"Last month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread in which she acknowledged that there was a substantial error in her blockbuster book Empire of AI. Hao had written that a proposed Google data center in a town near Santiago, Chile, would require "more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population"-a figure which, thanks to a unit misunderstanding, appears to have been off by a magnitude of 1,000."
"In the thread, Hao thanked Andy Masley, the head of an effective altruism organization in Washington, DC, for bringing the correction to her attention. Masley has spent the past several months questioning some of the numbers and rhetoric common in popular media about water use and AI on his Substack. Masley's main post, titled " The AI Water Issue Is Fake," has been linked in recent months by other writers with large followings, including Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith."
"Masley emphasized that he's not an expert, but "just some guy" interested in how the media was handling this topic-and how it was shaping the opinions of people around him. "I would sometimes bring up that I used ChatGPT at parties, and people would be, like, 'Oh, that uses so much energy and water. How can you use that?' he says."
A high-profile numerical error overstated a proposed Google data center's water demand by a factor of 1,000 due to a unit misunderstanding. An effective altruism organizer, Andy Masley, questioned common media figures about AI water use and published a Substack post titled "The AI Water Issue Is Fake," which was amplified by other prominent writers. Masley describes himself as "just some guy" and recounts social reactions that conflate small water uses with large environmental harm. Public concern and opposition to data centers has increased, and numerous green groups have recently raised warnings to policymakers about environmental impacts.
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