Shocking Truth About Tech and Water Use

Every time you hit enter on chat GPT, it uses one liter of water 300 times. You've gone through 300 liters of water just for your one session. It's going to take some new environmental solutions. 216 companies in the United States that are solving environmental problems now and making money doing it. Welcome back to Silicon Valley Front Row. I'm Steve and David is the co-host. And David, today I think we want to talk about the resources being used by AI. So as we mentioned before, NVIDIA invested $100 billion in open AI. And then a few days later, AMD came and invested billions more, undisclosed amount. Soon after. Soon after, yeah, a few days later. And all of this has to do with, the way I understand it, with infrastructure that needs to be built. Data centers all over the country. And some of the questions that come to mind is like, how much energy is needed? And there's always a concern about energy because energy and water are kind of related and we're short of energy and all that. So I think that's our topic for today. We welcome back Jim Beach, who wrote about this, writes about this and he's knowledgeable. Jim, can we pick your brain on the resources that are needed for AI infrastructure and what your thoughts are? Well, thank you for having me. Yes, AI is going to be a tremendous challenge for our resource base. Power is going to probably double in a lot of places. They're building a new open AI office and factory, a data center in Texas. And they predict that it will double the amount of power needed in the entire state just for that one facility. And then water is equally a big concern. Every time you hit enter on ChatGPT, it uses one liter of water. So if you spend five hours on ChatGPT and hit enter every minute or so, you've hit 300 times. You've gone through 300 liters of water just for your one session on ChatGPT. And so the energy use is a huge concern. Google has come out and announced that they're going to be building their own nuclear power plant. And so I think one of the interesting things to see play out in the next couple of years is does tech have its power? Is it powerful enough to start building power plants much quicker than what have happened in the 60s, 70s, and 80s? Do they have the ability to bring in the fourth-generation nuclear power plants that are inspected at the factory and they actually produce the power plant at a factory as opposed to building it on site, which would give you incredible advantages, safety advantages, consumption advantages. And as those fourth-generation power plants roll out, I think more and more companies will be required to build their own plant. I don't think Google will be the last. Jim, where do you see these data centers? So data centers would be needed to cool down the AI because it takes up a lot of resources, like you said. Where do you see it across the U.S., aside from Texas, that people could see data centers just being built up across vacant lots or land? You know, there's a lot of data centers, call centers in the middle of the United States, in Iowa and places like that. And those states are usually very, very competitive and give huge tax incentives. And so I think that we'll see that trend continue. It will get more and more toward the middle of the country. And also, the new nuclear power does not require that it's on a river or next to an ocean like it used to. And so that opens the possibility of building nuclear power plants in the middle of nowhere where there's no water or anything. So I think that gives the middle country a big advantage as well. And the land is pretty expensive. You don't want to do this in the middle of San Francisco or something like that because it just takes up too much land. I think we'll end up in places like Des Moines, Iowa. So we talked about this the other day, about how the water is being used. Is it going to get depleted or is it being recirculated? You know, what's your thoughts on that? Yeah, good point. I was thinking about that. Like, the water itself, if you just cool something down, in theory, it could be recirculated. But then I thought about it more, and then you need some kind of pump, some kind of system that needs to bring the water back. If you think of Hoover Dam, this huge dam in Las Vegas, right? How can you possibly bring that water back to recirculate? It'd be a huge effort. It's not going to work. Maybe some can be recirculated, but I would assume most of it is going to just flow through. And the water, would it change the state of the water? Would there be chemicals added? That's what I'm wondering. And would it become drinkable after, or how much process would it have to be if it ever gets reconverted? Yeah. Well, Jim, that question, but also I want to ask you about your thoughts of the impact of the building of this huge infrastructure for AI on the environment. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I don't think that we're going to be plowing under beautiful forests for it. There's already open fields all over the country. So I don't think it's going to cost us trees, but it is going to require the power and the water facilities to be upgraded in each of those areas. And so I think that's going to be the major impact. And there are problems with the water. It cannot just be immediately recycled back into the system. And that's where companies from the book, there's a company in the book that we talk about, it's named Vater, V-V-A-T-E-R, and the two Vs look like a W. And they're working in a whole new way of cleaning water just for this type of a situation where there's an industrial use, maybe in carpet manufacturing, and they can go and clean the water after the carpet has been manufactured and then reuse it again. And so it's going to take some new environmental solutions, like what Vater is doing, to make that possible. And now we're going to end with your book. You have a book that just came out, I understand, The Real Environmentalist, how Wayne Elliott and other capitalists will save the world. Give us a sense of what the book is about. The book, thank you for mentioning, is called Real Environmentalist, and we follow five hero entrepreneurs that are solving environmental problems now. We identify 216 companies in the United States that are solving environmental problems now and making money doing it. And so they're not going to the government for help. They're not going to the U.N. and trying to get a grant. They're finding customers that will pay them for their solutions. And that's the way that things get done. You can't have a permanent solution that requires constant financial input from the government. The only way you have a permanent solution is if there's a permanent income of money to cause the action to occur. And that's what's going to be needed, constant income, and that only comes from paying customers. So these entrepreneurs are solving the environment, not the United Nations, not the academics, not the celebrities, but the entrepreneurs out there that are just quietly solving the world's problems. And so this book is very upbeat, very positive, very enthusiastic, saying you really don't need to not have children because of the environment, because you're afraid of the environment. Just be aware that there are people cleaning it up right now, and we all need to help and get that message out and participate in those solutions. Tell us about Wayne Elliott. You mentioned he's one of the heroes in the book and in real life. Tell us, what does he do? He's a double hero. First, he is the Western Hemisphere's largest recycler of ships. So there are over 300,000 ships out there now, and what happens to them at the end of their 30-year life? They rot and sink, and then they have all of that asbestos gas and oil leaking out into the ocean, and that's not what we want. So there's number one. Number two, he figured that all of that recycling, the problem that he had was the batteries. And so he spent 20 years and $20 million of his own figuring out how to recycle batteries, and he discovered it, has a patent on it. He just sold that company to BlackRock, and he was able to get Canada up to 97% battery recycling when here in the United States we're still under 1%. And so hopefully our politicians will mandate that batteries be recycled, and we all take our old batteries and drop them off at a box at the grocery store or Home Depot instead of putting them in the trash, because they're horrible in the trash. They need to be recycled, and Wayne Elliott's the only person in the world to ever figure out how to do that. Let me make sure I got that right. You said Canada is at 97% recycling rate, and the U.S. is like 1%? Less than 1%. Like car batteries? Car batteries or small AA batteries or what kind of batteries? Alkaline batteries. Small AA alkaline batteries. The ones that we use in our remotes and all of that. Unbelievable. That's really... Did you know that? I had no idea. It's sad, isn't it, that our country is at such a low percent. Well, Jim, it was great hearing from you. We learned a lot. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks for having me. David, any final thoughts on this, not just recycle, but the environment and how AI is impacting all of this? Yeah, I think final thoughts is I'm glad people like Jim are writing about it and investigating, because when you hear about batteries, AI, and electric vehicles, that it could save gas, save the planet, but there's the other side, how much of the batteries impact the environment as well. What I liked about the story, and I may go and look at his book now, is that we hear so many politicians or so many, quote, experts who talk about the environment, and they say, we have to do this, this, and this, and it's all talk, right? I mean, maybe there's something, but mostly it's talk. They just have all this kind of interaction that may not lead anywhere, but he gave us an example of a person who's actually doing the work, and he's probably the only one, he said, in the Western Hemisphere, who's collecting all these ships that leak and all that. So I think we need more of that, more of those stories, more of those kind of people, rather than the one who talk or the ones who just do it to make money, right? To get some kind of benefit out of it. And I think we also heard about, I think it was a previous conversation about a private jet. One private jet is, well, what are the cost savings of that, right? For travel, absolutely. For traveling, yeah, compared to commercial. With that said, we want to ask the viewers, well, my questions for the viewers is, how much do you recycle? Do you make an effort to recycle paper, plastic bags, or even batteries in your home or your offices? My question is, how much of a difference do you think that makes in society and for the world? Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time on Silicon Valley Front Row.