so so I'm just doing this just drinking this a lot of water [Laughter] [Music] it's good water hey there I'm Andrew Chang you're watching about that uh why did I just chug this bottle of water I'm glad you asked it's to illustrate roughly how much chat GPT apparently drinks each time you have a conversation with it that according to one pre-print study is the hidden cost of AI all the water needed to power and cool the kind of supercomputers needed to make it work on a large scale and if you figure there are like 100 million active chat GPT users and each user has let's say one conversation we could be talking about a hundred million of these really starts to add up but here's the thing the exact amount of water consumed may not be as important as just realizing that water is consumed at all like I don't know about you but I typically think of the environmental impact of technology in terms of greenhouse gas emissions or electricity use certainly less often in terms of clean drinkable water but that is exactly what technology needs and as AI grows so does its thirst for one of our planet's most precious resources thank you [Music] the first question you might have is why would chat GPT need to use so much water to keep its processors cool well the first thing to understand is how much water everything and everyone uses according to statscan the average Canadian uses around 215 liters of water every day that's 430 bottles of water some of it you drink and used to cook cleaning and laundry also uses a lot of water but flushing the toilet multiple times a day that's a killer and bathing on average it's how Canadians consume most of their water but then think of industry it's estimated manufacturing Taps into somewhere between five and ten percent of the world's fresh water supply so Industries like textiles chemicals paper the list goes on energy production it's another big one oil gas coal electricity water is used at every step and agriculture is Bar None the biggest clean water hog on the planet 70 of the fresh water we use helps grow the food we eat but it's still a little surprising that something like Chachi BT demands as much water as it does so let's explore why that is I'm here at the RC Harris water treatment plant in Toronto this plant produces 30 percent of Toronto's fresh drinking water now if you run a data center this is the kind of water you need and the colder the better the water here is pumped in through long pipes that extend several kilometers into the lake it's about four degrees Celsius which is basically close to being ice right perfect for computers which run really hot most people do not realize that a computer is basically a radiator every single unit of electricity that's consumed by your computer is transformed into eat so the 100 megawatt of electricity that are we're consuming is producing a hundred megawatt of heat that's been santibo he's the co-founder of Q scale his company operates a large data center in Levy Quebec and dealing with all that heat is a big problem you know this if you've ever owned an electronic device that got so hot that it's shut down Microsoft says its latest supercomputer built to train artificial intelligence is made up of 10 000 Advanced graphics cards more than 285 000 CPU cores and each of these CPUs running at full load might get as hot as 100 degrees Celsius I mean you could boil water in that environment right but running that hot for too long will damage your equipment so water is actually one of the most efficient ways to keep a room and a supercomputer cool a good example of why we need to move to liquid cooling if you're naked in the air at 25 Celsius you'll feel perfectly fine it's actually even going to be warm as soon as you you exercise just a bit you'll feel warm but if you're in the pool that's at 25 Celsius you'll feel refreshed and the reason for that is that the thermal capacity to transfer eat of water is 25 times higher than air to transfer it so you can see why having access to cold water is so important but why do you need clean fresh water well it has to do with how water is used to cool buildings in the first place come with me so I've got all my safety gear on right now because we are at Toronto metropolitan University which is a place that uses water a whole heck of a lot of water to cool not just this big building that I'm in right now but to cool several buildings in the immediate area so this is where the magic happens in just a moment I'm going to speak with animesh Roy who you could think of him like an energy manager here at the University he will explain how all of this works foreign [Music] hi Andrew how's it going good how are you good nice to meet you nice to meet you as well so this is it Yep this is a chiller plan we are where where are we explain so we're in the basement of the library building on Toronto metropolitan University's campus and and what is all of this so this is a 4 000 ton chiller plant that is responsible for cooling most of our campus it cools about 2.9 Million square feet of our campus over the course of the summer wow okay so big campus yes how much water is is kind of funneled through the I mean what's in here this right now so there's actually two Loops here that is the more extensive Loop that goes throughout our campus and it holds about 250 000 liters of water okay now that's a closed loop so the water stays in there for most of the of uh the season this on the other hand this Loop is open to the environment and uh you actually incur evaporative losses which is how you eventually actually cool the campus so this Loop actually loses about eight Olympic size pools worth of water over the course of the summer okay you have to lose that water in order you have to it's similar to how the human body sweats you you let the sweat evaporate off your skin cooling your body this whole complicated system essentially comes down to evaporative cooling can you show me where that happens oh absolutely I can take you upstairs okay this way yep all right let's go [Music] foreign these are cooling towers that's right so this is where the evaporative cooling takes place so the chillers they basically bring the heat from our campus into the chiller plant but that heat still has to be ejected somewhere so this is the secondary Loop that works in conjunction with that chill water loop it takes the heat from that Chiller and vents it up here through evaporated Cooling and that's that's the sweating like that is the sweating the waters this is the way I can to sweat um so this is pretty cool they're actually letting us into the cooling tower so come with me watch your head don't have to wait to get hurt as you come in but this is kind of where it all happens and so water sort of pours in from the top there's a giant fan that that pushes the water back out and kind of disperses it like at like an evaporative effect turns it into this mist and that's the sweating that happens the remaining water kind of gets collected in these pools gets recirculated back into the whole Chiller system where it's about seven degrees cooler because of that evaporative sweat cooling it's kind of cool so you know I can understand why chat GPT or AI needs a lot of water right yes to keep everything cool yes but I also understand it needs clean drinkable water yes but why would that be the case uh it's because the equipment involved in here is very sensitive to minerals or salinity in the water so you actually need to have fresh water or essentially clean drinking water to make sure that they equipment runs smoothly you were telling me that that this I guess the scaling that I'm seeing yes what's the significance that is uh actually from drinking water because even with feet and drinking water there's still minerals in the water so you actually have to go beyond take that drinking water treat it even further to reduce a deterioration of your equipment you know we don't typically think of consumption in terms of water when it comes to a technology right we think of it in terms of emissions greenhouse gases electricity but not drinking water wherever there's heat fire or with equipment you need Cooling and uh very few things cool better than water [Music] clean fresh water is essential we can't live without it but according to the World Wildlife Fund more than a billion people on this planet lack access and almost 3 billion experience water scarcity at least one month a year rivers and lakes are drawing at alarming rates due to human activity and climate change by 2025 two-thirds of the world's population may be facing water shortages and as emerging Technologies like AI become more powerful they also at least in the short term become more demanding they join the ranks of all those industries that require large amounts of a precious resource and if anything is true about AI it's that it's growing at an absolutely astronomical pace thank you [Music] now we've got Brad bass here with us you're with the University of Toronto and you've spent a lot of your life studying Green Technology and and water yes so so tell me what is it that you think Canadians maybe you know sort of fundamentally misunderstand about clean drinking water as a resource what we misunderstand is the sheer volume of water we use on a daily basis to live but more than that is a hidden amount we use the water we don't see there's more water that's been used to grow our food than we consume on a daily basis we don't think about the water we don't realize that without it a lot of the other things we do we wouldn't be able to do because are we worried about the global supply of clean drinking water globally yes there's a concern in part because populations are growing climate change is increasing evapotranspiration so the water water evaporates more quickly but it's just every person requires a large amount of water not just to live on a daily basis but to be able to eat and our phones our computers the amount of water required to cool the technology that to allow us to keep using these things is also tremendous and I guess that technology and you know especially I think of of emerging Technologies like like artificial intelligence which may govern everything yes that we do in the future I mean how big of a concern is that for you in terms of water consumption so I'm not concerned when we're standing on Lake Ontario right we already are using the lake to cool about 100 buildings in Toronto and we're way below the capacity even with climate change I think we could add a lot to that but in countries that don't have the Great Lakes where they're thinking of Hosting these server farms and they have much smaller bodies of water I would be concerned but it's not just a consumption issue that water is now heated and it might be polluted and you're putting warm polluted water back into a clean freshwater river lake so I'm I'm probably more worried about that than I am about the actual consumption [Music] so here's the bottom line it's true that whatever amount of water something like Chachi PT uses on a daily basis it is a sliver of what Humanity uses for everything else in life but AI is growing there is very much a global arms race of A Sort to find ways to use and apply AI to almost everything from automating work to driving us around solving problems inventing new things exploring new forms of creativity it may all wind up being driven by artificial intelligence and as it grows in scale we should just remember that it like us needs a drink every now and then we'll be right back [Music]