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Does AI use water? Is it a whole bottle per question?

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FALSE CLAIM 95% confidence: “Every question you ask an AI chatbot uses up a whole bottle of water”

False (checked by VOM on ): The assertion that every question asked to an AI chatbot consumes a whole bottle of water is not accurate according… Source: themarkup.org.

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About this check

If you read that every question you ask an AI chatbot uses up a whole bottle of water, this is what the people who measured it say.

Does one question use a whole bottle?

  • In the researchers' paper, GPT-3 needs to "drink" a 500ml bottle of water for roughly 10 to 50 medium-length responses, depending on when and where it is deployed.
  • Google estimates that the median Gemini Apps text prompt uses 0.24 watt-hours of energy and consumes 0.26 milliliters, or about five drops, of water, figures it calls substantially lower than many public estimates.
  • The average ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 watt-hours and about 0.000085 gallons of water, roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon, says a post on blog.samaltman.com.

Why AI uses water at all

  • The researchers' paper describes AI's water footprint as many millions of liters of freshwater consumed for cooling the servers and for electricity generation.
  • To reduce energy consumption and associated emissions, data centers often consume water for cooling, Google says.
  • The researchers' paper estimates that training GPT-3 in Microsoft's U.S. data centers can consume a total of 5.4 million liters of water, including 700,000 liters of on-site water consumption.

What the data center companies say

  • Traditionally, water has been evaporated on-site to reduce the power demand of the cooling systems, Microsoft says.
  • Microsoft says that beginning in August 2024 it launched a new datacenter design that optimizes AI workloads and consumes zero water for cooling: by adopting chip-level cooling, it can deliver precise temperature control without water evaporation.
  • Microsoft says that in its last fiscal year its datacenters operated with an average water usage effectiveness (WUE) of 0.30 L/kWh.

Saw another figure about chatbots and water, and want to check it?

  • Look at what the figure counts: one answer, one long email, the training of a model or a whole data center.
  • Look at who measured it, and which model and which data centers it is about.
  • Look at whether it counts only the water used on site for cooling, or also the water used to make the electricity.
  • Paste the figure or the post into VOM and see what the sources say.

Sources the search found