Thirst Trap

“Each time you ask an AI chatbot to summarize a lengthy legal document or conjure up a cartoon squirrel wearing glasses, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water.” To make matters worse, it almost seems like the people building the data centers used AI to find the locations where that water was already the most scarce. Bloomberg (Gift Article): AI Is DrainingWater From Areas That Need It Most. “As tech firms have pushed to develop new data centers to support cutting-edge AI systems, they’ve increasingly turned to states and countries with ample energy resources and favorable regulations, according to experts. What those places often lack, however, is an abundant supply of water.”