■ In this week’s Backchannel:Molly Taft looks at how data-center water use actually works, why estimates are so murky, and why the fight over AI’s thirst is really a debate over who gets to use scarce public resources.
Hello, Molly Taft here, stepping in for Steven this week. I'm a senior writer at WIRED, covering climate change, energy, and the environment.
Last 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.
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