Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale — mentioned by Veedrac

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:16:45 GMT

The energy use claims are questionable, but I at least get where they're coming from. The water use is the confusing part. Who looks at a server rack and goes ‘darn, look at how water intensive this is’? People use water as a coolant in large part because it's really hard to boil, plus it's typically cheap because it regularly gets delivered to your front door for free. As to actual numbers, they're not that hard to crunch, but we have a few good sources that have done so for us. Simple first-principles estimate: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg... Google report…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale — mentioned by nerevarthelame

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:44:22 GMT

> Didn't google just prove there is little to no environmental harm, INCLUDING if you account for training? I don't think they, have, no. Perhaps I'm overlooking something, but their most recent technical paper [0], published less than a week ago, states, "This study specifically considers the inference and serving energy consumption of an AI prompt. We leave the measurement of AI model training to future work." [0]: https://arxiv.org/html/2508.15734v1

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale · HackerPapers discussions

Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale — mentioned by Veedrac

Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale — mentioned by nerevarthelame