{"id":502639,"date":"2025-10-15T22:58:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/502639\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T22:58:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:58:10","slug":"scottish-data-centres-powering-ai-already-using-enough-water-to-fill-27-million-bottles-a-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/502639\/","title":{"rendered":"Scottish data centres powering AI already using enough water to fill 27 million bottles a year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Many data centres are privately funded by US tech giants, such as Google and Microsoft, and major investment firms.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But most current owners do not share data about their environmental impact,  something Prof Basiri said needed to change.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She added: &#8220;We can&#8217;t really measure this because, of course, there is not necessarily a big mandate from the government to report on the detail of the energy or water use of data centres or other big tech companies that exist and that&#8217;s a massive challenge.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Prof Basiri said one way to ensure that data centres were more sustainable would be to set carbon targets for companies and impose tax penalties for exceeding them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The academic said the power used by an AI tool, such as ChatGPT or Google&#8217;s Gemini, was about 13 times higher than a simple Google search.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She said ordinary people could play their part by considering their &#8220;AI footprint&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Prof Basiri added: &#8220;For example, reducing the number of times we go to these AI chatbot systems when a Google search would be efficient or considering how you use image generation, or what you attach to an email.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many data centres are privately funded by US tech giants, such as Google and Microsoft, and major investment&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5009],"tags":[748,4884,712,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-502639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scotland","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-scotland","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115380663389709136","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}