Tariq Al Hosani, Founder and Chairman of Zero Gravity Group
“Green intelligence is not an ethical luxury; it is a condition for survival.”
How many times today have you asked artificial intelligence to write for you, summarize something, or think on your behalf?
Behind every conversation you conduct with an artificial intelligence model, a silent army of servers operates at full capacity. These machines do not think for free. Every computational process generates heat, and that heat must be cooled immediately or the equipment will fail. The most common solution today is water sprayed through massive cooling towers where it evaporates, carrying the heat into the atmosphere.
This water does not return to rivers, to underground aquifers, or to any water cycle that serves humanity. It simply evaporates and never comes back.
In the language of numbers, the most painful figure is that 78 percent of the water withdrawn by major data centers is potable water. We are not dealing with saline or industrial water, but with water that could have reached a thirsty home or revived barren land.
Tariq Al Hosani, Founder and Chairman of Zero Gravity Group, says:
“Technology itself is not the problem. It is our only tool for survival, development, and prosperity. But intelligence that is not designed from the beginning with the logic of sustainability, what we may now call green intelligence, may transform from a solution into a deliberate postponement of the crisis. Green intelligence is not a slogan; it is an existential necessity and a condition for survival.”
In numbers half a liter of fresh water for every conversation.
A study by Professor Shaolei Ren of the University of California Riverside estimates that an average conversation of twenty to fifty prompts with an artificial intelligence model consumes approximately 500 milliliters of water, a full bottle that evaporates for the sake of an answer that may be forgotten minutes later. Training a single model from scratch requires about 700,000 liters in one session.
If we imagine this in the context of at least one billion daily queries processed by ChatGPT alone, we begin to grasp the scale of water waste. This is in addition to the fact that Google withdrew 37 billion liters of water in 2024, of which 29 billion evaporated permanently. Estimates also indicate that by 2027 the artificial intelligence sector will consume the equivalent of four to six times the entire annual water consumption of Denmark in the United States alone.
The impact does not stop at servers. Manufacturing a single smartphone consumes 12,670 liters of water, and a single Bitcoin transaction drains about 16,000 liters of water, enough to fill a small swimming pool.
The ethics of innovation
This silent competition between algorithms and humanity over water does not appear in advertisements and is not mentioned in earnings reports. Yet it is a real reality taking shape beyond the awareness of users.
Tariq Al Hosani, Founder and Chairman of Zero Gravity Group, comments:
“The question is no longer how to make intelligence faster, stronger, or smarter. The real question is how to make it consume less of what cannot be replaced. The company that resolves the equation of green intelligence first will be the one that wins both the battle of value and the battle of sustainability.”
Is there a way out?
The path toward a solution requires a strong decision before technology. Closed loop cooling systems, immersion cooling technologies that drastically reduce the need for water, and more efficient chips are solutions that already exist and can be implemented.
Microsoft announced in 2024 a design for data centers that consumes zero water for cooling, a sign that the industry has begun to recognize its water bill. Yet Tariq Al Hosani believes the real beginning lies in establishing a fundamental standard, saying:
“What cannot be measured cannot be managed. We need a clear global index for the water footprint of every artificial intelligence model. When users see the number of liters spent behind every answer, awareness will transform into a force of ethical, educational, and economic pressure.”
Finally, we encourage progress and advancement. But from a standpoint of awareness, we must recognize that the extraordinary computational power we possess may become a burden if we fail to guide it wisely.
Every time we press the question button, somewhere a drop of water pays the price.
If intelligence is not governed by wisdom, we may wake up one day to a world overflowing with answers and images and everything else, yet unable to provide a single glass of water.
Green intelligence is the solution for sustaining this unique and remarkable form of intelligence.
