What Americans think about the #Environmental impact of #AI, according to a new poll

By JENNIFER McDERMOTT and LINLEY SANDERS
Updated 7:02 AM EDT, October 23, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — "As the United States rapidly builds massive #DataCenters for the development of artificial intelligence, many Americans are concerned about the environmental impact.

"Worries about how AI will affect the environment surpass concerns about other industries that worsen #ClimateChange, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.

"The results of the poll, conducted in September, suggest that as AI reshapes work, communication and culture, it’s also sparking anxieties about how the growing energy demands could further harm the environment.

"It takes massive amounts of electricity to power AI. Electricity consumption from data centers is set to more than double globally by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. The United States accounts for by far the largest share of the projected increase, followed by China. In many places, the electricity for data centers will come from power plants that burn #coal, #oil and #NaturalGas. Burning these #FossilFuels for electricity emits carbon dioxide, trapping heat in the atmosphere and warming the planet."

Read more:
https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-data-centers-poll-climate-change-c9f95aa014254ef454b763ccfb32de39

#BigData #BigEnergyUsage #LLM #ChaptGPT #AIDataCenters
#WaterIsLife #NoisePollution
#FossilFuels #EnergyWaste
#NoNukesForAI #NoNukesForDatacenters

@fdarecall_bot Yikes! More #RadioactiveSeafood! #NuclearDumping has got to stop!

#NoNukes #NoNukesForAI #NoNukesForDatacenters #Cesium137 #RadioactiveContamination #Bioaccumulation

U.S. faces electricity challenge as AI energy demand soars

By : Chip Minty//The Journal Record//September 25, 2025

"They say that artificial intelligence (AI) will be the most transformative technological development ever. Pick any revolutionary advancement you can think of — the Internet, smartphones, air travel, automobiles, the conveyor belt. You can go back as far as fire itself, and experts say AI has a chance to outshine them all.

"As a consequence, there’s an international winner-take-all race to supremacy underway that involves the United States, China and Europe, and the victor stands to emerge at the top of the world’s economic pecking order.

"Much is at stake as industry and institutions are ramping up microchip production, data center construction and educational programs customized to a new AI economy. But behind the billions of dollars in technology infrastructure investment, policymakers and industry visionaries still don’t know if the United States will have enough electricity available to feed the AI behemoth once it reaches maturity.

"No one is quite sure how much more electricity the United States will need, but estimates suggest the nation’s emerging AI machine could demand 60 gigawatts or more within the next couple of years. That volume far exceeds the needs of major U.S. cities, such as New York.

"Adding that much power to the grid will be no small undertaking, experts say, especially for a nation that has focused the last quarter century on a clean energy transition that still is looking for traction. Wind and solar energy can play a role, but inconsistent production limits their ability to meet spikes in power demand.

"So, what’s left? No one is talking about coal. That leaves #NaturalGas to carry the burden. And then there’s #nuclear, an emerging darling of the power industry, winning bipartisan support from policymakers who are now willing to set aside the 1979 #ThreeMileIsland disaster, which practically paralyzed the industry for decades.

"The Oklahoma City-based Hamm Institute for American Energy has made the issue one of its core concerns, bringing leaders together from across the United States and from key international trading partners, such as Japan and South Korea.

" 'The United States has the resources it needs. What it lacks is speed, certainty and alignment,' said Ann Bluntzer Pullin, executive director of the Hamm Institute.
'This initiative is about turning urgency into action so that America and its allies can lead in both energy and AI.'

'" I feel like you’ve got these two giants, the tech industry and the energy industry at this unbelievable moment in time where they can both rise to the occasion and literally move society forward in a way where everyone’s quality of life goes up,' she told leaders at a recent roundtable event.

"There’s a growing number of AI systems housed in an expanding network of data centers, which store, process and manage critical data and their applications. The giant facilities’ large assemblies of servers, storage drives and other hardware are known for their enormous appetite for electricity."

Read more / listen:
https://journalrecord.com/2025/09/25/ai-energy-demand-us-power-challenges/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/VKXi7

#NoNukesForAI #NoNukesForDatacenters #FossilFuels #NuclearPlants #WaterIsLife #LandIsLife #CorporateGreed

Ummmm... Not everyone!

"Altman's statement reflects optimism about the usefulness of future AI systems, but despite warnings of an AI bubble and criticism of the underlying technology, there is still actual unmet demand for generative AI capacity today. ChatGPT serves 700 million weekly active users, more than double the US population, who regularly use the AI assistant to develop software, provide personal advice, and compose or edit correspondence and reports. While the outputs may be imperfect at times, people apparently still want them."


Why does #OpenAI need six giant data centers?

OpenAI's new $400 billion announcement reveals both growing AI demand and circular investments.

Benj Edwards – Sep 24, 2025

[How many of these places are low on water resources? Quite a few!!!] "The five new sites will include three locations developed through an OpenAI and #Oracle partnership: #ShackelfordCounty, #Texas; #DoñaAnaCounty, #NewMexico; and an unspecified #Midwest location. These sites, along with a 600-megawatt expansion near the flagship #Stargate site in #AbileneTx, can deliver over 5.5 gigawatts of capacity, which means the computers on site will be able to draw up to 5.5 billion watts of electricity when running at full load. The companies expect the sites to create over 25,000 onsite jobs.

"Two of the sites will be developed through a partnership between SoftBank and OpenAI. One site in #LordstownOH, where #SoftBank has broken ground, is on track to be operational next year. The second site in #MilamCounty, #Texas, will be developed with #SBEnergy, a SoftBank Group company. These two sites may scale to 1.5 gigawatts over the next 18 months.

"The new sites will join the flagship Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas. Oracle began delivering #Nvidia hardware to that site in June, and OpenAI has already begun training (building new models) and inference (running #ChatGPT) using the data center."

Read more:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/why-does-openai-need-six-giant-data-centers/

#AIDataCenters #WaterIsLife #NoisePollution #FossilFuels #EnergyWaste #NoNukesForAI #NoNukesForDatacenters #AISucks #UseYourBrain #ThinkForYourself

So, taking off to run a few errands. I'm thinking that this afternoon/evening I'll be posting about a topic that's been on my mind for a while -- is #AI #DumbingUsDown? A lot of you won't be surprised at what the studies say. AI and #DataCenters are NOT worth the price to the #Environment or our #BrainHealth!

#AISucks #AIIsDumbingUsDown #NoNukesForAI #NoNukesForDatacenters #ElectricityHogs #WaterUsage #WaterIsLife #NoisePollution

The Staggering #Ecological Impacts of Computation and the #Cloud

Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez illustrates some of the diverse #environmental impacts of data storage.

by Steven Gonzalez Monserrate

Excerpt: "#TheCloud now has a greater #CarbonFootprint than the airline industry. A single #DataCenter can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall #CarbonEmissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions.

"Why so much energy? Beyond cooling, the energy requirements of data centers are vast. To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centers are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences. Like Tom’s air conditioners idling in a low-power state, ready to rev up when things get too hot, the data center is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6 to 12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime."

Read more:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
#NoNukesForAI #RethinkNotRestart #NoNukesForDatacenters #AI #LMs #Datacenters #WaterIsLife #AISucks