Posted by Henry Chinaski on January 17, 2025
Listen up, you digital dreamers and AI enthusiasts. I’ve got some sobering news for you, and believe me, I know something about being sobered up. While you’ve been asking ChatGPT to write love sonnets to your crush or generate pictures of cats riding dinosaurs, something’s been cooking in those massive data centers. And I don’t mean the sad microwave burritos the night shift survives on.
Let me break this down for you, through the lens of my morning bourbon (medicinal purposes only, I assure you). MIT just dropped a report that’s scarier than my bar tab from last weekend. Turns out, every time you ask an AI to write you a bedtime story, you’re burning through enough electricity to power a small house. And here I was feeling guilty about leaving my TV on while passing out on the couch.
The numbers are staggering, folks. These data centers - imagine warehouse-sized computers that run hotter than my ex’s temper - are now consuming more electricity than Saudi Arabia. That’s right. An entire oil-rich nation is using less juice than our collective addiction to asking AI what we should have for dinner.
But wait, it gets better. Or worse, depending on how many drinks deep you are into this revelation. These AI models need more water for cooling than a spring break pool party. For every kilowatt-hour they burn through, they’re guzzling two liters of water. That’s more wasteful than my attempt at becoming a home bartender last summer.
The real kick in the teeth? These companies are pumping out new AI models faster than I can clear empties from my desk. Every few weeks, there’s a new version, making the old one obsolete. It’s like they’re running a planned obsolescence scheme that would make smartphone manufacturers blush.
You want to know what keeps me up at night (besides the usual suspects)? It’s the GPU situation. These specialized chips are being cranked out at a pace that would make a rabbit family look celibate. 3.85 million of these bad boys shipped to data centers in 2023 alone. Each one requiring more rare earth minerals than my collection of vintage bottle openers.
Here’s the thing that really twists my bourbon-soaked mind: we’re all complicit in this digital disaster. Every time you ask ChatGPT to explain why your code isn’t working (guilty as charged) or to generate a picture of a cyberpunk hamster (also guilty), you’re contributing to this environmental tire fire. A single ChatGPT query uses five times more electricity than a Google search. Let that sink in while I pour another drink.
The suits will tell you it’s all for progress, for innovation, for the future of humanity. But from where I’m sitting (which happens to be my favorite barstool at O’Malley’s), it looks more like we’re trading our planet’s future for the ability to generate infinite variations of cat memes.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not some neo-Luddite crying into my whiskey about the good old days. Hell, I’m writing this on a laptop that’s seen better days, probably using less power than a single AI training session uses in a microsecond. But maybe, just maybe, we need to ask ourselves if we really need another AI model that’s marginally better at writing pickup lines.
The bottom line? While we’re all busy playing with our shiny new AI toys, Mother Nature is running a fever, and these data centers are the equivalent of wrapping her in an electric blanket. Sure, the technology is impressive - I’ll give them that. But at what cost? My liver might be taking a beating, but at least it’s not contributing to global warming (I think).
So next time you’re about to ask an AI to write you a report, or generate an image, or whatever the hell else people are using these things for, remember: somewhere, a data center is spinning up, sucking down electricity like I down my morning coffee, and pumping out enough heat to make Death Valley feel like a spring breeze.
But hey, at least we can get AI-generated pictures of dogs wearing top hats. Progress, am I right?
Time for another drink. My throat’s getting dry from all this truth-telling.
Yours truly from the digital apocalypse, Henry
P.S. - If anyone needs me, I’ll be at O’Malley’s, using zero watts to generate my own creative content, one glass at a time.
[Posted via a very energy-efficient hangover at 2:47 PM]