Andrew Maddox

Category: Business

  • Politico: Artificial intelligence threatens to raid the water reserves of Europe’s driest regions

    Amazon and Microsoft are considering building data centers in Aragon (northeastern Spain), a prospect that some in Europe are concerned about because of water use.

    This is an extension of an ongoing conversation in the EU:

    Much has been written about A.I.’s energy demand and carbon footprint. But running a data center is also extremely thirsty work. In 2024, Europe’s data center industry consumed about 62 million cubic meters of water, which is equivalent to about 24,000 Olympic swimming pools.

    After reading this, I thought, geez, that’s a lot of water. But when converting this to acre-feet, it’s roughly 50,000 acre-feet. A large number, for sure, but not astronomically large. By comparison, Granger Lake in Texas stores roughly the same amount of water.

    In 2022, total water usage in Texas eclipsed 15 million acre-feet, of which approximately 7.5 million acre-feet were consumed by irrigation. This makes the 50,000 figure from Europe seem negligible for an population of 450 million.

  • Google offers buyouts to more workers

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google has offered buyouts to another swath of its workforce across several key divisions in a fresh round of cost cutting coming ahead of a court decision that could order a breakup of its internet empire. The Mountain View, California, company confirmed the streamlining that was reported by several news outlets.

    Source: AP

    The Verge also reports, Google is offering employee buyouts in Search and other orgs:

    Google is starting to offer buyouts to US-based employees in its sprawling Search organization, along with other divisions like marketing, research, and core engineering, according to multiple employees familiar with the matter.

    Per Bloomberg last month:

    Beyond that upheaval, AI is already making gains with consumers. Cue noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI. Cue said he believes that AI search providers, including OpenAI, Perplexity AI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, will eventually replace standard search engines like Alphabet’s Google. He said he believes Apple will bring those options to Safari in the future.