“My buddy lost his job to AI. It was his job to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center”

It’s often said that AI is coming for people’s jobs, but AI requires a lot of water. A joke about this was posted on X/Twitter by Benny Feldman 🪸🫧🐠 on October 12, 2025, and this received over 215,000 likes:
 
“My buddy lost his job to AI. It was his job to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center.”
 
   
Wikipedia: Environmental impact of artificial intelligence
The environmental impact of artificial intelligence includes substantial electricity consumption for training and using deep learning models, and the related carbon footprint and water usage. Moreover, the artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are materially intense, requiring a large amount of electronics that use specialized mined metals and which eventually will be disposed as e-waste.
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Water usage
Cooling AI servers can demand large amounts of fresh water which is evaporated in cooling towers.[24][25] To minimize the use of water required for cooling, centers are adopting a closed-loop system where the water is reused.

In a 2025 paper, researchers projected that AI will withdraw[a] between 4.2 – 6.6 billion cubic meters of water in 2027, greater than half of the total water withdrawal of the United Kingdom. The authors estimated that training GPT-3 may have consumed 700,000 liters of water, and that 10–50 medium-length GPT-3 responses consume about 500 mL of fresh water, “depending on when and where it is deployed”.
   
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Benny Feldman 🪸🫧🐠
@Feldfrog
My buddy lost his job to AI. It was his job to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center
7:16 PM · Oct 12, 2025
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Sean Olson
October 12, 2025 at 10:26 PM ·
My buddy lost his job to AI. It was his job to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center
 
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Him∩nsh∪ Sharma
@himanshucosmos
My buddy lost his job to AI. It was his job to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center.
10:59 AM · Oct 13, 2025
 
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jason liu
@jxnlco
Overheard: My buddy lost his job to AI. It was his job to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center
12:47 PM · Oct 13, 2025
 
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Matthew J. Oldach, M.Sc.
@MattOldach
My buddy lost his job to AI. It was his job to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center
1:16 PM · Oct 13, 2025