AI is not the water hog antis think it is - your lawn is
Interested this earlier as a comment and decided it deserved its own post
People are all upset about the water use when it comes to AI and data centers. They say even if AI doesn't steal and even if it's used appropriately, why would you want to use a tool that increases water costs and takes water away from people's homes?
But the thing is it doesn't do those things
AI does not really increase water costs - it's a skapegoat for bad municipal water management. When people go for the lowest bidder for public services like water because they want to cut taxes, The water problems that people are describing are what you get. But it's not because of AI
Let me give you some perspective
All data centers - all of them - in the US they use about 449 million gallons of water a day
That gives you corporate cloud services, streaming video (both already a much bigger user of data centers than AI), and the backbone of the Internet itself, and then also AI, with online gaming in the mix too
449 million gallons seems like a lot doesn't it? Nearly half a billion.
Now let's look at the American lawn:
9 billion gallons a day! That's billion with a b! Lawns use about 18 times the amount of water that all data centers combined use, much less AI.
So for about 1/18 the usage of people having patches of grass in front of and behind their homes you get cloud services, streaming video, the Internet, AI, and online gaming - that's a pretty good deal if you ask me
Edit: this post got more attention than I expected. I've been trying to respond to most of the comments but I'm not going to be able to maintain at this volume so hopefully the rebuttals I've already made continue to frame the issue