A Bottle of Water Per Email: The Hidden Environmental Costs of Using AI Chatbots
AI bots generate a lot of heat, and keeping their computer servers running exacts a toll. (photo: iStock)
Roughly a quarter of Americans have used ChatGPT since the chatbot’s 2022 release, according to the Pew Research Center — and every query exacts a cost
by Pranshu Verma and Shelly Tan
Chatbots use an immense amount of power to respond to user questions, and simply keeping the bot’s servers cool enough to function in data centers takes a toll on the environment. While the exact burden is nearly impossible to quantify, The Washington Post worked with researchers at the University of California, Riverside to understand how much water and power OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using the GPT-4 language model released in March 2023, consumes to write the average 100-word email.
Let’s look first at water.
Each prompt on ChatGPT flows through a server that runs thousands of calculations to determine the best words to use in a response.
In completing those calculations, these servers, typically housed in data centers, generate heat. Often, water systems are used to cool the equipment and keep it functioning. Water transports the heat generated in the data centers into cooling towers to help it escape the building, similar to how the human body uses sweat to keep cool, according to Shaolei Ren, an associate professor at UC Riverside.
Where electricity is cheaper, or water comparatively scarce, electricity is often used to cool these warehouses with large units resembling air-conditioners, he said. That means the amount of water and electricity an individual query requires can depend on a data center’s location and vary widely.
Even in ideal conditions, data centers are often among the heaviest users of water in the towns where they are located, environmental advocates said. But data centers with electrical cooling systems also are raising concerns by driving up residents’ power bills and taxing the electric grid.
Data centers also require massive amounts of energy to support other activities, such as cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has only increased that load, Ren said. If a data center is located in a hot region — and relies on air conditioning for cooling — it takes a lot of electricity to keep the servers at a low temperature. If data centers relying on water cooling are located in drought-prone areas, they risk depleting the area of a precious natural resource.
In Northern Virginia, home to the world’s highest concentration of data centers, citizen groups have protested construction of these buildings, saying they are not only loud energy hogs that don’t bring in enough long-term jobs, but also eyesores that kill home values. In West Des Moines, Iowa, an emerging hotbed of data centers, water department records showed that facilities run by companies like Microsoft used around 6 percent of all the district’s water. After a lengthy court battle, the Oregonian newspaper forced Google to disclose how much its data centers were using in The Dalles, about 80 miles east of Portland; it turned out to be nearly a quarter of all the water available in the town, the documents revealed.