AI's Thirsty Infrastructure, Hollywood's Digital Pups, and Boy Scouts AI Badge

In partnership with

Welcome to another Monday where AI's promises meet pavement, and sometimes, that pavement needs a new power grid. Today we're diving deep into the hidden costs that make your ChatGPT queries possible, plus a few stories that remind us AI is changing the world in more ways than we might realize.

Choose the Right AI Tools

With thousands of AI tools available, how do you know which ones are worth your money? Subscribe to Mindstream and get our expert guide comparing 40+ popular AI tools. Discover which free options rival paid versions and when upgrading is essential. Stop overspending on tools you don't need and find the perfect AI stack for your workflow.

Subscribe to Get Your Free Comparison

The Real Cost of Your AI Assistant

Hassan Taher, an AI consultant who's been advising enterprises since 2019, shared some sobering math about what it takes to power the AI revolution. Not-so-surprising spoiler: it's not pretty. Let’s dig into what your friendly neighborhood AI actually consumes behind the scenes.

Every time you ask ChatGPT to write 100 words, it chugs about 519 milliliters of water (basically an entire water bottle). That innocent request to "summarize this quarterly report" becomes a lot less innocent when put into tangible means.

And water is just the appetizer. AI-enhanced searches use 30 times more electricity than traditional searches. Remember when we thought cryptocurrency mining was energy-intensive? AI makes Bitcoin look like a Prius.

The infrastructure demands are staggering. AI data centers require specialized GPUs and TPUs that generate substantially more heat than conventional hardware, forcing facilities to implement liquid cooling systems that withdraw between one and five million gallons of water daily. That's small-city levels of consumption.

More uncomfortable realities:

1. Location, Location, Litigation: Tech companies are concentrating data center expansion in southern U.S. states with lower costs and limited regulatory oversight. These facilities negotiate favorable rate structures that shift infrastructure upgrade costs to residential customers. Your shiny new AI facility might make you the least popular neighbor on the block.

2. The Grid Can't Handle It: Dublin's data centers now account for nearly 80% of the city's total electricity consumption. That's not a typo. Eight. Zero. Percent. Meta's planned Louisiana data center complex correlates with three new methane gas plants being constructed specifically to supply power. So much for those net-zero commitments.

3. ROI Check: Data centers employ relatively few workers compared to their physical footprint and resource consumption. Communities hosting these facilities are essentially subsidizing your AI infrastructure through higher utility costs and reduced public services, while getting minimal economic benefit in return.

The most damning observation: Taher suggests companies should evaluate whether AI implementation offers sufficient advantages over existing approaches to justify its material costs. In other words, just because you can AI-ify that process doesn't mean you should.

For procurement teams eyeing AI infrastructure investments, consider these questions:

• What's your actual water access situation? (Texas won't even let you track facility water use, for example.)

• Can your local grid handle the load without building new fossil fuel plants?

• Are you prepared for community backlash when residential electricity rates spike?

• Could you achieve 80% of the benefit with 20% of the resource consumption using traditional computing?

The bottom line: AI's physical footprint is becoming impossible to ignore. Smart enterprises will start factoring infrastructure reality into their AI strategies now, before regulators force the issue.

AI Headlines

1. OpenAI Tunes Into Music Generation.

   OpenAI is reportedly developing a tool that could generate music from text and audio prompts, working with Juilliard School students to annotate music scores for training data. The vision: Generate guitar accompaniment for vocal tracks or add music to videos.

   Read more →

2. Fido Gets the Digital Treatment.

   Hollywood's latest unemployment crisis has four legs. Studios are pushing AI and CGI hard to create animal performances in post-production instead of bringing real animals to set. One dog actor named Rocco, who appeared on "The Morning Show" and "Veronica Mars," is now struggling to land gigs beyond the occasional commercial.

   Read more →

3. Scouts Prep Tomorrow's AI Workforce.

   Scouting America launched merit badges in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, challenging scouts to examine AI's effects on daily life, study deepfakes, and complete AI projects. Some scouts have already earned them after just a week of availability.

   Read more →

Become An AI Expert In Just 5 Minutes

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

TL;DR:

• AI infrastructure is devouring resources: 519ml of water per 100-word generation, 30x more electricity than traditional computing.

• Data centers are maxing out city power grids and shifting costs to residential customers.

• OpenAI's music generation plans could create a copyright nightmare that makes image rights look simple.

• Even Hollywood's animal actors are losing jobs to AI, and audiences aren't happy about CGI dogs.

• Gen Alpha is earning AI merit badges while your workforce still forwards chain emails.

Today's briefing is a reality sandwich with a side of irony. We're building AI systems that need entire power plants to operate, while 13-year-olds are earning merit badges in technology that's putting both human and canine actors out of work.

The enterprise lesson: AI's physical reality is catching up to its digital promises. Smart leaders will start planning for infrastructure constraints now, before they become infrastructure crises. And maybe keep a real dog around the office, just incase they become collectors' items.

Stay sharp,

Cat Valverde
Founder, Enterprise AI Solutions
Navigating Tomorrow's Tech Landscape Together