AI's energy footprint

Summary

Part Three: Fuel and emissionsNow that we have an estimate of the total energy required to run an AI model to produce text, images, and videos, we can work out what that means in terms of emissions that cause climate change.First, a data center humming away isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If all data centers were hooked up to solar panels and ran only when the sun was shining, the world would be talking a lot less about AI’s energy consumption. That’s not the case. Most electrical grids around the world are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels. So electricity use comes with a climate toll attached.“AI data centers need constant power, 24-7, 365 days a year,” says Rahul Mewawalla, the CEO of Mawson Infrastructure Group, which builds and maintains high-energy data centers that support AI.That means data centers can’t rely on intermittent technologies like wind and solar power, and on average, they tend to use dirtier electricity. One preprint study from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that the carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average. Part of the reason is that data centers currently happen to be clustered in places that have dirtier grids on average, like the coal-heavy grid in the mid-Atlantic region that includes Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. They also run constantly, including when cleaner sources may not be available.Data centers can’t rely on intermittent technologies like wind and solar power, and on average, they tend to use dirtier electricity.Tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google have responded to this fossil fuel issue by announcing goals to use more nuclear power. Those three have joined a pledge to triple the world’s nuclear capacity by 2025. But today, nuclear energy only accounts for 20% of electricity supply in the US, and powers a fraction of AI data centers’ operations—natural gas accounts for more than half of electricity generated in Virginia, which has more data c...