Meta Announces Huge New Data Centers, But They Could Gobble Up Millions Of Gallons Of Water Per Day

Meta is building respective gigawatt-sized information centers to powerfulness AI, as reported by Bloomberg. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says nan company will walk "hundreds of billions of dollars" to execute this feat, pinch an purpose of creating "superintelligence."

The word typically refers to artificial wide intelligence (AGI), which describes AI systems that boast human-level intelligence crossed aggregate domains. This is thing of a beatified grail for Silicon Valley tech types.

The first halfway is called Prometheus and it comes online adjacent year. It's being built successful Ohio. Next up, there's a information halfway called Hyperion that's almost nan size of Manhattan. This 1 should "be capable to standard up to 5GW complete respective years." Some of these campuses will beryllium among nan largest successful nan world, arsenic astir information centers tin only make hundreds of megawatts of capacity.

Meta has besides been staffing up its Superintelligence Labs team, recruiting folks from OpenAI, Google's DeepMind and others. Scale AI's co-founder Alexandr Wang is heading up this effort.

However, these elephantine information centers do not beryllium successful a vacuum. The complexes typically brushwood up against section communities. The centers are not only powerfulness hogs, but besides h2o hogs. The New York Times just published a report connected really Meta information centers effect section h2o supplies.

There's a information halfway eastbound of Atlanta that has damaged section wells and caused municipal h2o prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The value of h2o successful nan region is group to summation by 33 percent successful nan adjacent 2 years.

Typical information centers guzzle astir 500,000 gallons of h2o each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will apt beryllium moreover thirstier. The caller centers could require millions of gallons per day, according to h2o licence applications reviewed by The New York Times. Mike Hopkins, nan executive head of nan Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming successful pinch requests for up to six millions of h2o per day, which is much than nan county's full regular usage.

“What nan information centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up nan organization wealth,” he said. “We conscionable don’t person nan water.”

This aforesaid worrying communicative is playing retired crossed nan country. Data halfway basking spots successful Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and Colorado are besides taxing section h2o reserves. For instance, immoderate Phoenix homebuilders person been forced to pause caller constructions owed to droughts exacerbated by these information centers.

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