The usage metrics for energy that support his argument came from Sam Altman. And this is also terrible reasoning in regard to water usage, because it doesn’t really matter that the prompts are only 0.3ml. Since the rest comes from generating a response. Also, it’s 0.5 -1.5l of water not 2 ml. Because again he’s using AI tech oligarchs as his source, in this case, Google. So the water usage is minimized by several orders of magnitude.
However, that 2 mL of water is mostly the water used in the normal power plants the data center draws from. The prompt itself only uses about 0.3 mL, so if you’re mainly worried about the water data centers use per prompt, you use about 300,000 times as much every day in your normal life.
https://www.profolus.com/topics/ai-water-consumption-2025-rivals-global-bottled-water-demand/
I will take a look at the original article.
But again I’m going to restate that the article you posted uses tech oligarchs as primary sources. Which just on the face of it looks like green washing.
Edit: I read the paper. Yeah the conclusion is tech is seriously underestimating water and carbon footprint. We don’t have exact figures because they don’t disclose them. But from what we can gather the information they are giving us substantially down plays the environmental impact.
So, we don’t have exact figures. And acting as though we do using tech oligarch statistics is greenwashing 🤷♀️
For anyone following along.
https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(25)00278-8