{"id":2923,"date":"2026-04-21T20:33:46","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T02:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/?p=2923"},"modified":"2026-04-21T20:33:46","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T02:33:46","slug":"how-much-water-does-ai-use-an-expert-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/archives\/2026\/04\/21\/how-much-water-does-ai-use-an-expert-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"How Much Water Does AI Use? An Expert Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>When an Outside editor reached out to ask me to write this story, I was on a trip to Marble Canyon, Arizona, to train raft guide companies on what is happening with the river. I drove my diesel Sprinter van from Tucson to the site, which tallied 383 miles at 20 miles per gallon of gasoline. When I ran the numbers later, the lifecycle water footprint of my fuel was around 110 gallons. One drive to the work I do on the Colorado River used more than 20 times the water of everything I did with AI in 11 weeks. That comparison stopped me cold\u2014and I study this for a living.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/outdoor-adventure\/environment\/ai-water-use-colorado-river-footprint\/\">How Much Water Does AI Use? An Expert Analysis of the Real Footprint.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As the current owner of a diesel sprinter van&#8230; ouch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When an Outside editor reached out to ask me to write this story, I was on a trip to Marble Canyon, Arizona, to train raft guide companies on what is happening with the river. I drove my diesel Sprinter van from Tucson to the site, which tallied 383 miles at 20 miles per gallon of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pf4VN-L9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2924,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2923\/revisions\/2924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}