The recent wildfires in Los Angeles have been devastating, and somewhere in the discussion ChatGPT entered the conversation. Some people online connected the chatbot to the fires, raising questions about its resource consumption. It is worth unpacking.
First, to be clear: ChatGPT did not cause the fires. The main culprits are well known. Climate change leading to dry conditions, a large amount of dry brush acting as fuel, and infrastructure problems such as old power lines.
The connection people were making is inaccurate as direct blame, but it points at something real. Running models like ChatGPT takes a lot of computing power, and that means energy and water, mostly for cooling the servers in data centres. Every time you use it those servers work hard and generate heat, and keeping them from overheating often involves water. ChatGPT did not start the fires, but it does add to the overall demand for resources.
So the online chatter was not really an accusation. It was people pointing at the growing environmental footprint of AI and its connection to climate change, which does make wildfires more likely.
One more thing worth being precise about: the water shortages firefighters ran into were not caused by data centres consuming the supply. The local water systems were not designed to handle a fire that large moving that fast. That is an infrastructure problem.
The fires are a serious reminder that climate change and infrastructure both need addressing. And while ChatGPT is not to blame for these particular fires, the question underneath the argument is valid. We do need to think about how we use energy and water as we build more powerful systems, and tech companies have a part to play in that, whether through using less water for cooling or siting data centres in cooler places.
The future of AI depends not only on how capable it is but on how responsibly it is used. This is a reason to look at the bigger picture.
