Sam Altman: a data center drinks no more than an office building — tell that to the neighbors in Georgia whose water turned muddy

The OpenAI CEO went on Alex Heath's Sources podcast this week to address the AI backlash, and came armed with an almond. Not a real almond — a rhetorical one, which is the most water-efficient kind.

"For every 38,000 ChatGPT queries, that is the same amount of water that is used in the production of a single almond in California," Altman said, adding a jab at the snackers of the world: "The people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don't feel like they're doing something horrible from a water perspective, for the most part."

He also insisted that the evaporative-cooling era is ancient history, and that "if you look at a modern very large data center, it uses the equivalent amount of water as an office building in terms of, you know, people like running the sinks and the toilets and whatever."

The math, briefly, because it's fun

Almonds are genuinely thirsty — about 1.1 gallons of water per nut, which is why the almond has been California's designated environmental villain for a decade. But Altman's own past estimates put a single ChatGPT response at somewhere between 1 and 50 milliliters of water. Run those numbers and you get roughly 85 to 5,500 queries per almond, not 38,000. Even doing it "from memory," as he cheerfully admitted, that's a miss you could see from space.

Meanwhile, in Georgia

Here's where the office-building comparison gets awkward. Near Meta's giant data center campus on the Newton–Morgan county line, residents with private wells have been reporting muddy, sediment-filled water ever since construction began — a mess that escalated to AOC waving mason jars of brown water at a congressional hearing and, this week, a full-blown lawsuit from local homeowners.

"Well water, you know, it got muddy when it rained some, but not like it does now. It just gets muddier even in the littlest rain now. And by that, I mean, it's terrible, too," neighbor Victor Chafin told a local news crew going door to door in the area.

To be scrupulously fair: that's Meta's project, not OpenAI's, the causes are still being investigated, and construction is not the same thing as cooling. But when an industry's collective pitch is "we sip like an office building," and actual humans down the road are holding up jars of chocolate milk that used to be their drinking water, the vibes — much like the water table — are not great. An office building, for the record, has never made anyone's toilet stop working from across the street.