Andy Masley

speaker

209 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 12 Dec

Andy Masley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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Hard Fork · Australia Kicks Kids Off Social Media + Is the A.I. Water Issue Fake? + Hard Fork Wrapped · 12 Dec 2025 podcast

Got it.

Yeah, it's a great question.

By 2030, it could be as much as about 250 square miles of irrigated corn, which is about 1% of America's corn.

So, again, I'm trying to frame this as like, you know, we should be about as worried about this as America's irrigated corn growing by about 1%.

or something and again like this really isn't nothing like that's a huge amount of water but the reason i'm comparing this to other industries like agriculture um other things too like even just household leaks use a lot more um the reason why i'm making these comparisons is more to say like should we expect the current water system to be able to absorb this and where should we expect to actually see problems and i think just based on how much water we use in most other contexts

we shouldn't actually expect this to be a huge disruptive disaster for water use.

Like there could be problems in the way that there are problems with other large industries, but I kind of expect this to be like one of many just normal industrial uses of water going forward.

So I've come away thinking this really isn't as much of an issue as people think.

Definitely not saying that is overblown, especially.

I basically think the water case seems kind of open and shut to me right now, whereas the power case is a huge question mark.

One way to think about this that I think is useful is that as a proportion of our total system, the increase in electricity going to AI will be an order of magnitude more.

From what I can tell, it's going to rise from 0.5% to 5% by 2030 of our national electric grid.

Whereas for water, it might only rise to about 0.5%.

So there's an order of magnitude difference there.

And there's just a lot to think about.

And there have already been, I think, pretty bad effects on the environment from data centers.

There's been a lot of instances of coal plants staying open.

And so this is the main thing that I am really quite worried about.

And I think that the answer to this is going to involve a lot of different things.

It might involve, in some cases, data centers not getting built.

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