The emergence of artificial intelligence has lead to an increase in the carbon and water footprint, and is projected to compete with Australian households for water consumption within a decade.
With the rapid expansion of data centres housing AI, the demand for its cooling source rises each year, leaving Australia’s drinking water at risk.
The building of data centre infrastructure within Australia, such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, have become the primary source of AI usage.
(Source: Global Data Centres Report)
Computer science student, Jordan Milevski has a view on the expansion of AI in Australia.
“It’s a bit excessive, I reckon, probably just like go back into the same thing I said before, just you know, we should be using waste water a bit more efficiently,” Mr Milevski said
Xylem , water solution and technology company CEO, Matthew Pine said that his company cooperates with data centres in relation to water supply.
“(Data centres) need cooling, but that’s not really the tip of the iceberg in terms of the challenge,” Mr Pine said.
“If you think about it, a user who searches AI every day for a 30-minute session would use about 600 millilitres of water, so that’s like a bottle of water.”
(Source: Sydney Water)
A report by the Water Association of Australia has found that some data centre developers are requesting up to 40 million litres of water a day to cool their computer systems.
While there is productivity efficiency of AI in corporate and industry roles, there is the issue of water protection.
(Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
“In the future, they’re starting to make processes that are towards AI computation, so they’re going to be using a whole lot less water and a whole lot less heat… they’ll be using something called an MPU… that will reduce the amount of processing power and amount of electricity to run it,” Mr Milevski said.
Both CDC data centres and the Commonwealth have introduced plans to innovate the safe use of AI, with the National AI plan coming into effect this month.
