this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Currently, LLMs impact on electricity usage and fresh water usage across the world is HUGE.
The painful part to me is the choice on where to put the stress. Which areas to highlight and talk about.
Yes some weak LLMs can use comparatively little electricity. Yes some other industries use electricity, generate CO2 and consume fresh water, too. But the existence of other problems, to me, does not mean that eco impact of LLMs should be swept under the rug.
While it may seem counterintuitive, cloud LLMs use less electricity than local LLMs. When serving a single user, an inference engine spends very little time and power doing calculations, and most of it reading in the model (weights) from memory
Cloud LLMs serve multiple users and therefore batch requests, so a model that has been copied once from memory can be used to generate hundreds of tokens
Fresh water usage has been debunked. It's fake propaganda. Datacenter water usage is a rounding error if you compare it to the whole economy. This is why you'll always hear absolute numbers from these people, and never percentages
So, if one was to check your post history, they would find complaints about the energy usage of video games? The water usage of golf courses?
Or would we find neither, and learn instead that anti-AI is the only bandwagon you've hopped on because it is the most popular?
I'll skip discussions about my persona. But most certainly golf courses or video games have orders of magnitude lower impact on electricity and watee than worldwide LLMs (mostly in datacenters).
You would be mistaken.
Data Centers use about 0.06% of the USAs total Water per year.
Watering golf courses in total uses about 0.5 percent.
My personal hardware that hosts my AI uses zero water. It uses more electricity when running a game.
There are more video gamers than there are users of AI.
Your persona is indeed just jumping on the popular bandwagon.