AI is probably cheaper right now than it will ever be again — and the bill will come due in water and electricity.

The hidden costs

Artificial intelligence doesn’t just consume data. It consumes resources: the electricity that powers server farms and the fresh water used to keep them cool. Those costs are real, but they aren’t reflected in what we pay. What looks like innovation is partly a subsidy — drawn from underpriced utilities meant for human survival, not machine learning.

The moral line

We’ve kept power and water inexpensive so people can survive, and that’s the right instinct. But letting corporations use those same cheap necessities as raw material for profit is a different matter. A server farm burning through millions of gallons of water isn’t the same as a family running a washing machine. Allowing that waste without consequence is a moral failure on par with pricing people out of basic needs — it just shifts the suffering onto future generations instead of current ones.

Pricing reality

A progressive cost schedule could fix this: keep electricity and water affordable for personal use, but scale up rates for industrial consumption that strains shared resources. That would make AI, cloud services, and other data-center-dependent industries pay closer to their true environmental cost. Yes, it would make technology more expensive — but that’s just honest accounting.

The temporary window

Until reform happens, AI remains artificially cheap. The electricity is subsidized, the water is discounted, and the long-term harm is deferred. For individuals and small creators, that means we’re living in a rare window — a moment when these tools are accessible precisely because the true costs are being ignored.

Use it wisely

So use it. Learn what you can, build what you can, automate what you can. Because this phase — where AI is both powerful and underpriced — won’t last forever. When society finally starts charging what these systems really cost to the planet, the era of “cheap AI” will be over.

AI isn’t free. It’s just borrowing from the future — and right now, that future is still on sale.