Water, a new concept of power, the invisible deterrent of the new technological era. The opinion by Elena Tempestini in the Italian Nuovo Giornale Nazionale:
In the 21st century, power doesn’t just flow through undersea cables, gas pipelines, or fiber optics. It flows through rivers.
And of all strategic resources, water is today the quietest and most contested. Invisible in its everyday existence, yet crucial in its absence. It is the true fuel of digital civilization: it serves to cool the data centers of artificial intelligence, to power the power plants that supply energy to the semiconductor industry, to sustain the physical heart of a world that deceives itself into thinking it is virtual.
Every computational request, every algorithm, every prompt launched into the digital ether consumes water. A single state-of-the-art data center can use over a billion liters of water a year just to maintain operating temperatures, equivalent to the water needs of an entire medium-sized city.
Thus, while artificial intelligence promises to disembody the world, its survival depends on a fragile and concrete resource, which cannot be replicated or programmed.
Read the full article in Nuovo Giornale Nazionale (Italian) or on Google translation (English)
