A college student told his mom to ease up on ChatGPT. He said the technology was wasting the planet's water. About a week later, search teams found his body in the mountains outside Kyoto, Japan.
James "Weston" Higginbotham was a 20-year-old junior at Auburn University studying environmental engineering, from Hoover, Alabama. He had been traveling through Japan with his parents and brother when he walked off on his own on May 29. A volunteer search-and-rescue group recovered his body on June 6, in steep wooded ground the police search never reached. His mother, Nancy, confirmed his death on Facebook and asked for privacy. Officials haven't released a cause of death.
What happened in Kyoto
The family stopped for lunch in Kyoto, and afterward Weston's parents and brother headed to a nearby temple. He stayed behind. Something had been bothering him for much of the trip, and it was, of all things, a chatbot. Nancy had been leaning on ChatGPT to get around an unfamiliar country, and her son couldn't stand it.
"I was using a little bit too much ChatGPT," she told reporters. "Japan is a country that I've had a hard time navigating." Her son saw it differently. As she put it, he was "very anti-AI because you know he's into sustainability engineering and AI uses a lot of water and is depleting a lot of water resources." For someone building a career around protecting the environment, watching his mom feed prompt after prompt into an AI felt like a betrayal of the thing he studied.
That evening he left alone. His parents could still watch him move on Life360, the family location-sharing app, which traced him along a river and then onto a train. By a little after 8 in the evening, his phone placed him at a station in the Yamashina area, east of Kyoto. But about 14 minutes later his location-sharing switched off, something his mother said he had never done before. Then nothing. They figured he was heading for a hiking trail.
Japan Today, CBS News Missing Auburn University Student Japan Found
The search, and how he was found
Japanese police put real weight behind the search. More than 100 officers, K-9 dogs, and helicopters worked the foothills for roughly 72 hours. A powerful typhoon rolled through the region and made everything harder, soaking the slopes and grounding part of the effort. After about three days, police suspended the official search.
Weston's family refused to stop. They flew in. They hired a private rescue team and rallied local volunteers to keep combing the slopes. One of those volunteer groups found him on June 6, in dense, steep woods the police had not covered. "Our family is heartbroken," Nancy wrote. "The grief we feel is impossible to put into words." She said the family was "forever grateful for the time we had with our sweet, precious Weston."
What killed him is still unknown. The ground east of Kyoto is rugged and thickly forested, easy to get lost in once you step off the trail, and a single fall or one night exposed to a storm can kill even a fit, experienced hiker. Police haven't described his death as anything beyond a recovery in the mountains, and the family has asked the public to respect their privacy.
CBS News Missing Auburn University Student Japan Found, Fox News
Was he right about AI and water?
Weston wasn't making it up. AI really does drink, in two places:
- On site, where the data centers that run ChatGPT, basically warehouses packed with computers, throw off heat and get cooled with fresh water that evaporates away.
- Off site, at the power plants feeding those centers, since generating that much electricity uses water too.
How much water? One widely cited study from researchers at the University of California, Riverside, titled Making AI Less Thirsty, estimated that training one big model, GPT-3, evaporated around 700,000 liters of clean fresh water in Microsoft's US data centers. Roughly 185,000 gallons. For a single model, before anyone typed a question.
For everyday use, the same team figured a short back-and-forth of 20 to 50 questions runs through about 500 milliliters, a small bottle of water. OpenAI tells a very different story. In his blog post The Gentle Singularity, CEO Sam Altman said the average ChatGPT query uses about 0.000085 gallons of water, roughly a fifteenth of a teaspoon, plus 0.34 watt-hours of power. Both cannot be right.
So who is right? Actually, the honest answer is messier. OpenAI's figure basically counts only the water that boils off inside its own data centers, and leaves out the water spent making the electricity. Independent researchers count both, and they fold in older, thirstier buildings. Honestly, the per-question panic is overblown. One chat won't drain a reservoir. But that was never the real worry.
arXiv paper, Data Center Dynamics
The footprint nobody sees
Scale is the real story. Stack up all those queries and every new model and data center going up, and the totals stop looking small. US data centers already burned through about 163.7 billion gallons of water in a recent year, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
A single large facility can use up to 5 million gallons a day, about what a town of tens of thousands of people drinks. Morgan Stanley has projected that AI data centers alone could pass 1 trillion liters of water a year by 2028.
And the geography is cruel. These centers often go up exactly where water is already scarce, because the land is cheap and the air is dry, so the strain lands hardest on the communities least able to spare it. That's the direction Weston was pointing at, frankly, even if one person's chat history is a rounding error next to it. He wasn't arguing about one afternoon of his mom asking for directions. His real worry was the direction the whole industry is heading.
Environmental and Energy Study Institute, IE Insights
None of this means an argument about a chatbot sent a young man to his death. We don't know what happened on that mountain, and it would be wrong to pretend we do. What we do know is that a 20-year-old who cared deeply about the planet was upset about something real, and the research he was studying backs a big part of his case. That part is worth taking seriously, whatever the investigation finds.
