Every time you talk to ChatGPT it drinks 500ml of water; here's why

OpenAI’s ChatGPT consumes 500 ml of water for every 5 to 50 prompts it answers, wrote Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside. In the paper, Ren revealed that Microsoft’s global water usage surged to 34 per cent from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons). It is due to heavy investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and partnership with OpenAI. He stated, “It’s fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI.”

Microsoft-backed OpenAI pulled water from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa. This water is used to cool powerful supercomputers as they trained its AI systems to mimic human writing.

This water is being used in cooling down the supercomputers that generate heat after using electricity. Heavy electricity usage goes into analysing and computing the human-written text given to these large languages models like ChatGPT. On hot days, data centres need to pump in water to a cooling tower outside the warehouse-sized buildings.

In response to growing concerns, Microsoft said in a statement, “We are strengthening how we manage water within Microsoft, while working to improve the way the world evaluates and manages water today and for future generations.”

The company told Associated Press,  “We will continue to monitor our emissions, accelerate progress while increasing our use of clean energy to power data centers, purchasing renewable energy, and other efforts to meet our sustainability goals of being carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030”

OpenAI has also acknowledged the water usage issue and has committed to making LLMs more energy-energy.

In addition to Microsoft, Google’s water consumption has also increased after growing AI efforts. As per Google’s 2023 Environmental Report, the tech giant used 5.6 billion gallons of water last year. This accounts for 20 per cent increase that is attributed to the company’s shift towards AI efforts. As per a report by Insider, Google’s planned data center in Arizona switched to “air-cooled technology” due to water shortage in the area.  

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