EP047: The Hidden Cost of AI — Water, Energy, and Why Your Model Choice Matters

Every token you generate has a physical footprint — water, electricity, carbon. A single large data center can consume over ten million gallons of water per day for cooling. We break down the real environmental cost of AI inference, why model selection is green engineering, and three levers developers control today: choosing efficient models, writing better prompts, and picking providers with sustainable infrastructure. Plus: a practical tiered workload framework to cut your resource consumption across every dimension.