AI's Energy & Water Demands: Sorting Fact from Fiction with Andy Masley

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Andy Masley, a blogger and thinker who's done some of the best recent independent analysis of the energy and water demands associated with AI. Andy is the Director of Effective Altruism, Washington DC, and this conversation served as a great reminder of why I appreciate the EA community. Their emphasis on identifying causes that are neglected, tractable, and large in scale seems right on to me, and the culture of epistemic humility and earnest truth seeking is genuinely admirable. What's more, Andy is a great example of how EA thinkers are generally very pro-progress, even as they worry about extreme risks from AI. A consistent pattern, in my experience, which contradicts the popular Doomer caricature. In all sincerity, the main reason I've never gone around calling myself an EA is simply because I don't consider myself virtuous enough to deserve the label. But regardless of affiliation, this conversation also demonstrates how a genuinely curious, truth-seeking, numerate person can, with AI help, make a meaningful contribution to the discourse on a complicated topic, even without formal credentials or deep experience. In this conversation, we tackle the prevailing narratives around AI's consumption of energy and water, while we acknowledge that there can be local issues associated with large-scale data centers that really do matter to specific communities, such that local leaders should be careful about the deals they strike with data center companies. The bottom line is that AI is not a huge deal when it comes to global emissions or water use. The main reason is simply that bits really are that much less massive and therefore easier to manipulate than atoms. For the purposes of quick mental math, I find it helpful to remember a few key heuristics that we develop in this conversation. A single ChatGPT query uses roughly as much energy as running a microwave for one second. A single Crosstown car trip, a hamburger, and a hot shower all use roughly as much energy as 10,000 ChatGPT queries, which means that if you can save just one car trip with AI use, which I've done a number of times in just the last couple of months, you have more than offset your AI use for a year. Meanwhile, a one gigawatt data center uses as much electricity as one million American homes. And that one gigawatt of power requires roughly 10 square miles of solar panels to produce. Big picture, the full $7 trillion build out, which is estimated to use something like 80 gigawatts of power over time, would represent a one to two percent increase in global energy usage, which is less than the expected increase due to general global economic development over the same period of time. And finally, that full 80 gigawatts of power, if it were all powered with solar panels, would require 800 square miles of area, less than one percent of the size of the state of Nevada. The water usage analysis is very similar, albeit a bit more complicated, for reasons that you'll hear. Obviously, there is some uncertainty associated with all of these numbers. And of course, things will continue to change, with forces such as increased usage and longer thinking times pushing AI resource intensity up, even while increased efficiency and new energy sources push it down. Nevertheless, I feel very good about the back of the envelope calculations and the memorable comparisons in this conversation, and I hope that it gives everyone a confident, grounded sense of how resource-intensive AI really is. With that, let's get into the fundamentals of AI energy and water use, with the director of EADC, Andy Masley.
Andy Masley, Director of Effective Altruism DC, Internet Truth Warrior, online at andymasley.substack.com. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Andy Masley** (3:49)
Yeah, so great to be here. A long-time listener, first-time caller. Like really, yeah, crazy privilege to be here. Thank you, David.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:55)
My pleasure. Thank you. That's very kind. So today we're going to get into AI use of energy and a little bit of other resources, focusing on water probably. This has been something that for me has really kind of surprised me over the last couple months. In particular, I went and did a talk at an AI for public school educators event in October, and there's a lot of questions on everybody's mind across society and certainly in the education space right now, like what is this going to mean, whatever, whatever. But aside from the very education-focused questions they were asking, I think the number one question that kept coming up over and over again is what about energy? Like is it going to ruin the environment? You know, is it going to blow up our electricity bills? Like what's going to happen with this energy thing? It is clearly something that people have understood is a potentially big problem. I think you and I are both, you know, spoiler, generally on the same page that a lot of the fears that are out there circulating are pretty overblown relative to what we actually have to worry about, which is not nothing, but you know, hopefully is something that we as a society can manage. So maybe for starters, why don't you just introduce yourself a little bit? I mean, I think one thing that is striking is, you know, I already gave your role as the Director of EADC.