AI Water Footprint

Ethan Mollick commented that he finds it weird that water became the issue for why many people publicly dislike AI:

Of all the concerns about AI use, even just limiting it to environmental concerns, water use is generally one of the least important*. But when I speak with people, especially younger ones, water usually comes up first.

As Abram Jackson says, this appears manufactured outrage to him - but manufactured by whom?

The water argument traces back to Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI”, where she sets a certain narrative under chapter titles like “Divine Right” (for clean water), “Disaster Capitalism” and “Plundered Earth”. The book prompted widespread criticism, with Andy Masley writing a blog post titled “The AI water issue is fake” - which caused Hao to correct two substantial errors.

This echoes the energy fallacy by AI sceptics, which Ethan Mollick addressed in another blog post:

Google has reported that energy efficiency per prompt has improved by 33x in the last year alone. The marginal energy used by a standard prompt from a modern LLM in 2025 is relatively established at this point […]. It is roughly 0.0003 kWh, the same energy use as 8-10 seconds of streaming Netflix or the equivalent of a Google search in 2008 […] ¹