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I couldn’t sleep, so I was remembering that time I was given ‘facts’ about how efficient AI usage was compared to Google search.

Then my brain wandered into the entirety of Googles water usage for data centre cooling, using their figures.

Where I ended up was, as there’s no way to conceivably store this much water: a 15m diameter pipe, to each of Google’s data centre’s internationally with 3,500km of pipe for *salt water* on the cold side, and the same on the hot side, heating 1% of the world’s total water to around 60 degrees C, every day.

Then I started wondering where all that sweet, sweet silicon is hiding, because that amounts to something like 35 quadrillion 2U server units… or 1.5 quadrillion 48U racks. An area twice the size of France if no room is left between them.

I’m not even getting into power infrastructure.

And that’s just Google. Microsoft and AWS are far bigger.