The Machine Is Thirsty. And It's Drinking Your Town Dry.

This is what progress looks like when nobody asks who pays for it.

Let me ask you something nobody in the tech industry wants you to ask.

Every time you type a question into ChatGPT, every time you ask an AI assistant to draft an email or explain your medication or summarize the news; where does the energy for that come from? Where does the water go?

Because it goes somewhere. It always goes somewhere. And right now, it's going into the ground underneath communities that had no say in the matter, into the atmosphere above towns that were promised progress, and into the bank accounts of companies whose executives will never once live near the infrastructure that made them rich.

This is not a future problem. This is happening right now. Today.

The Numbers the Tech Industry Doesn't Put in the Press Release

Let's start with water. Because water is the one that should stop you cold.

A single ChatGPT response, the kind you get when you ask it to write a paragraph or answer a question, consumes approximately 17 millilitres of water. That sounds small until you understand the scale. Millions of queries. Every minute. Every day.

One major tech company's data centres consumed 30 billion litres of water in a single year.  Thirty billion. To cool servers. In buildings that don't grow food, don't house people, and in many cases are located in some of the most water-scarce regions on the continent.

Nevada. Arizona. Places where farmers are watching their water tables drop and their wells go dry, not because of drought alone, but because a data centre moved in next door and the local government gave it a tax break to do so.

Now the carbon numbers. By 2030, AI data centres will produce between 24 and 44 million metric tonnes of CO₂ annually. That's the equivalent of adding 5 to 10 million cars to the road, every single year, just to keep the AI running. And even under the most optimistic clean energy scenario, Cornell researchers found that 11 million tonnes of residual emissions would remain that simply cannot be offset.

That's not a rounding error. That's a climate commitment.

The Nuclear Gamble Nobody Voted On

Here's the one that made my jaw drop.

Microsoft, one of the wealthiest companies in human history, signed a deal worth $16 billion to reopen Three Mile Island.

If that name doesn't immediately ring a bell; Three Mile Island is the site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in United States history. The 1979 partial meltdown that contaminated the Susquehanna River, triggered a partial evacuation, and left a generation of Americans with a permanent distrust of nuclear power.

Microsoft reopened it. To power AI.

Not because it was the only option. Not because there was no alternative. Because it was convenient. Because the power was there and the AI needed it and the shareholders needed the margins and nobody in that boardroom lived anywhere near Middletown, Pennsylvania.

I want to be careful here because I know nuclear energy is a complicated conversation. I'm not saying nuclear is categorically wrong. I'm saying that a private corporation making a unilateral decision to reopen the site of America's most infamous nuclear disaster, to power a product that writes marketing copy and generates images of cats, without community input, without public debate, without anyone asking the people of that region what they thought, is not progress.

That's a company doing what it wants because it can.

That is the opposite of the Virtuous Machine.

Who's Actually Paying the Bill

The tech companies aren't paying it. Let's be honest about that.

They're paying the electricity bill and the water bill. But the real costs; the depleted aquifers, the carbon in the atmosphere, the strain on local power grids, the land used and fenced off, those get distributed to communities. To ratepayers. To farmers. To the people who live downstream, literally and figuratively, from decisions made in boardrooms a thousand kilometres away.

Communities across the US have been aggressively courted with tax incentives to host data centres. The promise; jobs, economic development, a tech future for your town.

The reality; a massive windowless building employing between ten and thirty people, drawing enormous amounts of power and water, and sending the profit somewhere else entirely. The jobs went to engineers who drove in from the city. The water stayed gone.

And here is the thing I need you to sit with, this is a choice. Not an inevitability. Not a law of physics. A choice made by people with money and power who decided their computational needs outweighed your community's water security.

The Stoics Would Have Something to Say About This

Marcus Aurelius governed 60 million people and wrote every night about the responsibility that came with power. Not the privilege of it. The responsibility.

He understood something that no tech CEO has apparently been required to learn; that power over resources other people depend on is not ownership. It is stewardship. And stewardship means answering for what you consume.

Seneca, who watched Nero build monuments to his own ambition while Rome burned, wrote; "Omnia aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est." Everything is borrowed. Only time is truly ours.

The water in that aquifer was borrowed. The carbon capacity of the atmosphere was borrowed. The land those data centres sit on was, in many cases, farmland borrowed from the food system, fenced off, and made to serve a machine.

When Marcus Aurelius asked himself each night whether he had used his power well, he wasn't asking whether he'd been efficient. He was asking whether he'd been just.

The AI industry is extraordinarily efficient.

It has not asked the justice question. Not once. Not publicly. Not in a way that produced any change.

The People Who Are Fighting This

They exist. They're underfunded, outgunned, and largely ignored by mainstream media. I want you to know about them, and I want you to visit their sites, because the more public attention these organizations get, the harder it becomes for the industry to pretend this conversation isn't happening.

Earthjustice - The largest environmental law organization in the US. They are actively litigating against data centre expansion in water-scarce regions and fighting for communities whose resources are being consumed without consent.

The Center for Biological Diversity - Filing petitions, publishing research, and pushing hard on the water consumption crisis created by the AI boom. Their data on aquifer depletion is some of the most detailed publicly available.

The Sunrise Movement - A youth-driven climate organization that has begun connecting AI energy consumption directly to the broader fossil fuel and carbon conversation. They're loud, they're organized, and they're not going away.

AI Now Institute - Possibly the most important research organization you've never heard of. They publish rigorous, independent analysis of AI's social and environmental impacts with no corporate funding. Their annual reports are the ones the industry does not want you to read.

Greenpeace - Clicking Clean Campaign - Has been auditing the energy practices of major tech companies since 2012. Their data centre scorecards name names, rank companies, and hold them publicly accountable. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all graded. All exposed.

What You Can Actually Do

I'm not going to tell you to unplug your phone. That's not an answer and we both know it.

But I will tell you three things that are actually worth doing.

1. Ask your elected representatives where they stand on data centre tax incentives. Local and state governments are handing out subsidies to attract these facilities with almost no public debate. That is a policy choice that can be reversed. Your voice in that conversation is legitimate and it matters.

2. Visit the AI Now Institute and read their most recent annual report. Not a summary. The actual report, https://ainowinstitute.org. It will change what you see when you look at AI. I guarantee it.

3. Talk about the water. Not the carbon, that conversation has been going on so long that people have learned to tune it out. Talk about the water. Talk about the aquifer under a Nevada farm town that is being drained to cool servers. That is a concrete, local, human story that people who don't care about climate change at all will care about. Use it.

Before You Go

The AI industry spent billions this year on infrastructure, compute, and lobbying. They spent almost nothing on genuinely accounting for what that infrastructure costs the places it lands.

That is a choice. And choices made by powerful people only change when the people without power get loud enough to make not changing more expensive than changing.

Marcus Aurelius asked; "What is it fundamentally that this thing is for?"

Not what it claims to be for. What it is actually for.

We know what AI data centres are actually for. We know who they serve and who pays the price.

The question, the only question that matters now, is whether enough people care to say so out loud.

I do. Do you?

Drop it in the comments. Tell me if your community has been approached about hosting a data centre. Tell me if you've seen a water bill go up or a well go dry without explanation. Tell me if you're angry.

Because I am. And anger, aimed correctly, is one of the most useful things a human being can produce.

Referenced: Cornell University / Nature Sustainability, Smithsonian Magazine, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, AI Now Institute

➡️ Read the previous Virtuous Machine post: [The Dictator's Algorithm - How Authoritarian Governments Are Quietly Shaping the AI That Shapes You].

➡️ Want to understand who's building this AI and why they might regret it? [Read: He Built AI. Now He Regrets It. Here's Why].

➡️ Want to talk about this with people who are paying attention? [Come find us in the free Tech 4 Grown-Ups community].

— Michael Routhier, Founder of Tech 4 Grown-Ups. I run free digital safety seminars for adults 55+ and write about tech threats as they happen. Learn more about me →