Hey, I think ai can be a useful tool and I use both cloud hosted and local models.

The ecological impact is god awful.

Datacenters run on fossil fuel turbines to meet demand when there isn’t enough capacity on the grid or just 24/7 because the residents of the nearby municipality said they don’t want brownouts.

Fundamentally ai datacenters transform expensive to transmit electricity into cheap to transmit data, financializing what was previously a relatively insulated commodity whose pricing and production reflect local demand into a globally traded commodity whose pricing and production reflect global demand.

If you don’t have a background in the history of industry and environment: that’s bad news for the environment (and anyone who relies on stable power rates).

Production of ai computing components requires mining rare earth minerals and phenomenal amounts of power. This is the same process with nearly the same inputs as the production of general purpose computing parts (if you leave off the increased rare earths needed to mitigate electromigration in single digit nanometer processes!) but the increased demand has already brought more fabs up to meet it meaning more use of resources and energy in production before the first kilowatt of inference is run on those chips.

Turbine blades for datacenter generators are also limited by production and are currently years out for delivery. These are components produced by advanced aerospace manufacturing shops which use massive amounts of energy to shape alloys of metals that have to be yanked out of the ground and smelted into some esoteric type of steel or aluminum first.

So even without the water concerns datacenters have tremendous impact on the environment.

But the water concerns are legitimate. Swamp chillers divert flowing water into the air where it is blown anywhere but where it would have flowed. Which is fine if you aren’t downstream of one I guess.

All this is to say: if you don’t care about the impacts you can rationalize that however you like, but they exist.