Unless they’re [...] building data centers in those regions without the infrastructure needed to supply themselves?
Yes, for example, the book describes Google’s efforts to build a data center in Chile.
> [...] Google said that its data center planned to use an estimated 169 liters of fresh drinking water per second to cool its servers. In other words, the data center could use more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population of Carrillos, roughly eighty-eight thousand residents, over the course of a year. [...] Not only would the facility be taking that water directly from Cerrillos’s public water source, it would do so at a time when the nation’s entire drinking water supply was under threat. (pg. 288)
It then describes the efforts of an advocacy organization MOSACAT to push back against Google’s plans.
Even though the aggregate emissions / water / climate impact of genAI is not super large (see e.g. this Google report), that doesn’t mean that negative consequences can’t be concentrated on small regions or populations. To use a different example, it can both be the case that a vanishingly small fraction of data annotators encounter disturbing content in their jobs, and also the case that those that do deserve better employee protections.
Anyway, this was just a single clause summarizing half a book, there is only so much detail it can get into, especially since the purpose of this post is different.
Yes, for example, the book describes Google’s efforts to build a data center in Chile.
> [...] Google said that its data center planned to use an estimated 169 liters of fresh drinking water per second to cool its servers. In other words, the data center could use more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population of Carrillos, roughly eighty-eight thousand residents, over the course of a year. [...] Not only would the facility be taking that water directly from Cerrillos’s public water source, it would do so at a time when the nation’s entire drinking water supply was under threat. (pg. 288)
It then describes the efforts of an advocacy organization MOSACAT to push back against Google’s plans.
Even though the aggregate emissions / water / climate impact of genAI is not super large (see e.g. this Google report), that doesn’t mean that negative consequences can’t be concentrated on small regions or populations. To use a different example, it can both be the case that a vanishingly small fraction of data annotators encounter disturbing content in their jobs, and also the case that those that do deserve better employee protections.
Anyway, this was just a single clause summarizing half a book, there is only so much detail it can get into, especially since the purpose of this post is different.