According to a United Nations University report released on June 3, the environmental impact of data centers is already comparable to that of some countries around the world.
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As their use of artificial intelligence increases, their water use, energy use, and pollution are predicted to double in just four years.
Much of the growth in data centers is being driven by AI. About 20 percent of data center energy currently comes from AI, which should increase to 40 percent by 2030, according to the report.
AI users can reduce the climate impact of their queries by making them less elaborate and more concise, one of the report’s authors advised.
A 2024 survey by British publisher Future found that a majority of people, 70%, are polite when interacting with AI. Fifty-five percent of respondents said it’s just a good thing, and 12% said it’s because they don’t want to be the first in the robot uprising.
Electricity usage equivalent to Argentina
Last year, worldwide data center According to the report, global electricity usage is 448 trillion watt-hours, which is more than all but 10 countries in the world. According to a report on the environmental impact of AI’s energy use, its electricity use generated about 189 million tons of carbon dioxide, about the same amount as Argentina, and that producing the same amount of energy consumed about 4.5 trillion liters of water.
By 2030, data centers will account for nearly 3% of the world’s projected electricity usage, amounting to 935 trillion watt-hours. If a data center were a country, it is predicted that by 2030, that country would be the 6th largest electricity user in the world. In that case, about 399 million tonnes of carbon dioxide would be produced, the report said. The study focused on energy use and did not examine the large amounts of water used to cool data centers.
“When you look at these numbers, you see a scale comparable to that of a nation,” study co-authors say Kave Madania water scientist and director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada. “The demand is huge.”
First global study of the ecological impact of data centers
Fengqi You, an energy engineering professor who directs AI sustainability issues at Cornell University, said the report is important not just because of its eye-popping numbers, but because of the UN’s credibility and authority.
“It’s valuable that the UN agency is bringing together carbon, water, land, life cycle impacts and environmental justice in one framework,” said Yu, who was not involved in the report, highlighting issues that are often shrouded in secrecy or partial disclosure.
“The public should be concerned, but there is no need to panic,” he added.
Jean Hsu, director of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the report is important because it is the first UN, or even global, report to “shine a light on the environmental harm caused by AI.”
Caleb Max, president of the National Association for Artificial Intelligence, highlights how his industry is becoming more efficient and how it benefits the public. “AI is rapidly becoming a part of our daily lives, adding benefits that improve safety. [help people] Live longer, work more efficiently, enhance food production and reduce poverty. The evidence is increasing every day. energy The return on investment of AI development is transformative for our world and is well worth it. ”
Josh Levi, president of the Data Center Coalition, says the industry is taking its environmental impact seriously.
“We will work with policymakers, communities and industry partners to data center In order to grow, they will do so in a manner that is responsible, transparent and reflects the best practices available,” he said in a statement.
The report was released shortly after the California city of Monterey Park became the first in the country to vote in favor of a permanent ban on data centers on Tuesday (June 2).
How much energy does a query use and how to reduce it?
Madani, who is also the latest Stockholm Water Prize winner, says the numbers show that: Environmental costs of AIAt first glance, it may seem cleaner than other mechanical equipment with visible pollution, such as automobiles or furnaces.
“AI is not just a virtual thing. We’re talking about something physical, something that has real impact. There’s infrastructure there, there’s energy being used,” Madani said. “There’s a lot of hardware behind all these operations, and it looks very clean to us because we don’t see any smoke coming from our devices. On our phones, we don’t see any visible smoke or smoke coming from computers or anything like that. But someone somewhere is suffering.”
Madani says that if people ask less polite questions and are more concise, they can reduce AI’s enormous energy consumption. The report found that reducing the use of words in requests by 30% can reduce the energy used by AI by 25%. This would save approximately the same amount of electricity that approximately 700,000 people in Africa use in a year, the report said.
“If you’re too polite, that extra ‘ask’ can make a big difference,” Madani says. “It has to be very precise and short.”
typical Chat GPT-style queries consume about 200 times more energy than the type of basic text classification used in e-mail spam filters, for example. Images and videos generated by AI require more energy.
And the more complex the AI, the more energy it requires to train and learn. GPT-3 used about 1.3 billion watt-hours for training, while the next version used between 50 billion and 70 billion watt-hours, according to the report.
But study co-author Miriam Akzel, an environmental policy researcher at the United Nations University, says it’s not the training that actually entertains power. About 90% of AI’s power usage comes from operational requests, she says. GPT alone generates 2.5 billion prompts per day, she says.
Increased efficiency still requires increased power usage
Technology advocates can argue that machines are becoming more efficient, but a common paradox is that when things become more efficient, machines are used more frequently and total energy use spikes, even as individual usage efficiency increases, Madani says.
Although some companies promote the use of renewable energy, data centerMadani says this means the supply of clean electricity will be depleted and therefore dirty energy will be used elsewhere.
One of the problems with conducting this study, Akzel and Madani say, is that many companies and locations aren’t transparent about what their data centers and AI are consuming, or even where and at what scale.
“You can’t control what companies don’t disclose,” says Cornell University’s You.
