"AI created as much carbon pollution this year as New York City and guzzled up as much H20 as people consume globally in water bottles, according to new estimates. The study paints what's likely a pretty conservative picture of AI's environmental impact since it's based on the relatively limited amount of data that's currently available to the public. A lack of transparency from tech companies makes it harder to see the potential environmental toll of AI becoming a part of everyday tasks,"
""There's no way to put an extremely accurate number on this, but it's going to be really big regardless... In the end, everyone is paying the price for this," says Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who published his paper today in the journal Patterns. To crunch these numbers, de Vries-Gao built on earlier research that found that power demand for AI globally could reach 23GW this year"
Estimates place AI's carbon emissions this year on par with New York City and its water consumption equivalent to global bottled-water use. Limited public data and low transparency from tech companies likely make these estimates conservative. Analysts used earnings calls, analyst estimates, and other publicly available information to approximate hardware production, energy consumption, and water use tied to AI and data centers. Projected power demand for AI could reach about 23 GW this year, which would surpass electricity used for Bitcoin mining in 2024. Companies generally report aggregate emissions and water use but rarely break out AI-specific resource consumption.
#ai-environmental-impact #data-center-energy #carbon-emissions #water-consumption #corporate-transparency
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