AI’s Energy Demands Are Fueling the Climate Crisis

Texas’ electrical grid made national headlines in the winter of 2021 when the state experienced statewide power outages. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s power grid operator, was caught completely off-guard when a winter storm exposed the organization’s lack of severe weather preparedness. Embarrassed, ERCOT developed a roadmap to increase the reliability of its energy delivery system.

But guaranteeing a reliable flow of energy from the state’s generating plants to the homes and businesses of Texan residents has proven more difficult than expected. ERCOT recently announced that if a comparable storm were to hit the Lone Star State this winter, there is an 80 percent chance that they would again experience blackouts during peak hours.

Failure to resolve Texas’ power grid bottlenecks is perhaps not entirely ERCOT’s fault. Demand for energy in the state has ballooned in recent years thanks, in part, to the explosion and hype around artificial intelligence.

A significant expansion in the supply of data centers is needed to meet artificial intelligence demand because the systems rely on vast computational power. AI systems are energy hungry — for example, a query using ChatGPT takes ten times the energy of a traditional Google search. 

There are approximately 342 data centers currently operating in Texas. Running these systems non-stop, daily, for twenty-four hours, requires a gargantuan amount of electricity. As a result, ERCOT has identified data centers as presenting a potential energy emergency alert risk at night and during early morning hours this winter. Data centers are currently consuming close to 9 percent of the energy produced in Texas and it is putting a significant strain on its power grid.

Texas is a microcosm of the threat artificial intelligence poses to the world — lack of energy security for households, an accelerating climate crisis, and the consolidation of corporate power.

It is estimated that new AI servers that will be sold in 2027 will consume between 85 and 134 terawatt-hours annually. This is comparable to the electricity consumption of 18 million people living in the Netherlands.

Data centers can be the size of multiple football fields, and they are dependent on energy-intensive cooling systems that prevent computer servers from overheating and crashing. Water is an important component for cooling towers and lots of it is needed to bring down the temperature of server equipment.

An analysis conducted by the Washington Post and the University of California, Riverside found that generating a 100-word email with ChatGPT-4 requires the use of at least one water bottle. Multiply this by millions of queries that are inputted each day, and you can get an idea of the scale of the tech sector’s water consumption.

In regions where water is already scarce, the unquenchable thirst of Big Tech hits especially hard. In 2021, a Google-owned data center in The Dalles, Oregon, consumed nearly one-third of the town’s water supply even as the community grappled with a prolonged drought. As one frustrated resident aptly put it, “Google has become a water vampire, basically.”

This surge in AI energy demand use has led utilities to build new gas plants and delay the retiring of current fossil-fuel infrastructure, thereby forestalling progress on our much needed green energy transition. 

Both Google and Microsoft released reports this year effectively razing to the ground the climate goals they set for themselves by the end of the decade. Targets to reduce CO2 emissions are off track and both companies have blamed their investment in data centers for their increased carbon footprint.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently suggested at an AI summit in Washington DC that while the negative effects artificial intelligence will have on the environment are inevitable, we should continue to invest in AI development because “we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway.” The true AI doom scenario is not a sentient robot uprising but the oncoming environmental catastrophe caused by the expansion of AI infrastructure.

What’s worse is that tech companies are wrecking the planet to push a technology that most consumers do not even want. Aggressive investment in AI has resulted in their needless integration into existing consumer products, like an AI toothbrush or a Coca-Cola AI beverage, often without assessing the actual value added. 

A recent study found that consumers were less likely to purchase a good if it contained the descriptor artificial intelligence. It demonstrates that the tech industry has created a frenzy that is less about solving real problems and more about staking a claim in an industry fueled by its own hype. 

The demand for AI is largely manufactured by Big Tech itself, not the everyday consumers who bear the brunt of its consequences. Tech companies are not pouring billions of dollars into the industry with the hope of solving the climate crisis or initiating a post-work society, but with the aim of surveilling labor and, of course, increasing their rate of profit. They are plundering finite resources in their pursuit of endless growth.

Energy consumption for the sake of AI is pulling energy resources away from other very important endeavors like the green transition.

“There are ways to improve AI to use less power,” Dan Stanzione, executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, told The Daily Texan. But “decarbonizing the power grid is really the most important thing.”

But this will never occur if we continue to privilege the insatiable energy appetite of Big Tech over the collective need for environmental sustainability.

Yet, there are reasons to be optimistic. Communities are beginning to organize, and they are pushing back against the unchecked expansion of data centers and the drain they incur on local resources. 

In Loudoun County, Virginia, officials rejected a data center application due to the strains it will put on the local electric grid. Atlanta’s city council shelved a similar proposal, citing an additional concern over local water supply depletion. In Peculiar, Missouri, public outcry led the city to reverse its decision to allow for the construction of data centers in their community, with one resident capturing the broader sentiment: “Big Tech is preying on small communities all over this country.”

This wave of resistance reflects a growing awareness that unchecked AI expansion comes at a cost to both consumers and the climate. By standing up to Big Tech, these communities are laying the groundwork to resist climate change and corporate greed. They are struggling for a future where people and the planet — not profits — take priority.