How Much Water Do AI Data Centers Really Use?

How the AI industry uses water and how that impacts an increasingly parched world is more complicated than people think.

L ast month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread in which she acknowledged that there was a substantial error in her blockbuster book “Empire of AI.” Hao had written that a proposed Google data center in a town near Santiago, Chile, could require “more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population” — a figure which, thanks to a unit misunderstanding, appears to have been off by a magnitude of 1,000. This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the thread, Hao thanked Andy Masley, the h

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