How to Actually Measure Your AI Workload's Water and Energy Footprint

Your team just shipped an ML inference endpoint. Stakeholders are asking uncomfortable questions about environmental impact. Someone forwards a scary headline about AI boiling the oceans. Your PM wants numbers by Friday. Sound familiar? I've been there twice in the last year alone. And here's what I've learned: most of the numbers people throw around about AI resource consumption are either wildly out of context or completely made up. The real problem isn't that AI uses resources — everything do