Why does AI devour so much water?

Computing generates heat. The more computing, the more heat. The more heat, the less computing, because hot computers lose efficiency and ultimately fry and die. You must remove the heat. That’s why when you’re doing some heavy processing on your computer you will usually hear the little fan kick in. That’s why it’s advised to keep your laptop slightly elevated and to keep the grills clean of dust, so that there can be a good air flow around the chips. When things are optimal, cold air flows in around the hot chips. The heat from the chips is then transferred to the air, which flows out, to be replaced by more cool air.

Many of the early data centers thus used air conditioning systems to cool the chips. Big Tech is very cost and efficiency driven. It quickly discovered that water is much more efficient at cooling chips than air and that, even though there’s a global water crisis, water is super-cheap.

Computers also like dry conditions. Deserts are very efficient places to put them once you have access to lots of really cheap water from an underlying aquifer. So, Big Tech loves to put data centers in deserts.

An AI data center is not so much a data center as a mega-computing center.