{"id":216810,"date":"2026-09-06T01:25:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/216810\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T01:25:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:25:11","slug":"fact-check-is-sam-altman-right-that-almonds-use-more-water-than-chatgpt-queries-long-beach-post-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/216810\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact check: Is Sam Altman right that almonds use more water than ChatGPT queries? \u2022 Long Beach Post News"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story was originally published by\u00a0CalMatters<\/a>.\u00a0Sign up<\/a>\u00a0for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

As Gov. Gavin Newsom weighs whether to require data centers to disclose how much water they use, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says concerns over AI\u2019s water use don\u2019t hold \u201cup to any scrutiny.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the\u00a0Sources Podcast with Alex Heath<\/a>\u00a0released Tuesday, Altman said that it takes 38,000 ChatGPT queries to use as much water as producing a single almond in California.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at a modern very large data center, it uses the equivalent amount of water as an office building in terms of, you know, people like running the sinks and the toilets and whatever,\u201d Altman told Heath.<\/p>\n

The problem, experts say, is that it\u2019s impossible to verify those numbers given what\u2019s public about the secretive industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe information we have is so limited,\u201d said\u00a0Shaolei Ren<\/a>, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside.<\/p>\n

\"\"OpenAI\u2019s CEO Sam Altman speaks at the AI Summit in New Delhi, India, on Feb. 19, 2026. AP Photo.<\/p>\n

Far too many factors affect how much water data centers use to boil it down to any one convenient statistic, Ren said, rattling off a handful of variables: the data center\u2019s location, the temperature outside, the type of cooling system, the length of the prompt, the reasoning required, the output. All affect how much water the data center uses.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the whole reason that these bills need the governor\u2019s signature,\u201d said\u00a0Michael Kiparsky<\/a>, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment. \u201cThere\u2019s no published data \u2014 certainly not for California \u2014 and what is public seems all over the place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past two weeks, California lawmakers passed two bills by\u00a0Assemblymember Diane Papan<\/a>\u00a0aimed at increasing transparency; both now await Newsom\u2019s signature.<\/p>\n

One would require operators to report their water sources and usage when\u00a0seeking business permits<\/a>. The other would block local governments from approving new data centers\u00a0unless developers disclose<\/a>\u00a0their water plans. They\u2019d also have to pay for any water upgrades needed to connect to the local supply.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the San Mateo Democrat\u2019s second attempt at more transparency around data center water use. Newsom\u00a0vetoed her bill<\/a>\u00a0last year, saying he was \u201creluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements \u2026 without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

The heavy-hitting tech industry and business groups again opposed the bills. But now, as data center fights erupt across the state and local governments ban the facilities outright amid a wider bipartisan backlash, the question of how much water data centers really use is gaining urgency.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we know what an almond uses, maybe we can figure out what a data center uses?\u201d said Alex Biering, director of policy advocacy who specializes in water issues for the California Farm Bureau Federation.<\/p>\n

What the data actually shows<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether it takes thousands of queries to match the water needed to produce a single almond in California (a number that varies substantially over time and space,\u00a0according to a 2019 study<\/a>), the Congressional Research Service\u00a0says data centers are using more water than they used to.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

One study<\/a>\u00a0reported the facilities directly used about 17 billion gallons in 2023, up from 5.6 billion gallons in 2014.\u00a0 Another report found that hyperscale data centers could use\u00a0150 billion gallons<\/a>\u00a0of water from 2025 to 2030 \u2014\u00a0which is as much water as 4.6 million households use in the U.S. in a year.<\/p>\n

Annual water use isn\u2019t the whole story, Ren cautioned. The hottest days, when data centers require the most cooling, can substantially increase peak water demand, according to Ren\u2019s research, which is under review by a scientific journal and\u00a0available online as a preprint<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor community water systems, the peak capacity is more important because they need to be designed and built to accommodate the peak demand at all times, similar to our power grid,\u201d Ren said.<\/p>\n

Ren\u2019s team found that data center cooling systems could call for\u00a0697 to 1.45 billion more gallons<\/a>\u00a0of peak water capacity per day. It\u2019s comparable to New York City\u2019s average daily supply, the study says. And unlike irrigation water typically used for farms, water for data centers is often treated, potable water from public water systems, the team reported.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a problem, because water systems across the country \u2014 and certainly in California \u2014 are \u201caging, fragmented, and\/or financially constrained, thus lacking sufficient available capacity to meet the additional peak water demands of large data centers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers pointed to examples in Georgia and Virginia where water suppliers worried they \u201cjust don\u2019t have the water\u201d to accommodate peak demand from the data centers drawing from their systems simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Ren said water use could drop by as much as 50% if data centers opt for less water-intensive cooling systems, like dry cooling, but there are tradeoffs \u2014 such as increased energy needs.<\/p>\n

And that, too,\u00a0requires water<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story was originally published by\u00a0CalMatters.\u00a0Sign up\u00a0for their newsletters. As Gov. Gavin Newsom weighs whether to require data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216811,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[150],"tags":[581],"class_list":["post-216810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sam-altman","tag-sam-altman"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117221492846232804","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}