this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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Anyone complaining about AI water usage that doesn't also complain about golf courses and water-intense crops grown in deserts is, to me, not actually upset about water usage. They just hate AI and have latched on to the only thing that can justify their hatred without being abstract or complex.
When a single almond uses more water than over 500 AI prompts, maybe we should be focusing on other things.
The almond thing is actually propaganda put out by the beef industry as part of a widespread campaign to demonize plant based protein btw
Also everyone complains about golf courses using irrigation, but no one complains about baseball fields, soccer fields, football fields, and public parks that all do the exact same thing, so maybe you're the one that isn't actually upset about water usage.
Or maybe, black-and-white purity tests like this are stupid because they leave no room for nuance and productive conversation.
Isn't living next to a golf course.
Yeah, people have materialistic views and materialistic concerns. If it's out of sight, it can easily be out of mind.
But the thing about these mega-projects that pop up in your backyard practically overnight and immediately jack up the cost of living in your rural township is that they are highly visible.
I don't care, because I don't live next to an almond grove. But I do care when I live next to an AI prompts factory.
Even then, we're rapidly approaching parity. You're weighing 1 trillion almonds/year against 100 trillion tokens consumed per year. And the number of tokens being consumed is rising rapidly, while the volume of almonds being produced are in decline.
The other thing to consider is that token usage is hopefully at its highest cost/token. As the market matures, it should stand to reason that efficiency for both data center structure and hardware should improve.
We're looking at an extremely unregulated, poorly thought out, gold-rush type market that is trying to cash in as much as possible before reality comes in to smash it in the face. As long as we keep pushing, regulations should be able to mitigate a lot of the biggest issues we see with data centers.
With the price of energy skyrocketing and a chip shortage constricting supplies? Doubtful.
But, like with the financial crisis, nobody really expects the Tech Giants to be the ones that feel the pain. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei will die richer than the Pharaohs, no matter what happens next. It's the hillbilly schlubs in Jackson, Mississippi and Bastrop, Texas who are going to be eating shit when the turd pile finally tips over.