OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismisses concerns over AI data center water consumption

Sam Altman has pushed back against escalating criticism over data centre resource consumption, particularly the water needed for artificial intelligence (AI) computing. He has argued that the public alarm over the use of fresh water to cool these massive structures has been exaggerated and ignores major upgrades in modern server cooling infrastructure. Speaking during an episode of the Sources Podcast to address growing public resistance to rapid AI expansion, the OpenAI CEO tackled the claims which allege that running a single ChatGPT prompt drains as much water as leaving a home shower running continuously for six hours.

Dismissing the viral narrative as an online myth, Altman argued that the actual resource ratio is very low. He said that the water needed to handle roughly 38,000 ChatGPT queries is similar to the water used to harvest a single almond in California. “I saw this thing going around about the water usage of ChatGPT and it was like, ‘every time you run a single ChatGPT query, it's like you run your shower for like 6 hours and the water never comes back and it's just it's done’. I don't have the exact calculation in front of me, but I think the real number is something like doing this from memory, it might be wrong. For every 38,000 ChatGPT queries, that is the same amount of water that is used in the production of a single almond in California,” he said on the podcast.

Altman pointed out the double standard surrounding resource awareness, noting that consumers routinely eat a dozen almonds in one sitting without considering their environmental impact. Addressing server technology directly, Altman explained that while early data hubs previously relied on evaporative cooling mechanisms that lost substantial volumes of liquid, modern facilities phased out those designs long ago. “There’s a question, ‘where this came from’ because the people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don't feel like they're doing something horrible from a water perspective. It is true that data centers at one point used evaporative cooling but they have not done that in a long time,” he noted.

Altman asserted that a large-scale data center uses roughly the same amount of water as a typical corporate office building running standard plumbing fixtures like sinks and restrooms. “If you look at a modern very large data center, it uses the equivalent amount of water as an office building in terms of people running the sinks and the toilets and whatever. So that has been a robust meme and difficult to disprove, but I don't think it holds up to any scrutiny,” Altman concluded.