Generative AI is a power and water hungry beast. While its advocates swear it’ll change the world for the better, the tangible benefits today are less clear and the long term costs to both society and the environment may be enormous. Even the federal U.S. government knows this, according to a new report published Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan watchdog group that answers to Congress. … One immediate obstacle to the investigators was AI companies’ lack of transparency around their water usage. … According to the GAO’s estimates, AIs doing 250,000,000 queries a day would use as much electricity as 26,071 U.S. household’s use in a day and 1,100,836 gallons of water.