By Brooklynn Then, age 11
“It is 2,250 acres of farmland that will never be farmed again,” Julie Richmond Sauer, a registered nurse in central Louisiana, told CNET.
What exactly happened to those acres of land? In this case, an AI data center that is going to be built in Richmond’s area.
A data center is a facility that stores and distributes the information necessary to run our technology, such as hosting photos and videos, streaming, and handling transactions, according to CNET. These centers also hold data for applications, including artificial intelligence generative tools—like a factory for AI.
AI data centers sometimes use more energy than a small town. One of the biggest uses of AI data centers is ChatGPT, which was launched in late 2022 and now has an estimated total of 700 million active users each week.
AI data centers use a lot of water and energy. Meta’s AI data centers used 1.39 billion gallons of water around the world in 2023, and almost half of that water used was permanently taken from local water resources. Despite using so much more water since the explosion of AI, both Meta and Google say they would like to be “water positive” by 2030, which means they would like to give back more water to the communities than the data centers take. But according to the Chicago Sun-Times, over the next five years, largedata centers could use enough water to supply 4.6 million homes.
As a consequence of this increased water usage, a lot of people might not have clean water for drinking. Tech companies have proposed a solution. Instead of using clean water that can be used for drinking, the data centers could use water that isn’t suitable for drinking, though this might be complicated.
The Trump administration is very supportive of AI data centers, saying they want the United States to lead AI innovation around the world. But we don’t know how this will all end up.
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Original public domain image from Flickr
