothering me, concerning the environmental factors of it. Every datacenter is the same now, gigawatts of new demand, water for cooling, grids that weren't designed for any of this, and rising cost of water for cities. And the data centers keep using clean water because of lack of technology to turn dirty water into usable water for cooling. Then I see Elon talking about putting data centers in orbit, solar powered, radiating heat into space, no water needed. And while I do think its going to be the end solution, I do think we have much more demand for compute power then Elon can provide so far with the space data centers and I think the demand is growing faster than Elon can provide Is efficiency improving fast enough to outrun demand? Are space data centers a real answer or a distraction that will fail? And is anything happening right now (smaller models, better scheduling, offsets) that you'd call an actual solution rather than PR? That people can use today to make an impact
Original Article

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