17
May
An often-overlooked but crucially important environmental issue—Big Tech's growing water footprint—is coming under more public scrutiny as a result of a global rush to capitalize on the next wave of generative artificial intelligence. Researchers say the race to profit from the next wave of AI is one of the main causes of the significant increase in water consumption that tech giants, like Microsoft and Alphabet-owned Google, have recently reported. Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, published a study in April investigating the resources needed to run buzzy generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Depending on…