| Homepage | proofnews.org |
And there’s an even bigger problem for AI data centers: it’s hard to be both water and carbon efficient.
Places that are hot and dry tend to be good for solar power, and places that are cool tend to use more water to generate ele
As @a_w_gordon says, “Next time you have a conversation with a chatbot programmed to sound like a movie star, you can think not only about the bottle of water evaporating into the air but all the climate promises that are now in jeopardy.”
The bottle-of-water AI usage estimates are from a 2023 study by UC-Riverside researchers.
But the real numbers are likely much worse. They studied older, smaller AI models running in big tech owned data centers. Today’s AIs are bigger and often are hosted in less efficient 3rd party data centers.
In 2022: Microsoft water consumption rose 34% and Google’s rose 22%. In 2023 Microsoft consumed enough water to fill 15.6 billion water bottles.
You may have heard that having a conversation with ChatGPT is the climate equivalent of pouring out a bottle of water. But it turns out that that is likely an underestimate.
In the third installment in our series on the climate costs of AI, we examine AI’s unquenchable thirst.
As @a_w_gordon writes: “Tech companies seem to be treating the climate impact of AI like they’re shopping in a store that has no price tags with a credit card in someone else’s name. And they’re not showing us the receipts.”
https://www.proofnews.org/ais-carbon-footprint-how-ai-is-killing-climate-goals/
Our educated guess of the CO2 costs of AI is definitely an underestimate - it is based on pioneering 2022 research by @SashaMTL Sylvain Viguier & Anne-Laure Ligozat.
The real climate costs of newer, bigger AI models is likely much higher.
What is the carbon cost of using an AI bot? The companies stopped disclosing it in 2022.
In the latest installment in our series on the climate costs of AI, we estimate a year of ChatGPT use may emit the same amount of CO2 as driving 2 million miles.
We believe that news should come with an ingredients label – so here is our label for this episode:
https://www.proofnews.org/ais-power-grab-how-ai-is-hogging-the-electric-grid/
Tech companies like to present themselves as some of the most climate-friendly corporations in the world. And in some ways, this is actually true. Amazon, Meta and Google were three of the top four corporate buyers of clean energy purchase agreements in 2023. They’d like you to think this
AI makers are trying to replace their fossil fuel usage with green energy. Amazon, Meta and Google were 3 of the top 4 corporate buyers of clean energy purchase agreements in 2023, and all have invested in nuclear power.
But their electricity use is soaring faster than they can add green energy. A smaller share of Google’s data center electricity is powered by clean energy now than in 2020.
“In a lot of ways, they are going backwards" says @a_w_gordon
Since 2017, electricity consumption at the biggest AI makers has soared:
186% at Google
186% at Microsoft
367% at Meta
The reason: AI.
@a_w_gordon examines the electrical costs of AI in the first episode of our YouTube series on the climate impacts of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFd0QUOUFUg
If you haven’t tried Nebula.tv, give it a whirl! It’s a great way to watch your favorite YouTubers, without ads and human-curated without algorithms. We’re honored to be part of their lineup.
The first installment of our new series on the climate impacts of AI is live on Nebula today. It will be available to the public tomorrow on YouTube.
