Jason Kelce 让球迷把尿寄给 AI 数据中心。他真正想说的，是水。

Start with something you have on you right now.

Play a game on your phone long enough and it gets hot.

Electricity goes into a chip; part of it becomes the thing being computed, and the rest, all of it, becomes heat.

There is no getting around this: if it is computing, it is producing heat.

Now scale that up.

AI does not run on one chip. It runs on a whole building of chips, twenty-four hours a day, without stopping.

A building like that is called a data centre.

Its biggest problem is not a shortage of power. It is that the heat cannot get out.

As the temperature climbs, a chip throttles itself; climb further and it fails.

So what a data centre actually spends its days doing is moving heat.

The cheapest way to move heat is with water.

Specifically: run water past the hot parts, let it heat up, then send the hot water to a tower outside the building.

In the tower, some of that water evaporates.

Evaporating water carries away a great deal of heat; the water that is left is cooler, and flows back.

The important part is the word "evaporates".

That portion of the water did not get dirty and did not go down a drain; it turned straight into vapour and left.

This is why, when people talk about data centres, they do not say "uses water" — they say "consumes water".

Water you use comes back. Water you consume does not.

How much does an AI data centre consume in a year?

In the figures that get published, hundreds of millions of gallons is a common order of magnitude.

Two further things make it worse.

First, to stop the pipes fouling, many cooling towers use treated clean water — that is, drinkable water.

Second, these buildings tend to go where power and land are cheap, and those places tend to be dry.

Hence the argument that has played out in a lot of small American towns these last few years:

A building arrives, brings a few dozen jobs, and at the same time starts drinking the town’s water.

Most people have heard this, and forgotten it by the next sentence.

This August, one man made it unforgettable.

His name is Jason Kelce, a retired football player, famous in America in the household-name sense.

He and two companies made an advert: one is his own beer brand, Garage Beer, the other is the canned water company Liquid Death.

In the advert, Jason Kelce holds up a glass jar and sings, with total sincerity:

Give us your pee.

Let us all pee on the computers.

Garage Beer then actually put the jar on sale, at eighteen dollars.

It is, in plain terms, a glass jar with a lid, and a line printed on the side: data centre coolant collector.

A disclaimer runs at the end of the advert: none of the above should be taken literally.

Why does the joke work at all?

Because urine is ninety-five percent water.

So the whole advert really does just one thing:

It turns the sentence "data centres drink water" into an image you cannot look away from.

Gallon figures were published for ten years and nobody remembered them; one man holding a jar and singing went nationwide in a day.

There is another side to this, though, and it should be said out loud.

The people who made this advert are Garage Beer and Liquid Death — one sells beer, one sells water.

They are pointing at a real problem, and they are also selling something.

An advert against wasting water ends up selling an empty jar for eighteen dollars.

Both of those can be true at once.

Think about it:

If a data centre were built beside your house tomorrow, bringing jobs to your town and drinking your town’s water, which side would you vote for?