Can you not do that?
water cooler
A massive Microsoft data center in Goodyear, Arizona, is gulping down the desert town’s water to support its cloud computing and AI efforts. atlantic I will report it.
This was revealed by a person familiar with Microsoft’s Goodyear facility. atlantic ocean That means it’s specifically designed for use by OpenAI, which is heavily funded by Microsoft and Micosoft. Both companies declined to comment on the allegations.
It takes an incredible amount of energy to power AI. Compounding the enormous environmental burden of AI is the fact that it consumes mind-boggling amounts of water. AI draws enough power from data centers to risk overheating, so to reduce that risk, engineers use water to cool servers.
by atlantic ocean, Microsoft has been incredibly shady about the Goodyear Center’s water usage, even redacting the exact numbers in city records on the grounds that water usage is “confidential” information. But estimates commissioned by Microsoft itself estimate that the 279-acre campus, which currently has two buildings and a third on the way, will provide 56 million gallons of potable water per year when the final building is completed. will be consumed.
Do you think about it with that in mind?every atlantic ocean, which is approximately the amount that a total of 670 Goodyear households consume in a year. That’s a lot of water anywhere, but it’s especially true in places like the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona. There, the drying up of the Colorado River and loopholes in real estate development have created a serious water crisis.
priority plan
According to the report, the Goodyear facility was first announced in 2019, shortly after Microsoft made its first $1 billion investment in then-little-known OpenAI.
To be clear, Goodyear is part of the Phoenix area, so it’s unlikely in the short term that a Microsoft facility will make any household thirsty. But as Hao’s report suggests, either move the water away from families, or leave it there for future Arizonans. — ChatGPT allows you to spit out shopping lists in the style of William Shakespeare choiceand those that come with implicit costs.
“In the near future, we will have to make tough choices to ensure the protection of our state for future generations,” Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays said. atlantic ocean. “Allowing another data center to be added to our state is an easy, but often foolish, decision.”
This is one of Microsoft’s data centers around the world. Additionally, data centers everywhere, especially those that power AI initiatives, require significant amounts of resources. But the fact that the facility continues to provide power as the Sonoran Desert continues to get hotter is a particularly striking demonstration of where the AI industry’s priorities seem to be.
Learn more about AI Thirst: Critics furious: Microsoft is training AI by siphoning water during drought
