Will Deleting Emails Save Water? Let’s Do the Math

Much of Britain was suffering drought conditions last spring. So were other parts of the world. The UK’s National Drought Group, after noting the extensive and increasing use of water by data centers, asked the British public to delete old photos and emails from their personal computers. Will this help the drought situation?

We can think about this by doing a little math.

Data centers typically use water to cool the rooms in which their chips operate. Using GPT-4 to create one 100-word email uses about 0.5 liter (500 milliliters) of water.

Storing one 75 KB email message for a month uses about 0.001 milliliter of water. A simple division problem shows that you would be required to delete 500 emails to make up for creating one!

Perhaps there are wiser ways to save water.

What about those leaky toilets? Leak rates range from about 110 to over 15,000 liters each day. At the lowest leak rate, you would need to delete over 5 million emails a day to keep up with the water lost to the leak!

It’s probably wiser to fix the toilet leak. That will save a LOT more water than deleting old emails.