Sam Altman says concerns about AI’s water use are a ‘meme’ that doesn’t actually hold water.
The CEO of OpenAI was asked to respond to the backlash against AI, including concerns about water consumption, in the first episode of the Sources podcast with Alex Heath, published on Tuesday.
Altman said that while modern data centers have a reputation for being water guzzlers, they use about the same amount of water as an office building.
“That was a robust meme and difficult to refute, but I don’t think it stands up to any scrutiny,” he said.
A 2024 state report A government commission in Virginia – a data center hotspot – found that while some facilities used significantly more water than others, most data centers used as much or less water than an average-sized office building.
Water consumption has been a central concern in the backlash against data centers. A Gallup report published in May found that 71% of Americans said they opposed the construction of a data center in their area, while 70% said they were specifically concerned about environmental impacts. Half of respondents mentioned the impact on resources, with 18% mentioning water specifically.
A Business Insider study published last year shows this to be the case data centers contributed to the water crisis in the West, in part due to water-intensive evaporative cooling techniques.
This is what the Data Center Coalition, an industry organization, says data center developers use different cooling methods, including some closed or waterless systems, and that they prioritize efficient water practices that take into account local water availability.
Altman also compared the water used by ChatGPT to the water used to grow California almonds, a water-intensive crop. He said growing a single almond in California requires more water than is used in thousands of ChatGPT searches, adding that “for the most part, the people who burn off twelve almonds at a time don’t feel like they’re doing anything terrible from a water perspective.”
Business Insider could not independently verify Altman’s comparison, but the claim that the water consumption of growing a single almond is an order of magnitude higher than an AI chatbot prompt is generally consistent with available figures. Altman has mentioned the average ChatGPT query uses about 0.32 milliliters of water, while Google has said the average Gemini app text prompt uses 0.26 milliliters. A 2019 study by researchers at the US Geological Survey found that growing a single almond in California requires an average of 3.56 liters, just less than a liter of water per nut.
While he said the water issues surrounding AI have been exaggerated, he said it is up to the industry to change the public’s mind.
“I think the right way to get people to like something is to give them value,” Altman said, adding, “The industry has work to do in terms of how we make these products easy to use and make it easy for people to get a lot of value out of them.”
