Every fashionable anxiety eventually finds its viral statistic, and artificial intelligence has now found water. The claim ricocheting around social media — that a single ChatGPT email “drinks” a bottle of water — is not quite wrong, but it is not quite the study either. The 519-millilitre figure comes from a 2024 Washington Post analysis produced with the UC Riverside researcher Shaolei Ren, not from the underlying peer-reviewed paper, which more cautiously estimated that GPT-3 consumes roughly a 500-millilitre bottle for every ten to fifty responses. The number swings wildly with where and when the data centre runs, and the larger share of that water is not spilled on silicon at all — it is evaporated upstream, generating the electricity the servers consume. The honest version is less frightening and more interesting: AI’s water footprint is real, large at scale, and almost entirely a function of geography.

And geography is exactly where Israel’s position becomes interesting — because no developed country has had to think harder about the cost of water in an arid place, or has more thoroughly engineered its way out of scarcity.

The same Riverside team projects that global AI could withdraw 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres of water annually by 2027 — somewhere between four to six Denmarks and half the United Kingdom. (The figure is for water withdrawn; the volume actually evaporated and lost is roughly a tenth of that — a distinction the headlines invariably drop.) For most countries this is an abstraction. For Israel it is a balance-sheet question, because Israel is the one developed economy that has already solved the problem the rest of the world is only now discovering it has. The country produces the overwhelming majority of its drinking water through reverse-osmosis desalination and reuses more than 87 percent of its treated municipal wastewater for agriculture — the highest rate in the developed world, several times that of any European peer. Israel did not stumble into water security. It manufactured it.

Here is where........

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