Watt about water? The green AI conversation we need to have now

OVER the past two years, the sustainability debate around artificial intelligence has been dominated by one resource: electricity.

Renewable energy targets, power purchase agreements, graphics processing unit efficiency ratings, the carbon intensity of compute workloads. These are legitimate priorities, and the industry has been right to pursue them seriously.

The resource that has not received comparable attention, despite being consumed at significant scale by every data centre running those workloads, is water.