We have a county reservoir and our idiot leaders have made a deal with Amazon to give them 40% of the reservoir capacity. That is a big problem, especially now what we are in a drought in the springtime.
I mean, assuming we are discussing the US where almost all datacenters are being built -
the real thing to realize is not that datacenters are bad (I’m kinda ambivalent), nor that meat is bad, but that poorly written water rights laws are bad. Which is why we grow some of our most water-intensive crops in some of our driest areas and some farmers end up just flooding the desert with water for no reason each year. Restructuring water rights would massively reduce water usage while maintaining food production for the simple reason that then we would stop growing alfalfa in Pheonix
Nuanced discussion? What are you, a European?
“But surviving uses more resources than generating value for the shareholders. Why are you so selfish?”
Many farms are owned by corporations not families. Shit, which one is more profitable?
I keep seeing this argument and it stinks of astroturfing. Probably to portray data centers the same as farms: a resource-intensive but necessary infrastructure. If they wanted to make a good faith argument, it would be good courses, not farms. And I could also go without golf.
Focusing solely on water consumption with these arguments is another red flag. Its easy to find false equivalencies with water, but no other project demands double the power output of the entire state it’s in, and not many other projects have as bad a ratio of taxpayer dollars spent to revenue or services generated.
Not all farms are required.
Farmers like to claim they are ‘growing your food’ while exporting grain and selling corn for ethanol or shipping alfalfa to Saudi Arabia for cattle feed.
They are incredibly unsympathetic.
We can shut down 90% of datacenters today, suffer a slight inconvinience to our lives and keep living.
We have a farm failure…
It is well known that meat based food, especially beef, is a bad use of water ressources vs the nutritional value, probably worse than those ai datacentres for water.
I keep seeing this argument about “meat vs ai” and I think it’s just a way to divert the blame and the anti-ai/anti-meat people’s attention. We should be doing both, reducing meat/beef consumption and heavily regulating AI datacenters in regards to water and electricity use (regulated in all aspects but that’s beyond the scope of this post).
There is zero nutritional value in AI slop
Yes, but does you eating food generate as much value for the share holders as AI? /s
I agree, but despite all the shit AI waifu generators and the “let’s shove it in everything just like we did with blockchain and metaverse” there are legitimate uses (medical, scientific) for AI I think where it has the potential to add value and improve life. AI in the current regulatory, financial, fiscal and moral landscape is a bunch of trouble waiting to happen.
That is why I think it’s just rage baiting comparison to say “Your food uses more water than AI”. It plays to the “we’re replacing you with AI” sentiment.
The more nuanced message is that yes AI datacenters use a lot of water but still a lot less than meat production. I have read a while ago about how with AI they are looking to better target irrigation of crops to reduce the amount of water needed while giving the optimal amount of water for each plants. We’ll see if it ends up being a net positive for water consumption vs the water used by the AI to do this…
Some datacenters are still built with cooling towers instead of chillers. I know for a fact Amazon does this. They are slightly cheaper, but massively wasteful. I think we need better laws for the irresponsible companies, but this is not most datacenter companies. If I heard a Google datacenter was going up near me, I would not care. If I heard an Amazon one was, I would be organizing against it as hard as possible.
pick a different reason to hate AI sheeple. water isn’t it
Pick a better reason to want AI. water is a significant issue, especially when it’s commercialized and not everyone has access to clean water.
You can go fuck yourself for defending AI.
The blasting for building these places is literally shaking people’s homes apart. The noise pollution after construction is vibrating people to death. Go setup camp next to a data center and come see us in 100 days.
We do not need AI. The only reason it’s being pushed is greed. These assholes have sunk too much money into it and won’t let it go, so they want to see “results” at the cost of human lives. Fuck off with that bullshit. Even the creators are against it.
There ya go!!! those are great reasons. I’m not defending it just the water issue doesn’t add up when cattle takes up way more and we have alternstive meat options in 2026.
Food is required to live, AI is not. At all. You’re comparing Lord of the Rings to Battlefield Earth.
Yes you’re stating a fact, is cattle the only food?
Other comments/arguments are more general to “farms”, not specific to cattle.
They didn’t say food, they said cattle. Meat is as unecessary (except pzarticular health condition) as ai, and pollute more. Opposing ai for environnemental issues but not opposing meat at the same time is kinda contradictory
The point you are DELIBERATELY missing is that farms use so much water than AI data centres that the amount data centres use is irrelevant. The water usage claims are so ridiculously overblown and so obviously stupid that it’s appalling that people believe them! I have seen people genuinely claim that water used in data centres is destroyed and can never be recovered, or that it’s polluted so badly it can never be cleaned. Farms not only use multiple orders of magnitude more water, they also pollute it a hell of a lot more so it’s far more difficult to clean and more damaging to the environment. A lot of the claimed numbers come from one person who got gallons and megalitres confused! Just stop spreading this utter nonsense! <haters will not respond with downvotes for calling them out, and more repeatedly debunked nonsense, because they always do, they’re really dull as well as annoying!>
Meat is worse than AI for the environnement, and you can go without meat (except some health condition)
I work daily with my company’s hosted LLM, and the last 6 months of use had the same environnemental impact as eating 10g of beef
Also i use an old model, in a country with mostly decarbonate electricity, and not with agentic mode, so it may have worse impact elsewhere
This is not an argument for ai though, pushing for ai use where it shouldn’t be used is dumb, wasteful and armful for society, just saying that if you are a dev using llm for occasional help and prototyping, eating less meat will be far more helpful for the environnement
Counter point, meat is fucking delicious and AI is just a shell game of stock manipulation that’s going to crash and throw the world into another Great Depression
As if meat industry where not also driven by stock manipulation, exploitation, destruction of natural habitat, to grow food for developped country consumers, when a lot people still don’t have safe access for food.
Meat delicious is based on personal taste. This argument is as valid as “using ai is so fun”, so argument rejected
I think the people have spoken
Meat is worse than AI for the environnement, and you can go without meat (except some health condition)
We can also go without AI. Meat can give nutritional value.
All I’ve seen AI do is reconcentrate wealth to the top 1% of tech bros. LLMs are chat bots that give out information that have to be independently verified.
We can also go without ai
Yes
Meat can give nutritional value
Palm oil gives nutrients, yet its cultivation pollute. Meat production pollute, and it’s consumption can be reduced or replaced.
All I’ve seen AI do is concentrate wealth to the top 1%tech bros.
I agree. Also consider that meat industry has it’s own big evil shareholder that exploit farmers to produce shit for consumers
My whole point is not ai good meat bad.
Its : if your argument against ai is water, energy and pollution (which i agree with, all this datacenter, hardware and energy consumption is nonsense compared to the little scope of where ai is useful), don’t oppose it to farming industry, or also fight against intensive meat production, which also involves a john shareholder that destroys the planet
LLMs are chat bots that give out information that have to be independently verified.
so you don’t work in tech then
Well, you obviously have a bias towards people doing the dumbest shit possible.
absolutely, when people who struggle to write English use it to make an email presentable i tell them stop doing dumb shit
when the person i know who has severe dyslexia uses it to fix his emails from an absolute state of typos and mixed words i tell him, hey man, hikingvet says you’re doing the dumbest shit 😃
Lol, you seem mad that I don’t have a good opinion of chat bots that tell lies.
any assumptions of ‘mad’ or ‘triggered’ are a mistake on your behalf
i think you have an uneducated opinion and i am simple offering a rebuttal to it
feel free to point out where im wrong (ideally without childish memes)
LLMs are chat bots that give out information that have to be independently verified.
so you don’t work in tech then
This is you upset about my opinion.
Anything you have said afterwards is just you stomping your feet, because we didn’t need LLMs to do the things you said they were useful for.
So hey, when you want to “educate” someone, don’t insult their intelligence first.
/vegan is that way
