Sam Altman told Alex Heath on a podcast that roughly 38,000 ChatGPT queries consume about as much water as growing one almond in California, hedging that this was his understanding of the real figure. He was answering a claim circulating online that a single query burns the equivalent of a six-hour shower, which he called “a robust meme” that doesn’t hold up, and he noted that nobody eating a dozen almonds feels like they’re doing damage. X users renamed him Sam Almond, posted AI-generated images of him as one, and pulled in the “almond mom” meme, while the most common objection was that an almond is food and a query isn’t. How much water data centers actually use is difficult to pin down, and agriculture still consumes far more than AI does.
