"AI Is Not Draining the Colorado River. I Measured It."
Summary from Beyond Euclid:
An engineer working on the Colorado River tracked every AI interaction he had over 11 weeks — 100 sessions, an iOS app, 15,000 words of text, countless policy documents. Total water footprint: about 5 gallons. One diesel drive from Tucson to his office that same period: 110 gallons. All US data centers account for 0.3% of the country’s total water use. Agriculture takes 80% of the Colorado River. The river’s problem isn’t AI. It’s a 1922 water-sharing agreement based on the wrong math, and a century of warming since. But what went viral was AI water use.
