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May 15, 2026
Where's the Water?
Where's the Water?
00:00
18:51
Transcript
0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Viro Podcast. Every week, we dig into what's really happening where climate crashes into culture, politics, and the world you actually live in. The stuff that matters, told straight.
0:17
This is Viro. Let's go. Okay, first story this week, and we need to set the scene. It is a normal day in Fayette County, Georgia, suburb about twenty miles south of Atlanta.
0:31
Nice neighborhood, lawns, quiet, and residents start noticing something weird. Their water pressure is low, really low, like something is draining the system. So they start asking questions.
0:42
The county investigates, and what they find is that a massive data center campus nearby had been secretly drawing water through two connections that the county did not even know existed.
0:54
Two connections that nobody knew about. Twenty-nine million gallons over fifteen months, gone. While the county was telling residents to stop watering their lawns to conserve water.
1:05
A six point two million square foot data center campus owned by a Blackstone-backed company called QTS was quietly draining the local water supply, and nobody found out until a resident filed a public records request.
1:19
And here is the part that actually made our jaws drop. The county owed one hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars in retroactive charges for the unmetered water, and Fayette County did not fine them at all. Zero.
1:34
The water system director actually said, and this is a real quote, "They are our largest customer, and we have to be partners. It is called customer service." Customer service. Right.
1:46
You secretly drained twenty-nine million gallons of water from a community supply while their residents had low water pressure, and the response is customer service. This is not a one-off story. This is a pattern.
1:59
In Pennsylvania, lawmakers just advanced a bill requiring AI data centers to publicly report how much water they use. Why?
2:07
Because a single fourteen million dollar data center was approved to use up to forty percent of a Pennsylvania town's excess water supply.
2:16
Four hundred thousand gallons per day, enough for twenty-three hundred homes from one building. And here is the bigger picture that makes all of this even more alarming.
2:26
Of eleven major tech companies, including Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple, only two report their direct water use publicly. Two out of eleven. Two out of eleven.
2:37
The International Energy Agency estimated data centers consumed five hundred and sixty billion liters of water in twenty twenty-three, and researchers say that number is likely a significant underestimate because the reporting is so incomplete.
2:51
Google actually published a report on the environmental impact of its Gemini AI model and said it chose not to report indirect water consumption because it does not fully control the water consumption in electricity generation.
3:05
Translation: We use the water. We just don't want to count the water we use.
3:10
And data centers are coming into communities with non-disclosure agreements, hiding water usage, hiding energy usage, hiding air quality impacts.
3:19
Communities are signing off on these projects without knowing what they are actually agreeing to. A researcher put it plainly, "Very often, data centers are coming in and hiding a lot of information.
3:30
Communities don't really know what they are getting into." And here is the scale of what we are actually talking about.
3:37
Every hundred-word AI prompt uses roughly one bottle of water, five hundred milliliters, just to cool the chips while your question gets answered.
3:45
Data centers already consume more electricity annually than the entire United Kingdom.
3:51
Their water footprint could be in the range of the entire global annual consumption of bottled water, four hundred and forty-six billion liters.
3:59
For context, forty-two percent of the US population lives within five miles of an existing or planned data center right now. Forty-two percent.
4:07
And the water crisis angle is one that almost never gets talked about in the AI conversation. Everyone focuses on energy and carbon, which matters, but water is the thing that hits communities first and hardest.
4:20
You feel low water pressure before you feel carbon emissions. You get told to stop watering your lawn before you get an air quality warning. And the good news is that states are waking up to this.
4:31
Twenty-seven states are advancing legislation requiring data centers to report water and energy usage. California, Ohio, and Utah have already enacted laws. Pennsylvania is moving.
4:43
Maine is close to becoming the first state with a full construction moratorium. The pushback is real, and it is growing. And here is the thing: Transparent reporting is not a radical ask. It is the bare minimum.
4:56
If your facility uses millions of gallons of water from a community supply, the public should know. That is not anti-technology. That is just basic accountability.
5:06
The Georgia story is the perfect example of what happens without it.
5:11
A company drains twenty-nine million gallons secretly, gets caught because residents noticed their water pressure was low, owes a hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars, pays it, gets called a valued customer, and builds more.
5:27
Pennsylvania is trying to make sure that never happens again in their state, and we are one hundred percent here for it.
5:33
Data centers can be built responsibly with proper water reporting, with community input, with recycled water cooling systems instead of potable water.
5:42
Microsoft actually just launched a new data center design that uses zero water for cooling. Zero. It is possible. It is just not required. And until it is required,The Georgia story is going to keep happening.
5:56
Different town, different company, same outcome. Residents with low water pressure and a county too scared to find their largest customer. The people of Pennsylvania are demanding better.
6:07
Twenty-seven states are demanding better. And every time a community shows up to a public hearing or files a public records request or calls their state representative, they are making it harder for this to stay hidden.
6:19
Transparency is all we are asking for. Turns out, that is a revolutionary idea in the AI industry right now. A quick note for any brands listening. Want to showcase your brand with us?
6:32
Partner with the Viro Podcast, and your marketing dollars go directly toward funding renewable energy and climate projects. Simple as that. Link in the show notes. Okay, we need to talk about Shrimp Jesus.
6:47
If you have been on Facebook recently, you have seen it.
6:50
AI-generated images of shrimp dressed as Jesus, cats playing piano with 12 fingers, fruit characters on Love Island, children with nightmare hands, sobbing veterans that never existed, disabled people asking for likes and shares for fake stories.
7:06
Really valuable content, really moving stuff. Merriam-Webster actually named slop their word of the year for 2025. Low-quality AI-generated content flooding the internet, and it is everywhere.
7:21
AI-created commercials running during the NBA Finals, Google pushing Gemini into every search, anthropomorphized polar bears, and what one writer called cute amphiblets taking over social media feeds.
7:33
And here is the thing that nobody talks about when they are scrolling past the shrimp.
7:39
Creating an AI image uses 12 to 20 times more energy than generating text, thousands of times more energy-intensive than a basic search.
7:49
Each image uses as much electricity as charging your phone, multiplied by billions of images a day. Billions per day. Sam Altman was asked about this directly at the India AI Impact Summit earlier this year.
8:03
A reporter asked him about ChatGPT's water usage, and he called the concerns completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality. He said concerns about data centers' water use were fake.
8:14
This from the guy whose company just went through a federal trial about betraying its nonprofit mission to benefit humanity.
8:21
The reality is that creating AI images is one of the most resource-intensive things you can do with the technology. Simple text searches already use 10 times the electricity of a Google search.
8:33
Image generation is thousands of times beyond that. Video generation is even worse. And the water footprint follows the energy footprint everywhere it goes. And what are we generating with all of this energy and water?
8:46
Shrimp Jesus, fruit Love Island, AI slop that exists for one reason only, to hack the algorithm, to generate engagement, to make someone somewhere a tiny bit of ad revenue at the cost of everyone's attention and the planet's resources.
9:02
This is not innovation. This is pollution with a prompt.
9:06
Someone is using the most resource-intensive consumer technology ever built to generate garbage content nobody asked for, and the planet is paying for it in water and energy every single time someone stops scrolling to look at a cat with too many fingers.
9:22
The numbers are staggering. AI's water usage is set to grow by 130% through 2050. 30 trillion liters of additional water consumption.
9:33
The electricity consumed by AI servers is expected to double between now and 2026 alone. By 2028, it could be 150 to 300 terawatt hours in the US alone, enough to power 28 million households for a year.
9:51
And a meaningful chunk of that is going toward content that will be forgotten in three seconds. Now, look, we are not anti-AI. We say that every episode, and we mean it.
10:01
AI is genuinely changing medicine, climate research, education, accessibility. There are real problems being solved with this technology every single day. That is why it matters what we use it for.
10:14
Because the energy and water costs are real. Whether we are using AI to cure cancer or generate Shrimp Jesus, the infrastructure does not know the difference. The data center does not know the difference.
10:26
The community with low water pressure does not know the difference. So here is the actual ask. Stop feeding the machine. When you see AI slop on your feed, do not like it, do not share it, do not engage with it.
10:41
The algorithm cannot spread what we refuse to reward. That is not a small thing. Platforms optimize for engagement. If AI slop stops getting engagement, it stops getting amplified. It is that direct.
10:54
And use AI for things that actually matter. The same technology that generates Shrimp Jesus can help you research climate solutions, write a better email, learn something new, build something useful.
11:06
The resource cost is roughly the same. The outcome is completely different. Pollution with a prompt is still pollution.
11:12
We just happen to find it funny for three seconds before we scroll past it, and that three seconds is costing us a lot more than we think. A quick note for any brands listening. Want to showcase your brand with us?
11:26
Partner with the Viro Podcast, and your marketing dollars go directly toward funding renewable energy and climate projects. Simple as that. Link in the show notes.
11:38
Okay, this next one, we have to be upfront about something before we get into it, because this story involves Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, the AI that helps power this very podcast through Viro.
11:50
We are going to talk about it anyway, because this is exactly the kind of story we exist to cover.And if we are going to call out everyone else, we have to be willing to call out the tools we use too.
12:02
That is what integrity actually looks like. So here is the story.
12:06
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers who left OpenAI specifically over concerns about AI safety and the company's shift from nonprofit to for-profit. Sounds familiar?
12:19
We literally covered that trial last episode. Anthropic built its whole identity around being the ethical AI company. They refused a US government request to surveil users.
12:28
The government labeled them a supply chain risk for saying no. Their entire brand is built on the idea that you can build powerful AI responsibly, that safety and mission actually matter.
12:38
Then Claude got really popular really fast. By April 2026, Anthropic was publicly admitting that demand for Claude had created what they called inevitable strain on their infrastructure. Users were hitting usage limits.
12:53
Performance was suffering during peak hours. The company was growing so fast it was outrunning its own capacity. So they needed more compute fast, and they made a deal.
13:03
They partnered with SpaceX AI, that is Elon Musk's company, the merger of SpaceX and xAI, to use the entire capacity of Colossus One, the data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the one we have talked about extensively on this podcast, the one with the unpermitted gas turbines, the one in the Boxtown neighborhood founded by formerly enslaved people, the one that has been sued over air quality, the one that increased hospital admissions for respiratory illness in surrounding communities.
13:35
That one. Anthropic signed a deal to run Claude on that one. Two hundred and twenty thousand NVIDIA GPUs, three hundred megawatts of capacity.
13:43
Elon Musk, who spent the last year calling Anthropic misanthropic and evil, suddenly spent a week with their leadership team and posted on X that, "No one set off my evil detector.
13:54
So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good." No one set off my evil detector. That is the ethical review process for powering the AI that markets itself on ethics.
14:06
And here is the detail that really stings. Anthropic's own CEO publicly criticized Sam Altman just a year ago for signing massive compute agreements and prioritizing quantity over quality.
14:19
He suggested OpenAI was taking risky financial commitments, and now Anthropic is running the exact same playbook driven by the exact same pressure. Demand exceeded forecasts. Compute is the limiting factor.
14:34
Deal with whoever has the GPUs. One analyst put it plainly: In the AI industry in 2026, computing capacity is the main limiting factor. Rivalry is taking a backseat to silicon.
14:45
Labs that compete on Monday are signing infrastructure contracts with each other on Wednesday. That is the real story here. Not that Anthropic is uniquely bad. They are not.
14:55
They are doing what every AI company eventually does when growth outpaces principles. The infrastructure pressure is real. The demand is real.
15:05
The timeline is brutal, and the only place to get three hundred megawatts of compute capacity right now is from whoever built it, ethics optional. But here is what makes it worth calling out specifically.
15:18
Anthropic built their entire brand on being different, the company that said no to government surveillance, the company founded on the premise that the others were moving too fast and too recklessly, the company whose AI literally markets itself as safe and beneficial.
15:34
And the community in Boxtown, Memphis, that already had the highest rates of respiratory illness in Tennessee, that already had cancer risk four times the national average, that is now also powering Claude without being asked, without any say in the matter, without Anthropic announcing that, "Hey, we know this facility has a troubled history, and here is what we are doing about it."
15:57
There was no statement about the environmental record of Colossus One, no commitment to pushing SpaceX AI toward cleaner operations, no acknowledgment of the community impact, just a press release about higher rate limits for Claude Pro subscribers.
16:10
And look, we use Viro. Claude is available on Viro. We have skin in this game too.
16:15
This is not comfortable to say, but the whole point of this podcast is that caring about the planet has to mean something, even when it is inconvenient, especially when it is inconvenient.
16:25
The good news is that Anthropic is also in a five gigawatt agreement with Amazon and a five gigawatt agreement with Google and a thirty billion dollar partnership with Microsoft and NVIDIA.
16:36
There is a massive infrastructure expansion happening. The Colossus One deal is one piece of a much larger puzzle that presumably includes cleaner options.
16:46
And Anthropic expressed interest in orbital data centers, space-based computing that could theoretically sidestep the land, water, and power constraints entirely, which is either visionary or science fiction, depending on your timeline.
17:01
But right now, in May 2026, Claude is running on gas turbines in Memphis, and the people who live near those turbines did not get a vote. Ethics on the website, gas turbines in the neighborhood.
17:14
We expect more from the company that built its brand on doing this differently, and we will keep saying so until the infrastructure matches the mission. And that is a wrap on another episode of the Viro Podcast.
17:28
This week, Georgia residents figured out their water was being stolen by a data center. AI slop is draining the planet one shrimp Jesus at a time.
17:36
And Anthropic, the ethical AI company, is running Claude on the exact data center we have been calling out all season. We said it in that last segment, and we will say it again here.
17:48
Caring about this stuff has to mean something even when it is inconvenient, especially when it is inconvenient. That includes us.
17:58
Which is why Viro exists, not because we have it all figured out, but because someone has to keep asking the question, "Does this have to work this way?" And the answer keeps coming back, "No, it does not."
18:10
Clean AI is possible. Transparent infrastructure is possible. Building technology that funds the planet instead of draining it is possible. We are doing it. Others can too. If this episode fired you up, share it.
18:23
Send to someone who uses AI every day and has never thought about where the water comes from. That is how this conversation grows. And if you want to be part of the solution, every time you open Viro, you already are.
18:35
That is not nothing. That is actually everything. Catch us next week. More stories, more heat, more reason to believe this thing is moving. This is the Viro Podcast. See you then. [upbeat music]
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