Hank Green - 2025-12-08
Go to https://ground.news/hank for a better way to stay informed. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access to world-wide coverage through my link. You might guess that I'm a little apprehensive about this one. Any amount of "actually this might not be the most important thing to focus on" can be interpreted these days as an unacceptable defense of AI or whatever, but I just felt like it was a good opportunity to talk about lifecycle and resources use analysis and how freaking tricky the are!! Edited by me and Aves: https://bsky.app/profile/avesmhl.com
it was me. im using the water and rapidly making all the "ai" text and images. im drinking 5000 liters per second down my human throat
Clippy support! You're part of the Right-To-Repair / right to own/use your own stuff movement, yeah?
waters georg
@treyslider6954 yep
Thank you for your sacrifice
Hi chatgpt, how do I drink more water?
“We cannot predict the future. We cannot even, apparently, agree upon the present” SO TRUE, oh my gosh that was a bar
Or the past for that matter!
i came here to type this exact comment
Everyday it sounds like we wander into the world of 1984 by George Orwell and it's scary af
@lukasistired England is already 1984
America is more Fahrenheit 451°
@xostler what's the big difference?
Clippy would never steal your municipal water supply
Clippy would never emit so much noise you have constant migraines for weeks
Clippy wouldn't have data centers that ruin small communities and drive down property values
@iaial0sounds like a great place for old deaf people.
It's not surprising that a useless thing would require nothing.
One of the stupidest memes made by the anti ai crowd.
@lavona8204 everybody wants everything in somebody else's back yard. I want clean energy but don't dare put a solar farm back there. I want my Disney plus but no data center. Why are all the stores closed and why do people keep stealing my Amazon package
You sure said "Open AI doesn't share that information" a lot for a company whose name is 67% "open"
It is literal doublespeak from 1984
Very odd for a company that started out by masquerading as a nonprofit
6-7
The other 33% is also a lie, so...
@bigbrainbudgie3408just wanted to check and sure enough
We're about a week away from chat gpt gaslighting us into thinking about our "water footprint" to draw attention away from themselves
🎯
they already do that with recycling plastics and carbon so why not water?
In Memphis they literally told people to start taking less showers because of Musks dumb fuck ai plant.
The year is 2019. The world's top billionaires take a trip on their private jets and yachts to meet in person for the annual climate conference to discuss how regular people need to fight global warming by switching to public transportation and lab grown synthetic meats.
The year is 2029, the world's trillionaires convene at the Skynet Global Command Center to discuss how regular people need to stop taking showers so their AI datacenters have enough water to generate another 200 pictures of a banana riding a skateboard.
So the good ol BP carbon footprint tactics
i hate ai, i hate corn, i hate cars, i hate lawns. my arguments remain consistent
edit: ok im at the point where im willing to spoil the fact that im fucking kidding
What if instead of lawns we all had corn?
@travishunter8573"Reject your HOA. Grow corn on your front lawn."
-a meme i saw
@fossilfighters101 i think monoculture gardens are bad, and fuck invasive grasses but a lot of that urban agriculture type stuff really has to ignore logistics to sound convincing. feeding the population with backyard corn would be hard to do in an industrial society.
what about cute furry art?
edit: I mean the regular stuff, nothing AI generation related.
@pymandres Dang I missed where that person says they want the entire agriculture industry to be replaced solely by growing corn in people's private urban front lawns, can you point it out when you're done creating a ridiculous strawman argument in apropos of nothing? Thanks
Titles that hit different in August 2026
What happened in 2026 that changes the context of the title, I haven't been following. :(
@DarkChiiTheme it recently came out that he uses ai for his videos. a lot of people, me included, think that hank genuinely thinks ai is a reliable source of info. he's also said that he's been using "LLM's" to "spike his dopamine" implying that he is now addicted to ai
@fl1ntl0kw00d Oh no, he's just like the rest of us 90% of the people. I don't even like Hank, but oh my god, you people sound like luddites.
@fl1ntl0kw00d Oh okaay, weird that a "science" guy relies on AI for info, isn't it pretty known that AI gets stuff wrong often? Thank u for telling me! 🙏
@Beliserius1 Oh and I am when the technology harms the environment, you all llm supporters love using that huh.
I was in Las Vegas for a conference last week. They had a sign in the hotel that said: "Help us conserve water". Meanwhile, outside my window: golf courses in the desert.
Edit: please take a moment to read the other comments before telling me something I've already been told a hundred times over.
Absolutely ridiculous
Not to "um actually" but Las Vegas has a very robust recycled water system, which is how they supply water for non-potable uses (lawns, golf courses, fountains, etc.)
@kearukearu the non potable system does not account for 100% of the water needs though it just helps reduce the amount of potable water they need
I thought those used fake grass
@Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee3using water to grow corn to make ethanol to make fuel to power equipment that planta corn to grow for ethanol to fuel equipment that grows corn
Ignoring the training cost would be like a movie displaying, "No animals were harmed during the streaming of this movie to your TV."
lol
a movie which stops all harm to animals while it's streaming would be a marvel of science.
@pymandres that would be relevant to the analogy if querying an AI stopped all worldwide water usage while the AI was thinking.
or beauty companies saying no animals were killed to be put in your shampoo...
@KingAdamXVII i wasn't continuing the analogy, just imagining a more beautiful world
I SWEAR TO GOD, EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS ONE OF TWO THINGS:
- BOILING WATER
- CORN
LITERALLY NEVER ANYTHING ELSE EVER
putting corn in boiling water to summon the demiurge
What about tuberculosis?
the two types of industrial product are corn and boiling water. coca cola? corn. personal computers? boiling water. despite being a mechanical device, automobiles are actually corn.
and if you put corn in boiling water, its grits :)))))
Crab
the existence of this video makes more sense in hindsight
Came here to say exactly that!
Wdym?
@brandyhensley2155 Wdym?
@SonicBuzz2010 hank got caught using AI
@SonicBuzz2010 he came out in support of AI not too long ago and had been using it for his videos without disclosure
Petition to call OpenAI "ClosedAI" from now on until they fix their attitude.
they used to be open source until... they werent i guess lmao
*unless.
from now ? you stole this joke from years ago
*until they shutdown
Thank u
The painful irony of getting hit with multiple ads that use Ai-generated imagery while just trying to get through this vid is truly boggling.
Get an adblocker already
Edit: ouf sry that came off as very rude :\
pi-hole or nextdns: blocks ads network-wide, including on all devices connected to the network. covers in-app ads, etc. :)
Get a Browser that supports "ublock origin"
For your own sake
Ublock origin on pc, youtube revanced on android, something via altstore on iphone / iphone
@drydum2185unfortunately not possible if you are using iOS. I’ve got it on windows though.
I knew it was corn.
The true root of all evil
Ugh I saw this comment halfway through the video and thought it was euphemism…
Yes, it was confusing, but I thought it was a joke I’d understand soon, and not be as distressing as it turned out to be
Don't forget, it's not the corn's fault- keep digging and you realize US corn is all about oil.
At the end of the day, it's almost always oil.
Corn, alfalfa, almonds.. anything we grow in places we shouldn't.. uses far more water than AI ever will.. Transporting foods to people internationally, is also far more wasteful.. And it's even worse when we combined the two, but we do it all the time. Really need to get our priorities in order, and address the big problems, or we'll never make any dent in the environmental issue.
@GrumpDog And also can feed people. AI is practically useless. And not “practically” as in “basically”, “practically” as in, it does not have a practical use in the way we are currently using it.
The fact there is a grok logo on the bottom of the thumbnail is crazy….
literally insane. Maybe don't use the CP generator to make your thumbnails my guy
@spilbobagginsmaybe just...
I think that was intentional
No fuckin way...
@spilbobagginsi think it was just added onto for like the joke?
I miss the days when all my data fit on a floppy disk and nobody could see it unless I gave it to them. Now, apparently, the fact that I watched this video needs to be stored in a data center somewhere.
Get off the Internet then.
best comment
@carlwheezer4347 Carl would never say that to someone. Shame on you
Oh... way more than 1 data center my friend....
Not just that you watched it, but that you decided to comment on it as well.
As a water resource engineer and manager of a medium sized water utility who sends about 10% of our municipal water to a large data center: Hank you actually did a fantastic job of explaining into explaining some really advanced concepts in water management. You might not have degrees in water management but your research and deduction skills are extraordinary.
Do you realise you sound like AI
Also the industry term for water lost to evaporation or irrigation/transpiration is « consumptive use ». Here in the mountain west where water can be accounted for and reused to extinction, consumptive use is how water use by municipalities and irrigators across watersheds is quantified.
How/ Where does one get a degree in water management?
@JamesHardaker He doesn't... It's funny how people see proper writing and a complement and all they can think is muh ai lol
@JamesHardakerAs a human and engineer I am offended by your comparison to AI. I am not AI. It is illogical to assume AI would look for a video to respond to, that is something us meat sacks are prone to.
"Open AI did not release information about..." "Open AI doesn't share this information..." There's a big problem, right there: Open AI is not Open, it's Closed. How about that.
wow, you are so smart
Before Sam Altman took over, OpenAI referred to how they open sourced everything. Sam Altman, in an attempt to create more value, has made everything closed to encourage competition
@sher618 shush! nasty bot
Everything on Wall Street is a euphemism. It's all about creating language that can be weaponized against he population to claim something bad is actually something good.
.because they sold out. Life every starving wage slave trying to make it in the hell scape that is corprate American.
My oh my, how the turn tables!
And how they turn back.
Something to really note regarding AI water use.
Because it uses municipal water, when municipal water in a cities water district gets used, the rates for that watee go up.
Thus, the citizens of that city have to pay more money for their water, without any commensurate impact to their quality of life, as the data center doesnt actually provide any economic value to the city its in.
same with electricity... and apparently RAM
I'm so eff'd up over ram bro please i was gonna upgrade my stuff next year 😭
This is important. Especially the part about the lack of economic value of the data center to the local area. Only the construction and setup phase draws in economic activity, but once the capital expenditures are paid for the land acquisition, construction and installation of the building there’s not that much more value generated for the community around it - in contrast to let’s say a production plant or office building.
@beatbizzle wait this the first i’m hearing about this, can you elaborate?
Well it’s like any other industrial use then, that’s the cost of having things in your city. Like it’s the same exact story for farming, or any industry that requires water. However a lot more of the water in the AI or energy production facility is recycled quickly, since it’s just there to move heat.
In theory the water utility should be pricing the industrial user to cover its costs.
This reminds of the bit in The Good Place where they say everybody keeps going to the "bad place" because it's impossible to be a good person when you track back every action far enough.
Exactly. I like to think…we all died and were living in the bad place l
I believe the joke is that the avocado someone bought was like -40 moral points or whatever, because the exploitation of the workers and the land. Basically that in today's profit driven culture everything is harmful.
@CRneu Yes, I recall that. There was a lot more, but that did indeed happen.
@Mori-man yeah a guy put flowers on his grandmother's grave and lost like 50k points.
Yeah, that it used to be like +15 points for getting flowers for your mother, but in modern times getting flowers means polluting with gas, the flowers are harvested by exploited migrants, the water used to grows the flowers is wasteful, that kind of thing, so doing a nice gesture for your mother is like -150 points instead.
And there's a clue early on in the show when Chidi says something about how he drinks almond milk because of how the dairy industry works but he also knows how much water almonds take to grow so he wasn't sure if that was actually the ethically correct choice - the thing that you can't win with how the system works.
Every issue eventually circles back to Big Corn
I was scanning the comments before watching the video, and I really thought you were using "Corn" in place of "Porn" the way people do to get around censorship. But, no...just actual Corn. Weird.
Big corn and TB. The real bastards.
I'm in the middle of the corn part, and I'm facepalming. Most corn grown in the US relies entirely on rainfall. OK he's done, he made no mention of dryland corn. Respect lost.
@brianmcdonald42 Iowa caucuses being first in line is a huge deal.
@brianmcdonald42 With the way that "corn" is so deeply entrenched into society and how our technology moves, I wouldn't even bother beating myself up on the misunderstanding.
Anyone else notice the GROK logo on the bottom right on the thumbnail
No fuckin way lmao. I thought you were joking, but nope, it was true
what a joke
Where
@hanifdachoosen1286 hidden behind the video length
@h@hanifdachoosen1286it’s literally on the bottom right
Thank you for mentioning thermal pollution. “Waste heat” is an issue most people don’t think of!
I know I'm a bit late to the conversation here, but I have to say that of all the ways to use water, cooling computers is far less damaging than most. You can clean and reuse the wastewater far more easily than you can, say, sewage or primary reactor coolant.
@don5062 Nuclear reactor coolant in a closed loop, you don't need to clean it like you do for an evaporative process.
@zwink37 Depending on what plant operations are going on, you'll have primary discharges. Apparently (I didn't know this), even the secondary discharges/leaks are treated as contaminated.
@zwink37 they don't need to have it be an evaporative process at all, it can be a closed loop. My PC is water cooled and isn't using evaporation.
They are just under sizing the systems and not paying for radiators to make it a closed loop. A data center isn't creating even a fraction of the heat a nuclear reactor is.
@W1ldSm1le no they have radiators they have water mist/droplet wet-cooled radiators that make the water loop run at possibly below-ambient temperatures (wet bulb vs. dry bulb temperature).
They never let the water in the computers touch the air, not inside air not outside air.
And it's not normally replaced before the entire computer in the building is turned off and taken apart because it's obsolete and no longer worth to keep in that space plugged in.
This also means that they could just put an AC in place of that wet-cooled radiator to give the same inside-loop water temperatures at the same dry-bulb ambient air temperatures, just using electricity for the AC instead of water for keeping the radiators wet.
Technically wet radiators are also a bit cheaper than AC units, but not much when you take a look back at the cost of the computers in the building, so it's pretty much just a question of AC-power-cost vs. radiator-wetting-water-cost.
How to spot Sam Altman is lying: his mouth is moving
Plz tell me why he always lookin like:
O..O
-
just like a chinese government official! must of gotten that from the same playbook on corruption.
In Michigan there is a data center that has made headlines for causing thousands of residents to lose water service and causing sewers to back up into their basements and crawlspaces. Right next door is a factory with twice the water usage that has been there for 75 years and has done none of this. The difference is that the data center is not classified as industrial water and is allowed to pull from the same pipes as those homes, while the factory has a dedicated blue pipe from the municipal supply, a huge buffer tank to protect that line from rapid pressure changes, and a dedicated collection sump and drainage line back to the river. This is all very expensive but it means they can use more water than every home in the city and never so much as sputter a faucet. The data center has none of that, it just has hoses connected to spigots fed by the pipes that were in the building way back when it was an American Bell switch rack and drains going down into the flood sump in the basement and feeding into the sewers.
I'm a Michigan resident and we're fighting hard against the data center Meta is trying to put in a field near my house. Remember folks, show up at your local town halls, meet and rally with your neighbors. We need to come together against our corporate overlords.
@NagathaChristee Saline? I was at the Saline protest recently. I'm proud of how our community is rallying.
In a sense this is actually good news, insofar as what you’re really saying is “There is a straightforward solution which is already known and which we are already capable of building, and we just need to put it in place”.
and thats a problem that is easily solved with time
why would losing water service cause sewage to back up?
foreshadowing
and he kept making these pro-AI vids after this
foreshadowing is a narrative-
what happened?
Hank admitted to using chatgpt to do "research" for his show ask hank anything where he repeatedly misinforms and has to correct himself in post
This wasnt a pro-ai video you clearly didnt watch this video at all omg
The water isn’t the only problem. It’s symptom of the real problem. We’re subsidizing the AI companies through increases in our utility rates and bills.
The water is the problem, this is quite literally the main argument from the anti-ai crowd
There are only so many freshwater sources in the world. I seem to remember that excessive water use/overallocation was causing the Colorado River to dry up. It's lost a ridiculous amount of It's volume, you can see in photos that the water line has dropped by like 20 feet or more. People further up the river use more water than they should, they water grass lawns and huge amounts of farmland, and people further down the river end up having no water because there's none left for them. No water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, bathing, etc. Necessities for human existence. Climate change is also a big factor in the river's decline, but overallocation is something that the US could actively fix by improving regulation and fixing that stupid loophole in the law that lets people take as much water as they want if they declare it an "emergency." Add to this crisis a bunch of data centers draining it even more? Freshwater sources will dry up and then your water bill will be 0 because you'll get nothing. It does suck that the bills are going up though, I'm not denying that. Hell, fixing that and making these companies foot the bill could help deter them from overconsuming, so I'm all for fixing that too.
@wetbed1im personally stuck in the land of the twitter artists where they can’t stop saying its theft using bad faith definitions but yk
@wetbed1 it is PART of the problem. The problem as a whole is exactly what OP stated, subsidization of expenses for AI companies. Water, Electricity, Taxes... there's more that I probably don't know. These are the emerging issues, water is one of them.
@wetbed1 As shown in this video it's not a huge problem and it's dumb to over index on water consumption as the issue with AI.
There are so many other issues with AI to bank on: overinvestment in endless AI data centers despite low AI revenues being unsustainable, that the s&p 500 is propped up by incestuous tech company cross investments, the real result of HBM investment resulting in RAM prices being inflated which increases the cost of basic electronics and therefore the cost of living, the high unemployment rates of young people and the lack of vision for what people will do with their lives when/if AI has automated their jobs, the lack of any AI alignment guarantees... Etc
All I know is Meta built a mega data center somewhere in Texas and now that town has horrible water pressure and water with a lot of silt.
They booted up a data center near to me and now we're getting random power outages that we weren't having before :/
@slithra227 You must be lying, because hank and all these pro ai people are telling us how there are no negative effects...😕
@y@yubariiHe literally said everywhere is affected differently and it would be a terribly dumb and bad idea to build somewhere with low water like a desert😭 I’m not denying that the negative effects exist, clearly they do, but just want to clarify that that’s not what hank is saying either.
@Caspitan1 Yet he made this video to downplay ais usage of water....by telling us how ai uses water, but its not taking oir drinking water, but that water could be used for driking, but its just that ots not rught now, but it might be used for drinijg later, but we know know that forsure, but hey guys theres a lot of misinformation about ai and i know nothing, but also im going to post rhis video to my millions of followers and act as if what i say is clear unbiased facts,
@yubariiI see your point, but he offered a nuanced view. That’s important. He expanded viewers’ knowledge on the subject and encouraged people to look into it for themselves or let the experts handle it. If you think the impact is bigger than most people think, look into yourself and learn the facts. If something needs to change, change it yourself. Tell people what’s up, present the facts.
The power grid needs to be talked about more than the water, its not just the power usage but how unprepared the grid infrastructure is for the increase in demand.
Especially with the government seemingly fast tracking EV adoption in the states. With summers getting hotter and people needing to use more fans or AC units already causing power brownouts. it will only get worse. And since we all know that corporations will have their things shut off last(such as stores, or data centers) means that while these things are running, everyone else will be in darkness.
That's why a lot of places are upgrading their power grid infrastructure, and, subsequently, rates for electricity are going up to cover these new infrastructure costs.
@MyAramil EV is a pretty small part of it. I did some numbers on my situation, I have a 28 mile round-trip commute, which I do 3 times a week primarily by electric power in my PHEV. The electricity my car uses is about the same as leaving my basement dehumidifier (small portable unit) running full time. But nobody is getting all worried about the dehumidifiers being sold at Lowes or Menards. My household electric bill is still lower than average for my community, according to the summary on my monthly bill. (I don't run the dehumidifier very often!)
Also EVs are about 8% of all new cars sold, that number is going up slowly. There is time for electric companies to adapt to that. Data centers came out of nowhere and are being built all around me. That's a much faster impact.
@michealwilliams472The problem with this is that data centers specifically pick places with some of the worst power grids and lowest supply/demands because it is cheaper, then they swoop in and force an increase of infrastructure. They create no jobs for the local economy that is affected by this increase in infrastructure and will eventually price locals out of the area.
And what kind of power generator they are making?
Water dams... can't use oil and coal forever.
I want them to use Nuclear, but I rather see THE military discipline handle nuclear powerplants than the government themselves. Wind turbines are hard to manufacture AND stockpiled by AI companies too. Geothermal is geolocation dependent and its hard to mine around bedrocks.
AI data centers 🤝 American lawns 🤝 live stock industry 🤝 ethanol production 🤝wasteful use of resources
Meat industry really is the worst tho
@xShujinkoI agree . It’s very cruel and extremely wasteful :(
@xShujinkodepends where the livestock are farmed and how. I farm beef in New Zealand and all the water I need falls from the sky
@shafffisherYesn‘t. Livestock and factory farming is genuinely terrible, both ethically and for the environment.
i have a conspiracy theory that these AI and data centre is being used by the elites to drain our resources so we have to depend on these elites in future
I love how AI has branded itself as an essential part of life now. Like how about everyone just… stops using it? we were better off before all this
I wasn't.
Simple as.
@solanumlycopersicum5594 I'm all for ai helping in health and science developments but it has no place as replacement for artists or pretending to be anyone's partner or friend, or strip down innocent people even CHILDREN on Tw*tter
@solanumlycopersicum5594That's sad and maybe you need to reevaluate your life and seek help.
@solanumlycopersicum5594 damn bro doesn't know how to use google??? Truly a shame...
I think people just really quickly fell dependent on it due to its "convenience". It's a dumb reason but at the same time- a lot of people are dumb and want to stay dumb :/
If I've learnt one thing from this channel, it is that every issue you can think of is more complex than you might have thought
Yeaa, that's the problem tho, those people who make the industry where we're the "product" can always lie to us, we're not even realize until someone tell us or until it's too late :")
@Noblesse_Sapphirethats the price we pay for innovation and improvements in standard of living. The world is too complex for any one person to make sense of. We just have to put our faith in fellow human beings that everyone in the chain knows their niche and all of it comes together for a seamless end result.
It's frankly a miracle that humanity has reached the point that we're at. Everything around us was affected by dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of other humans before making it's way to our nearby vicinity. Be it paper, printers, computers, textbooks, tables, cars, even buildings.
Absolutely, there is so much nuance in everything, people seem to be so “black and white” about things now when there is so much grey in between.
EVERYTHING is nuanced
Everything CAN be nuanced. Often, a simple model of a thing is sufficient for one's immediate purposes.
In the case of AI water use..... one may need a PhD to have a good grasp on it!
AI uses more water = Consumers pay more for water
AI uses more electricity = Consumers pay more for water and electricity
AI being used = AI being used++ (see previous results)
AI in products = Consumers pay more for product + product quality is lower
How the hell do we get off this ride? Because all that is happening is consumers are getting screwed over.
Not to mention AI uses more ram = ram becomes insanely expensive
@AmberCommentsThingsthis is actually a very fun point bc a lot of like ‘dude gamer bros’ are becoming very anti-AI because their computers are getting more expensive!!! so congratulations to AI for literally making everything worse for normal people.
@carmina-solis I got my 96GB RAM before the RAM skyrocket so I'm chill.
If they use all the water for LLM servers then we don’t need to worry about the future… there won’t be one
data centers including all ai centers only use .2% of total water usage. stop being dumb. blame regulators for any electricity issues or special deals. it's not the fault of ai, but the incompetent government who allows anarchotyranny. where everyone but YOU get to do anything.
GRRM level storytelling
Did you know making a single tee-shirt uses water equivalent to as many as 9 million ai prompts. If we eminated 50% of the fashion industry we would still have enough clothing for everyone and save 50x more water than if we eliminated every datacenter on earth
My theory is that Sam Altman is trying to say that ChatGPT uses some kind of demonic magic to remove a teaspoon of water from the face of the earth every time you ask it a question
Insane plot for a movie
Like a lower stake version of the box
Maxwell's water dipper demon.
@JustinHowe-gk2lzI kinda need that as a cartoon
he probably just asked chatgpt
I live in a desert, in a state with a governor who tells us to pray for rain. Then they tell people to conserve water while public spaces are covered in grass and watered at noon.
Do they also have golf courses everywhere? T.T
@SeSsan0owe sure do here :/
@technoweasel8937 prediction: you would scoff and brush it off when it's very clearly a republican place
Maybe don't live in a desert?...
hello fellow Utahn 🙃
a hidden subsidy. Municipalities will end up footing the cost for the infrastructure. Data centers should be like other industrial uses, source it yourself, clean it yourself, and return it cleaner than you got it.
Hahaha hahaha haha I wish industries all worked like this. The industries in my city (oil refineries, mostly) get their water from the same place we, the residents do, and they use about half of the water we have. We've been in drought conditions since 2022. Which is the same year Exxon started operating in the area. How strange.
And the industries are demanding desalination, which I'd be fine with, except the plan for the brine is to just dump it back into the sea and destroy the local aquatic ecosystem
Municipal water isn’t free…
And data centers aren’t different than other industries lol.
not really a hidden subsidy, no, but consumers will end up footing the bill. Utility companies, in many places, have their prices capped based on how much they spend on infrastructure. If they are able to build more infrastructure, they will happily oblige, because it lets them raise prices slightly for the next couple of years. Whether that's electricity or water.
@ZeteticPhilosopher Right...The residents pay for it. So as demand rises, we pay more. All so that these private companies can make billions of dollars that they aren't sharing with the municipalities other than a tiny handful of jobs. They should have to pay, or we get a cut of the profits.
Heres the thing. I work in manufacturing, we use thousands of gallons a day to clean metal for our products. "Returning it cleaner" in our case, and many other facilities' cases, that just means pumping it with chemicals that bring the pH back to neutral. If our ratio changes, we can get majorly fined.
Hey, data center mechanical engineer here, I litterally design the cooling for data centers, AI chips live there. While evaporative cooling is used, the majority are closed loop cooling, it uses water but just as a way to transfer heat to mechanical chillers. This does however use a lot of power as a trade off. So ya know still using water to generate that power
Closed loop systems are too complex for the average person to understand, so everyone just shout "AI data center is drying my pound" and that's more catchier and easier to go viral
tbf they do use stupid amounts of water when filling the loop, but it's not gonna dry the pound (if the water budget allows as Hank says)
Why can't we just cool it using a time vortex in which it naturally cools due to entropy while only a few minutes have passed in our time?
I work in a data center with the latest Nvidia GB200 servers, and their closed loop liquid cooling isn't even water, it's an oil/propylene glycol blend to prevent corrosion. In our case the liquid is then cooled in a heat exchanger via phase change cooling aka refrigeration.
I ass-u-me you are working in .5 - 3 GW range
Is it possible to take the waste heat and use it to turn a turbine to generate electricity?
I know it can't be self sustaining, but it could offset some of the actual use.
Regular people aren't the ones inviting water-guzzling, gas-emitting, job-killing data centers into their communities. Billionaires and multi-national corporations are pressuring/inventivising state and local electeds to deregulate, allow "offsets" for major pollution, and stifle the dissent of the governed.
Good, old-fashioned bribery
Absolutely correct
I work in a data center. My job hasn’t been killed. And it’s not using any water right now because it’s winter.
keep crying 🤡
Regular people are, however, buying animal products 3+ times every single day, propping up an industry that simultaneously destroys the world and inflicts more suffering than every single human atrocity throughout history combined
I went to the movies yesterday (im not american btw) the existential dread i felt upon seeing TWO ai ads back to back was unlike anything ever in my life we are so doomed
oh my god ai
😂😂😂
Trust your not going to suffer unimaginable torment, it will have a lot of negatives and some positives and we will move on with life, we are to aware of the risks AI presents to walk into them without seeing them coming a mile away
You will actually see education across the board go up for motivated children and an extreme depenedency in unmotivated ones depending on how schools handle AI but Ive seen plenty of adults who are dumber than AI so at the very least the lowest bar will be raised because AI will do everything at that point and below
@syther6768 please do not use reductive arguments like "your not going to suffer unimaginable torment". it does not have to be daily torture to have negative impact
@LiWhite_iWhat negative impact exactly? Boohoo AI bad. Stop the fearmongering.
This video makes a lot more sense now that we know Hank uses AI to write his scripts
Luddite
@Valentininia But now his reputation as an educator is shot, he just reads out scripts for money. AI gets used all the time in China but they don't use it in place of their their brains are, they use it for productivity. There's a fundamental schism here
@Catbus-n3hhe was using ai for research not writing scripts
@Valentininia sheep
@Valentininia You know, the Luddites weren't actually wrong if you actually read what they advocated for
As of 2022, Alfalfa farming comprised 68% of Utah's water use and 0.2% of its GDP, meanwhile the Great Salt Lake is drying up in part due to water that would go to the lake being diverted for industrial use.
As always, animal agriculture is in every single way worse than all AI problems combined. Water use, energy, moral issues (especially moral issues - "mecha hitler" itself doesn't even begin to approach the evil that a single rancher does every day).
@vidyagaems4063 Way worse than all AI problems combined so far ! But yeah, big agriculture has some of the most unethical business practices of any industry, especially when you get into animal products and meat production
had to scroll way too far to finally find this
@vidyagaems4063 yep, even if someone doesn’t care about the ethics (they should) at this point it’s just an archaic, incredibly inefficient way to produce food.
Cows require a 25:1 ratio of calories consumed to calories produced. Meaning that’s 25 calories of feed input for every 1 calorie of beef output. It’s maddening that we could just eat the plants instead and it would use a fraction of the land and water.
it's SALT, what does it even need a lake for?
The end is even crazier when you realize CORN IS MAD SUBSIDIZED by the government. The same government that says we can't afford to pay for schools or healthcare.
Please tell me the corn lore
We crave the corn lore
May we please have a crumb of the corn lore
@mk21-uwu a mere wee kernel mayhaps
Reason why Ohio is so dominant in elections even though as a state it probably does not matter as much.
I work at a water purification company (the same kind of water for microchips). And I will say the new data center that we started servicing is quickly becoming one of our biggest customers.
Yeah big customer that doesn’t pay
Tell your boss to charge them extra
@jazihughey8161 do you think they get the water for free? do you not know how businesses work?
@MrNoipe that doesn't matter data centers should not get priority over farms and civilians! Screw AI flipping poison the data it's nothing but theft over and over again. Let's also not forget how it poisons the planet!
Btw fresh water is a precious limited resource you can't eat data, so why protect sludge?
@houndgirl7365you know the video you're watching right now is hosted on a data center?
Insert Address Me Elephant meme photo
I’m more concerned with how AI is making us not use basic critical thinking skills however the use of water debate is hopefully making people realize how much water is used in industry . I super appreciate you dragging corn and lawns into this discussion!
Its not making us, we are making ourselves use it
The lack of critical thinking and its decline goes way farther back than the last 5 or so years of AI developing enough to become a consumer product. It's like the old calculator saying in school when they taught us manual math. "You won't always have a calculator in your pocket!" Well, Mrs. Doris, now we do. Does that make us dumber with math or are we just spending less mental effort that is then allocated to "bigger" problems? AI is vaguely the same and can have the same level of debate. Smart people will want to stay smart and do smart things. Dumb people take the path of least resistance (as always) and have their thinking done for them. We've been giving dumb people those avenues way sooner than 2020-21.
Google has been doing that for a couple decades now... We did not just start getting dumber overnight.
@MythicalArcher I hate this argument and all the forms it takes. There has never ever been something comparable or as transformative as AI in human history.
I think written language is a much bigger deal, same with the printing Press.
I think there are two factors leading to such a strong emotional response.
1 - we constantly hear about the Colorado River being overused upstream. Towards the east coast, it's been very dry, and our rivers are low. Exposure to water concerns leads to concern about water.
2 - The world has become justifiably cynical about any action taken by corporations. Oh, it turns out they didn't poison every penguin in the southern hemisphere? They didn't nuke Mars? They aren't marketing thalidomide²? That's fantastic, but it never feels like they wouldn't.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. These corporations have so much unmitigated power that one cannot trust they will approach this responsibly or that they will consider the bigger picture. Couple that with weak regulatory structures prone to corruption and it paints a really bleak picture of the future. I really hope we're being too pessimistic and everything will be okay but as of right now I doubt it
I think you've hit the nail on the head. These corporations have so much unmitigated power that one cannot trust they will approach this responsibly or that they will consider the bigger picture. Couple that with weak regulatory structures prone to corruption and it paints a really bleak picture of the future. I really hope we're being too pessimistic and everything will be okay but as of right now I doubt it
@elliem.1572Man's building a house
@maxhayer5241 it's a hydra, every time you hit it with a nail 2 more heads pop out
@attattatt-y3h i love this XD
I wish the AI water use conversation also brought up how searching, posting, texting, etc also uses water, so people were more aware of our footprint.
Nobody wants to think about how using electricity to freeze a burrito and then heat it up later in a microwave also has an impact. It's easier to just point at someone else and blame them.
It's like the people that think using an electric car is helping the environment and not contributing to green house gasses. They think "electricity" is just a magical resource that comes from the wall outlets.
@VileSentry The thing is an electric car does have more sustainable uses then gas. A lithium battering can be recycled and reused to make more batteries. It is more sustainable then a one time use of a gas. There is no possible way to live on this planet without a footprint, even plants and animals are invasive and destructive, but we could be so much smarter about it. We have the technology, we have the intelligence, but those stupid little pieces of paper we use to justify success and make people have to work towards to survive is what's pushing the destruction of our planet
@mywrath Do you know how that electricity is created? Do you know how those cars are made?
We are not talking about emissions from the car itself.
@VileSentry Yes and I do know that if we were to cut down on a quarter of the the 90+ million acres of corn grown to make ethanol for gas that we could replace it with solar panels. Of which those solar farms could generate 80% more electricity then the system we have in place now. I also know the the production of the materials for solar panels, electric cars and all of that of produced with sustainable energy like solar, wind or even nuclear could reduce those emissions immensely. The issue isn't that we just use gas for driving, we use it for EVERYTHING! Again, you can't take away us leaving a print or using materials on this earth, but we could be significantly smarter about it, more sustainable and give back.
i mean yeah, everything that requires storing and retrieving data from data centers requires water and energy
@hankschannel - 2025-12-09
Corrections:
1. Some people who know more than me have said that when Sam says "query" he does indeed mean the query and all of the subsequent work done by the models as part of that one query. This is probably true, but it's also the kind of thing that would be cleared up if OpenAI shared information rather than just talking points.
2. Some people have said that when /I/ say "query" I say it weird. I did not realize this. I put it down to having learned that SQL is pronounced "sequel" and that "sequel queery" sounds silly. I have not done a sql query since 2005 so I'm sure y'all are right.
@jowieramone2137 - 2025-12-09
original video & corrections are both so appreciated! you always put out great vids, keep it up :)
@ashtea96 - 2025-12-09
I like the way you say query though so keep doing it
@ashtea96 - 2025-12-09
I pronounce sql "squil/squel" but ive never heard/said it out loud.
@vorpal22 - 2025-12-09
I don't think it's universal that computer scientists say "sequel." I say S-Q-L, and I know many other people who do.
The way you say "query" sounds fine to me!
@h7hja6s5d4g - 2025-12-09
I pronounce SQL as "squeal" because it's funnier.