My regular favorite Techno-Hopium website that has all the Green Hydrogen propaganda articles in really badly translated English today has an Apocalyptic warning that the growing global water scarcity problem is going to leave us--horror of horrors--WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY!  :o  :o  :o   Apparently for the editors of this rag, this consequence is an even more terrifying outcome than crop failures and insufficient drinking water.  ::)

They also quote Elon Musk as saying that the exponential growth of AI is going to explode so fast that "by 2025 the demand for electricity from AI will be so high that it could "devour electricity and transformers.".  This level of hyperbole is just a little bit over-the-top of course, but it is very true that not only does AI consume gobs of electricity to run all those microprocessors, because they also produce mega-Joules of waste heat they require a lot of water to keep from melting into globs of plastic, silicon and rare earths metal that don't think so well. lol.

Now, a well designed closed loop system should be able to cool your server farm of supercomputers without taking fresh water heating it up and spilling it out into a river, but like with nuclear power plants that's what often happens if the water is available because it's cheaper.  And of course these new AI data centers are even being planned with their own dedicated Nuke Puke plants to run them.

Aficionados of AI and its "great potential" to solve all the problems of mankind tend to overlook or at least downplay the huge energy demands of this technology.  With the kind of build out being projected, they're talking doubling and tripling electricity consumption in a decade.  I can't stress enough how ludicrous this idea and goal is.  Who in their right mind realistically believes we could generate that much new electric power with carbon-free renewable energy AND upgrade the power distribution grid enough to handle such a demand increase in a decade?  There just is no way that can happen.

The problem seems to be that nobody stands up when some Tech Billionaire proposes building a Data Center and says "Uh, no, we don't have enough water to do that."  Rather they say, "OK, you tell us we must have this data center to keep up with the Chinese, so who can we take water from so we can make it happen?"

Every tech billionaire basically wants his own AI system.  It's the new status symbol among Billionaires instead of Super Yachts and Private Jets.  You're not a Mover & Shaker unless you have your very own Juice Hog slopping up electrons to think for you.  There's no central planning, no sense of realism here, as though the AI will take care of this problem itself.  The job of AI is to solve the problems caused by AI, in a kind of perpetual motion machine.  Insanity has arrived.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/water-energy-problem-experts/2866/

Water is scarce, but we have an even bigger problem: experts are already warning that it will leave us without technology

RE