First, I never said LLMs were evil. Second, even though datacenters (and LLMs) consume relatively little water on an absolute scale, they can and often do overwhelm local water supplies, frequently in marginalized communities [1]. This is exactly what Timnit and Emily warned about [2]:
> When we perform risk/benefit analyses of language technology,
we must keep in mind how the risks and benefits are distributed,
because they do not accrue to the same people. On the one hand, it
is well documented in the literature on environmental racism that
the negative effects of climate change are reaching and impacting
the world’s most marginalized communities first.
Please, please do the least bit of due diligence and understand the discourse before condescending to other people.
> When we perform risk/benefit analyses of language technology, we must keep in mind how the risks and benefits are distributed, because they do not accrue to the same people. On the one hand, it is well documented in the literature on environmental racism that the negative effects of climate change are reaching and impacting the world’s most marginalized communities first.
Please, please do the least bit of due diligence and understand the discourse before condescending to other people.
[1] https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-res...
[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922