By Molly Taft
Publication Date: 2025-12-11 16:00:00
Last month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread admitting that there was a significant error in her blockbuster book Empire of AI. Hao had written that a proposed Google data center in a city near Santiago, Chile, could require “more than a thousand times the amount of water used by the entire population” – a figure that appeared to be off by the order of 1,000 due to a misunderstanding of the units.
In the thread, Hao thanked Andy Masley, the head of an effective altruism organization in Washington, DC, for bringing the correction to her attention. Masley has spent the last few months challenging some of the popular media’s numbers and rhetoric about water use and AI on his Substack. Masley’s main post, titled “The AI Water Issue Is Fake,” has been linked to by other authors with large followings in recent months, including Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith. (Hao said in her Twitter thread that she would collaborate with her…
