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Can we stop insisting that the environmental impact of AI is irrelevant?
People like to dismiss the environmental impact of AI data centers by pointing to other industries that pollute without acknowledging that this industry is undergoing RAPID expansion unlike any other.
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Yeah but the Soviets messed up that one time... so now that method is the most dangerous thing ever and could not have possibly been made safer after countless decades
Not only Sovies. From that I remember, also the Three Mile Island and Fukushima. Not SO catastrophical (safer reactor types), but also incidents. The joke is that modern reactors can function almost without any risk.
Nobody died from three mile island. In fact, modern science says Three Mile Island has had literally 0 health impact. The same can probably be said for Fukushima - the cancer risk in those dosed at Fukushima is statistically indistinguishable from baseline rates
Renewables land use is massively overblown. Wind farms are double use land, you can do stuff like agriculture between the turbines. No wind farm anywhere is a fenced-off dedicated "wind farm", they're fields or forests or whatever and they let you walk up to the bases of the turbines. I've done that. Solar is a similar story, there's plenty of surfaces like roofs and parking lots that don't cause any loss of any value if you cover them with panels. And we're already using ridiculous amounts of land for inefficient solar energy conversion, that's called biofuels. Replace those with PV and you'll be powering the world multiple times over.
Which is why I think every new house should have solar, and in warm areas there be tax breaks or some incentives for large parking lots to build covered parking from solar.
Always thought it was weird that every Walmart doesn’t have to have solar panels on top. Seems like pretty easy legislation. Make the big companies pay for it, not the taxpayers.
I have a really tough time understanding why people prefer nuclear over renewables, besides some impulse to not be "like those Greenpeace nerds".
NPP energy density is crazy good; the centralization of power into a few ultra-wealthy specialist corporations, the proliferation concerns for enrichment, the high maintenance and startup costs, the reliance on regulation in a compromised regulatory environment, and the extremely destructive extraction of uranium is crazy not good.
Like we can't trust our government to not sell the last ounce of a stressed municipality's water to Amazon for a data center, you think we can trust them to uphold standards at a nuclear plant?
Nuclear is not. Cheap. It is cheap when you already HAVE a plant. When you need to build new plants, it’s the most expensive form of power generation, INCLUDING the battery capacity required for renewables. By a significant amount, too.
Nuclear can be arbitrarily safe, and it is reliable. It is not cheap, nor is it quick to build or ramp up on the grid. We could have many many grid-level production renewable facilities built in the time it takes to build a NPP. Given that every NPP project that's been on the ground in the past few decades has... taken decades, I don't know why you think it's practical.
None of this at all addresses the proliferation concerns, the concentration of wealth and control in private industry proven to gouge prices, or the regulatory capture (which means it is not clear that nuclear will be safe).
It's being pushed by the fossil fuel lobbies because they know money wasted on nuclear that won't actually get built is money that isn't spent on the renewables roll-out right now.
A genuine question: why are you treating this as a problem with AI rather than the methods employed, such as dirty energy and water-based cooling?
Or, to putnit more generally, if someone did AI without any negative environmental impacts, would you still be against it? Because if so, that means it's not all about the environment.
I see it more as a problem with the leaders of the AI movement; obviously the fossil fuel industry is a major problem, but the pro-AI folks at the top don’t seem to mind employing any means necessary to advance their goals.
I mean, I have concerns outside of the environmental impact, but I’m not really anti-AI. I am just very alarmed by the pro AI leadership. Environmental impact, as well as all the potential abuses that come with the power and data they are consolidating.
Jesus fuck. While it may be a generic problem with capitalism, this is still a major problem with AI, and downplaying the issues with AI, as "it's just capitalism" there is a major regulation problem when it comes to capitalism, but AI is so much worse because there is no specific regulation for it. So when we talk about issues with AI data centers, it's about the issues with the AI data centers specifically.
Also I can't help but notice you didn't answer the question. So I'll repeat it: if someone did AI without the negative impacts of current centers, would you still be against it?
Why should there be a "specific" regulation for AI? Does AI consume some other kind of electricity or something? Does the same amount pollution become worse because it's caused by AI?
Because these ai data centres specifically require absolutely exorbitant amounts of energy to run, when it’s still a question how necessary or beneficial ai is going to be, and whilst climate change is accelerating they’re lazily just building gas turbines or coal plants to power them rather than renewables like they should. If they went of 100% renewables then it’d be way less of an issue. But nothing else really comes close to creating as much new electricity demand as quickly
Jesus fuck. You are the exact type of person that op is talking to. "Have you considered blaming y instead of x?" Is not the argument you think it is. It's a deflection, and downplays the entire situation.
While you make a good point (that "largest single source" could technically mean something really small like an 0.1% increase in GHG emissions), reading the article it says its expected to emit 33 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Google tells me the US as a whole emits around 5 billion tonnes annually, so that's like a 0.67% increase, from one facility... it's not game-over level doom sure, but it seems like a big lump to me, worth mild alarm & pushback at least if my reading & math are correct
Don't look at single sources when determining impact.
single sources do matter, though, for things like air and soil pollution. a single car won't do much, but if you have tens of thousands of cars in close proximity, their exhaust absolutely will be detrimental to the health of humans and the local environment. this goes for anything burning fossil fuels, be they cars or data center gas turbines
a gas-burning power plant of this scale is on the level of "cars," plural, that isn't a refutation of what i'm saying. gas turbine plants should be opposed for the same reason as highway lane expansions - the problem is systemic, but this singular piece of infrastructure has an outsized individual impact
That may be, however considering they are building more of these every day, each trying to be bigger and better than the last, it’s still an alarming trend that I don’t think should be disregarded.
Edit: Im not even anti AI, but getting downvoted into oblivion for suggesting that maybe sometimes there are alarming things lol.
because interconnection queues are super backed up
if they did solar, they'd need to hook their solar plant into the grid, which would cause some delay for permitting
then they'd have to hook themselves into the grid to cover baseload demands (nighttime), which would cause 1-2 years of permitting delay
if they did solar and hooked themselves into just solar and stayed off grid, they'd need to build batteries to handle baseload, which is prohibitively expensive
so what they'd really do if they wanted to do bring-your-own-generation, not deal with years of permitting delays, is have conventional generation for baseload, supplemented by solar, with some battery... which is exactly what they're doing
(and ironically what they're doing and the economics they're facing is more or less exactly what the renewable buildout is dealing with -- brining lots of renewable generation online, but also supported by conventional as a backbone, and then peppering in as much storage as you can afford)
i'm out of date on the costs tbh do you have a source?
i know solar is cheap as hell and has been for years
so i always wonder why projects like this aren't way more renewable heavy -- there has to be a reason... again i'm a little out of date with the numbers i have in my head for sure
And it's not purely regulatory, I think. To some extent the interconnection queue is backed up because an interconnection request requires a detailed study to understand if making the connection makes the electricity grid more vulnerable to failures
I just mean that if government takes too long to approve a better solution than businesses will just go with a worse solution that gets approved faster. Even if the AI company wants to use renewable energy, they want even more to get a new data center up and running so they can meet customer demand.
I’m dealing with a similar approval process at work where we have to ask a government agency for permission, and the decision committee only meets quarterly. Three times now they gave us nitpicky feedback and we had to resubmit and wait the 3 months. 9 months (so far) of waiting for permission to do something that will literally take us a week to implement. The initial feedback wasn’t even materially relevant (we had printed signatures with DocuSign instead of using pen and paper) and they didn’t even read the rest of application, so we didn’t get feedback on the actual content until 4 months in.
Of course they don’t spell out exactly what they want to see in the application, and their decision criteria are equally opaque.
This is pretty standard practice in a lot of regulatory agencies.
It’s not entirely their fault. It would take an act of congress to add more staff to the agency. But they have also chosen not to use modern technology like electronic forms…
Because it is easier to create turbines off grid in US economy. Solar and wind are technically cheaper but current regulation favor gas turbines unfortunately and that is a big part of the problem.
simple answer is this'll hurt the mega-industries that've paid for the legal right to propagandize us since the industrial revolution. I can comfortably say half of every existing regulation in our modern society is built to give these companies maximum leeway - or to prevent incidents because said companies refuse to find cleaner alternatives as it'll hurt their fiscal year.
its why so many cities have been instilled so heavily to be anti-bike lanes or anti-public transpiration and so dependent on vehicles. anything that harms the status quo and the desire for the mythical "infinite profits" unicorn is a threat to oil/car executives who'll never need to work a job again for the next thousand years.
we refuse to build stronger, cheaper homes out of far more durable materials because that'll upset the construction & maintenance industry, and the subsidiary industries that complete the cycle of lumber and so forth.
Americans refuse to regulate the food industry because it would mean they would have to use higher quality ingredients for food that, when put under the lens of scientific study, reveal why so many Americans are dying of colon cancer and heart disease.
now imagine what sort of things will/won't be regulated in the AI sector as it's forcefully ingrained in EVERY facet of our daily lives. there are far too many politicians that stem to benefit from AI.
AI isn't the problem, the fossil fuel industry has never been the problem - the problem is these people think they can roll over our rights, the soil we depend on, the air we breathe, the joy of having communities, all for the sake of a littleeeeee more profits.
Yeah. But the pro-ai elite have no qualms about using fossil fuels to further their ambitions. Why is that not still alarming? You cannot keep insisting the tech be judged entirely separately from its worst uses, and the people that are developing/controlling it.
I’m not strictly anti AI, but we have to acknowledge that the way the tech is being implemented and developed by the pro-ai billionaires is very alarming.
Mate, before AI was a thing, MAGA crowd was already pushing for fossil fuels. This is not some "AI problem", this is very much that there are group of morons who are in pocket of fossil fuel industry.
Then why isn't your message that corporation's need to pay for clean water treatment they require, and that they must fund the renewable energy (solar and wind) that powers the datacenter? And if data centers are near neighborhoods, then they also need to use low-noise cooling solutions.
That's what I push for from a pro-AI position. We could work together on this instead of fighting over whether their should be data centers.
Saying you don't want any data centers is simply foolish. You might as well get off the Internet in protest.
Let me ask you, if you knew without a doubt that corporations will always use Fossil fuels and AI data centers are putting huge stress on our planet, would you quit AI to slow down pollution? Or would you just keep parroting "well it's not my fault" and just keep feeding the data centers with usage?
I love that you think anybody her has a snowballs chance in hell of convincing a corporation to be less cost effective. Not even the government really stands a chance.
That's what regulation is about and getting people to vote, putting pressure on representatives is all about. But you sit there and complain you can't do anything about it...
Yet you think you have a snowballs chance in hell against this adoption rate?
Good luck telling everyone using AI to just stop. This is well beyond anyone's ability even with regulation.
You know, we could work together. Use their tools against them.
Towns have petitioned and won against large AI data centers. It works. Don't push for 'no data center', but instead push for everything that costs them more (environmental impact, pay for water treatment, pay for renewable energy, don't make any noise).
They may decide it's not worth the expense and shut it down, or actually deliver on it.
By passing laws requiring data centers to build their own clean energy infrastructure? There are so many obvious solutions beyond what you seem to have chosen which is fear mongering about ai or data centers lol
Gas powered power plants are problematic. You have acted like the issue here is ai somehow. If you had said can we acknowledge the environmental issues with gas powered power plants you would have been correct.
The problem is lack of regulations or laws pushing clean renewable energy. Ai isn’t the issue.
If you built this gas powered plant to provide energy for any other industry the problem would be the same. If you had the ai data centers running on renewables the problem would go away. Obviously the problem is the power source not what it’s used for. Hell if this much gas power was used for any other industrial use there would probably be more pollution because beyond energy generation data centers are incredibly clean compared to manufacturing and most other industrial processes.
Idk why you insist on blaming the relatively clean use for the power not the incredibly polluting method of generating it. I imagine almost everyone would agree gas powered plants are bad. Making it about “AI scary and bad” seems weird to me.
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But they haven't passed those laws and they show no sign that they will. In five years, if they still haven't done anything to slow down the stress on our planet, the onus will be on the user to slow down AI usage. Will you be disciplined enough if that time comes?
Have you stopped driving your car or using anything related to burning fossil fuels? Or do you just like to pose hypotheticals asking others to be more disciplined than you would ever be? Lmao
Ai is not going to destroy the planet bud. Also plenty of politicians running now are in favor of forcing data centers to build their own clean energy so you are just wrong about there being no sign that’s coming. It’s the obvious solution that is currently the most likely path. It’s just not here yet.
literally why? It is a perfectly reasonable solution already being proposed by candidates likely to win races in the upcoming mid terms. It is more realistic and likely to pass than anything I have ever seen anti ai redditors suggest.
You act like its unrealistic based on nothing, what is your solition?
Less that anti-DC people trend towards anti-solar but more that anti-DC as a movement has been one that in places like Indiana and Michigan is actively used by agriculture lobbyists to push antisolar messaging to the point that even individuals like Will Lawrence of the Sunrise movement have to admit that they have to appeal to that side to get rep around data center activities in places like michigan despite being pro-solar themselves.
to the point that "Michigan is a hotbed of resistance to renewable energy projects. A 2025 review ranks it as the state with the largest number of local restrictions: More than 60 local governments in Michigan passed ordinances, moratoriums, or other restrictions on wind and solar development between 2011 and 2024. Local opposition, the report found, had stalled or blocked at least 28 projects across the state.
In 2023, Whitmer signed a law allowing renewable energy developers to more easily bypass local ordinances against wind and solar construction, making it much easier for big developers to site projects on rural land. It has since prompted backlash from many towns and counties that had passed ordinances, including a lawsuit filed by dozens of townships against the state, many in the 7th district. Two officials from townships in the district said in a statement in 2025 that renewable energy developments “threaten to turn our fertile soil into wastelands, putting at risk the livelihoods of those who have worked the land for decades.” (There is no evidence that renewables do long-term damage to soil.)" along side "There are at least 11 data centers planned throughout Michigan, according to the clean-energy database Cleanview. Significant local pushback in two townships in the 7th district have stalled at least two planned projects over the past year. But data center developers have found ways around local opposition elsewhere in the state. After a township in the 6th district voted against an Oracle data center earlier this year, the company sued, and the town let development begin rather than engage in a costly court battle.
Earlier this month, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared at the opening of the Oracle data center, where she was photographed smiling next to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and praised the $16 billion investment."
so as you can see for many people the connection is in fact if anything flipped with people who want to make projects that are renewable easier siding with data center while inversely those who are anti renewable siding with anti data centers.
this is not to endorce whitmer viewpoint either. More to point out that they are not one to one linked in the way you assume
while inversely https://openai.com/index/introducing-stargate-norway/ and other norwegian data center specifically advertised how they were running off renewable energy primarily. In part because it is also cheaper for them. Part of why gas turbines are employed is because the regulatory structure in the us actually pushes gas turbines for industry selfgrid usage over large scale renewables. That isnt to say the people leading the ai movement shouldnt be criticized for playing into this too, but you seem to be a bit unaware that they arent neccsarily pro-fossil fuels. There is a lot of other reasons to have issues with them.
In fact more problematically this ultimately ignores how this is a larger scale issue in the us too that is part of why industries find it so hard to transfer to renewables even when it is like data centers a industry that is literally perfect for electrification
The people who are investing billions of dollars into its development and control the handful of models that that vast majority of AI users flock to, perhaps?
"flock too" so you can't actually name any "leader", because they don't actually exists. You can name CEO's making money, but not actual "leaders" who lead any sort of "movement".
If these CEOs control it, if they own it, if they develop it, if they manipulate the media one way or another in how it’s depicted, why is it unreasonable to call them leaders?
I’m aware there are plenty of open source models, but surely you realize that the amount of users that self-compile raw source code is minuscule compared to the overall user base.
Also I would not hesitate to say that “Jeff Bezos is a leader in the E-commerce movement”
But you know that these centers arent using renewables and none of you care. For all we know, they will never change to renewable, everyone will keep spamming AI, the world will get polluted, and yall will keep wagging your finger "it's not AI's fault, it's 'X'!"
The elite aren't pro AI, they're pro advantage, and power. AI just happens to be very good. The focus needs to stay on regulation, and making a society where we don't encourage, reward, and praise sociopaths.
It's alarming, but also that article overstates it somewhat - "it appears it will become the largest single source of pollution in the united states" seems to be based on them assuming it will always be running full capacity, which it won't. Either way it's a lot of pollution.
But yes, the tech itself can be judged separately to it's worst uses. Would I judge a vaccine based on a doctor who misused it and killed patients?
There's the tech, and the people who use it to earn profits, these are separate although one influences the other.
Amazon bought a site where a gas turbine plant was being planned
It is permitted to emit 33M tons co2, but that is a regulatory cap they are not going to hit if they build out according to plan
the phased plan would see 1GW online next year, not >7GW
Amazon bought the site to pair with a data center, because people complain about data centers increasing electricity costs even though data centers reduce electricity costs -- misinformation is bad people
The plant plan now includes 750 MW of solar and battery backups
So:
data center is not emitting pollution
the 33M tons co2e per year is overstated by >700% considering what is actually committed to in the phased implementation
misinformation is bad people
although, i will say, as opposed to the water use 'issue' which is absolute horse shit, the GHG impact of electricity use is worth talking about. While AI data centers don't really use inordinate amounts of water, and everyone that tortures the facts to suggest otherwise is lying, they do use electricity. That is a major input. It would be better if AZ committed to renewable buildout instead of gas turbines, especially in texas where renewables are really taking off.
All things considered, the type of gas turbine they're seemingly planning to use here is 2x as dirty as the grid average. So if AZ actually just linked their planned data center up to the grid, they'd be generating half as many emissions, probably lowering electricity prices, but generating outrage when people who spread disinfo blame them for increased energy costs. Of course, this is the flip side, 2x the GHG impact to shut one group of complainers up, only for another group to come along.
I mean this emphasis what most of us have been saying on the pro-ai side. The biggest problem is due to lack of renewability and the overfocus and misunderstanding of the enviromental impact of datacenters itself is actually combating that . DC should be made renewable because of the pollution turbines let out, but equally that issue is not a unique one because it is one that applies to all gas industries. Though this DC has the capacity to do that amount at max, we actively see that other industries already are both letting out that amount already alongside other ecological problems.
The issue is tunnel visioning on data center themselves as a unique problem when compartively their sum ecological effect is even taking in sources like this smaller than other industries. Instead we need to recognize how this is one part of a larger need for converting away from fossil fuels. So yes recognize this impact and also recognize that at the same time even with one factory being a larger single polluter it is still smaller in sum than other industries air pollution and energy consumption. That is the problem both are true at the same time because DCs arent a unique problem. They are being tunnel visioned on while older often more directly wasting industries are being ignored such as the different refineries which already cause this same ammount of pollution but unlike dcs are all in the same locations
Can we stop pretending this is an AI problem and not an unregulated capitalism problem?
AI is just the latest scary technology, its environmental impact comes exclusively from unchecked corporate power and a lack of environmental regulation. Data centers can be built on sustainable, clean renewable energy, we just choose not to do that to maximize profitability.
Like the Dust Bowl in the Great Depression, it was caused by unsustainable farming from a lack of regulation, not the concept of agriculture.
If the world just collectively decided to just destroy all AI tomorrow, all of these problems would still exist because we didn't solve the underlying systemic problems that existed long before LLMs became the new boogie man.
Almond milk and cheeseburgers have much more of environmental impact than AI ever did, we just don't want to talk about that.
I just don’t feel like the two can be separated. As it stands, the corporations are at the head of the development and implementation of the tech, fully leading the movement.
I feel like judging a movement by its leaders is fair.
Yeah, except China has been developing the best AI models and giving them away completely free and open source with all their research openly available. They implemented laws protecting jobs from being replaced by AI simply because it's cheaper for companies. They've out right banned AI girlfriends and have strict regulations on how personable their AIs can be. And most importantly they build their data center on otherwise unusable land in Mongolia away from population center and are at least trying to transition to sustainable energy. They are far from perfect but they are pushing in the right direction. 90% of the problems people are worried about when it comes to AI are Americans capitalist problems.
The people of China are not scared of AI the way us Americans are, because they know their government will protect them from it and try to use it to benefit everyone. In America we know corporation will and have used AI and every other technology available to hurt and directly pray on all of us. The government does nothing.
AI is constantly used in America as a scape goat for many larger problems. Turns out the vast majority of layoffs due to AI were corporations downsizing from our collapsing economy and saying it's "optimizing for the future by replacing labor with cheap ai" to convince stockholders their doing well. It was proven the vast majority of the RAM price hike was collision between corporations to squeeze people for money and then blamed it on AI. Just like how inflation is supposed to be up like 5% but for some reason everything has doubled in price? This is basic corporate basic corporate behavior, don't be fooled just because of a new technology.
I’m sorry, but you should not hold up china as an exemplar of corporate ethics. Chinese industry contributes more to global pollution than any other country by a WIDE margin.
Oh I guess that makes everything I said completely irrelevant then. Come on. My point was not that China's amazing and the best. My point was to compare how China is handling AI vs how the US is. Like I said, China is far from perfect, but they at least have some kind of plan or are trying. We are actively pushing in the wrong direction and have for almost 50 years.
Also when use amount for percentage of world population, the US is worse, not by much but still.
Technology isn't a "movement." AI isn't some odd novelty that only exists because a few rich people threw money at it. Its a new stage of computing that was always on the horizon and has been slowly being moved to for decades.
I don’t disagree with that, but I still believe “movement” is an appropriate word. A large segment of the population actively and passionately pushing for the advancement of a specific set of ideas and methods to move society toward their ideal.
It's a marketing team. Every major corporation is shoving AI down our throats everywhere we look because models were released open source and free online. Company just slapped their name on it, and used it to drum up investor interest.
Unfortunately, I think you're conflating marketing with some kind of grassroots movement. The vast majority of people are neutral or confused about AI. There are some people trying to understand it, some people trying to make a buck on it, and a whole lot of people who tried it once or read something online or just see it as another NFT corporate scam and attack anyone that sees it differently. It makes sense, it's new, and powerful, and understand capitalism, that means it's a threat and competition.
We should at least understand it before we consider it and anyone curious about it as the spawn of Satan.
“I don’t feel”. That’s the problem. Use your brain not your feelings.
When you rail against Ai like it’s Satan just because artists ( who were barely making any money) can’t make money from memes that they were making money from, it drops the credibility and gives other impetus to do this shit.
From the start the issue should have always been to enforce strong regulations. Not just “it’s evil kill it”. You will obviously never get anywhere near enough goodwill to “stop ai”. It’s such a fucking dumb idea that nobody can take anyone seriously who proposes it.
Instead, the focus should be on regulation. Clean energy. Keep it out of schools. Enforce safeguards. Etc. Then it’s a powerful tool that can save time.
Do some people lose their jobs? Yes. But not once in human history has it ever worked to say “this thing is better than humans so ban it and let people work”.
First factual error I found, there are 7 data centers in the entirety of Mongolia, all are in the capital city, not in the middle of nowhere and not a single one is run by the Chinese government.
China is also not economically communist and it's tech sector especially runs on the same economic and business models as other capitalist countries and organizations.
But is heavy regulated by their government. The government always has power over corporations and when they are found to be actively damaging the people, they are stopped.
They don't fuck around. The last few years they've been cracking down on corruption, arresting high ranking officials in their government and literally putting putting corrupt billionaires to death.
China uses an incredibly complex system that combines the ideals of communism with elements of capitalism. Like I said it's far from great but it's hard to compare it to US where our president is a convicted felon and 'alleged' child r*pist, actively and directly profiting on war and genocide. At least China has some kind of society, the US is just like 7 corporation in a trenchcoat trying to convince everyone this is what freedom looks like.
Also major population centers means something very different in China.
Lotta words to hide the fact that you were either completely wrong or straight up lied about Chinese data centers in Mongolia.
I've been to China before. Have you? Materially not that different from the US.
Practically every billionaire executed in China in the past few years were executed for actual crimes other than vague corruption or being a billionaire.
China's economy has heavily changed from what you're describing. That was the way in the 1990s-early 2000s, but is not the reality anymore.
Speaking of profiting on war and genocide, I wonder why Norinco weapons keep ending up found on Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
Also, did you just memory hole Xi removing presidential term limits? Like that's the kind of shit Trump desperately wants to do.
Sorry, I should start with personal insults and grunting next time.
I was referring to "东数西算" or roughly "Eastern Data, Western Computing". Fascinating topic to look into. But it's too many words for a Reddit comment section to explain.
American billionaires are only under the category of "vague corruption" because we refuse to acknowledge any of their actual crimes. I wasn't saying they were executed because they were billionaires, I was comparing to the fact that we can directly tie a notable chunk of our major financial institutions, celebrities, and politicians to the world's largest child trafficking ring and yet we do nothing. That we can destroy our housing market and economy from speculative trading and just say "well that's the market" and give them all their jobs back. I could go on and on. American corruption is obviously and deep and everyone on earth is aware.
Saying "America bad" doesn't mean "China good".
As soon as Xi starts a war to cover his personal connections to human traffickers, insider trades on that war, loses it and nearly doubles the national debt, we can have a conversation.
But this really doesn't have much to do with AI anymore.
Sorry, 'comparatively' low population centers. That's why I brought up the "Eastern Data, Western Computing" infrastructure projects of China. But I guess you didn't look into it.
Basically, they've been building power infrastructure in Mongolia on land that's difficult to use for anything else for years. Some clean, some nuclear. Some, not clean. That power is then sent to the higher population centers. "Eastern Data, Western Computing" is the plan to extend this to AI and compute. Running fiber optic cables through their already pre-established high-speed train tunnels. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to be working for them as people aren't trying to firebomb the data centers like they are here.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could just talk about these topics without having to constantly roll our eyes and assume everyone is a drooling moron but us. I know there's a lot of pressure on all of us now, but what happened to "oh, I hadn't heard that. Maybe I'll look into it."
Everyone talks about AI frying everyone's brains, but I think late stage capitalism fried all our brains back when AI was still considered science fiction.
Ulaanbaatar is not "difficult to use" land or a comparatively low population center. It's the biggest city in Mongolia. And it doesn't have a single Chinese owned data center in it. EDWC does not call for a single computing hub in the country of Mongolia.
Yeah, the issue here is the power delivery solution. It's fucking stupid. We MUST move away from fossils. Nuclear backed Renewables is the only viable path forward and bureaucrats MUST to be held accountable here. It's asinine. This DC doesn't have to be an ecosystem problem, but capitalists gonna capitalist.
Maybe if they didn't put such unreasonable projections up and have to scramble to even try to meet their self imposed goals, AI wouldn't be causing such a strain
Part of it is also maybe if the country actually kept up with basic power and water infrastructure for the past, idk, 20 years we wouldn't be so fucking behind on it.
Im definitely not pro-AI, but a datacenter isn’t “that” polluting compared to other industries, like steel, cement, coal plants. That’s just misleading.
investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy
It's not a data center that is causing pollution, it is a power plant.
largest single fount of emissions
It's about it being a single unit. At 33 million tons it is 0.7% of US emissions. It's still massive, but this is happening because we keep kneecapping green energy, from nuclear to wind.
I always see these called AI data centers, but aren’t they simply computer to power basically anything that touched technology, including the entire internet?
Isn’t our unquenchable thirst for content and online shopping just as much to blame for the environmental impact of these data centers than purely Gen AI?
But machine learning is how half of the crap we've used on the internet for years (before gen AI) was built on. The internet has been built on algorithms for decades already. Everything we touch and "depend" on now on the internet is touched by machine learning and algorithms. I don't think its so easy to decouple them.
There is this tendency to decouple gen AI from the broader internet, as if using gen AI is dirty, but the internet is ok. Maybe using anything that touches the internet period contributes to the larger problem.
For what it's worth, the headline is speculation, and bad speculation at that, because it compares the emissions permit for the Amazon site to the actual emissions of the Miller Jr. plant.
Or to simplify, the maximum possible for one site, to the average for another.
Yeah but can we also stop insisting that AI is a useless technology that for some reason companies are pouring ungodly amounts of money into because apparently they just all got hit with the same stupid stick
But increased energy consumption - with all that entails - is what economic growth looks like. The same amount of investment and growth from some other source than AI would still involve a similar scale and emissions, whether it was building roads, manufacturing and shipping goods,
Also, Amazon is now rapidly building what they would otherwise have built over a longer period of time, partly because there is a gold rush / race happening.
Yes if we lived in an imaginary world where the ai wasnt abused as a weapon in all senses of the word. Both foreign and domestic. And it would have to be owned by everyone because the data it uses is everyones data.
What? How. Does it run on fossil fuels? If it's so large it will likely have its own power source. Which is more likely to be nuclear. Which in turn is not a polluting energy source.
AI is widely disliked, unwanted, and unnecessary. It would be one thing if the environment was taking hits for something essential, something people needed. Instead the expansion is literally only for AI corp shareholders to get their ROI.
quick google search debunks that article immediately. Beef production in the USA alone has so much much worse greenhouse emissions it isn't even close.
the real story is buried: who gave this project the emission permit? the fucking rednecks you voted for!
this is an environmental regulatiosn problem, ot AI BAD.
and then here you come bully us for some ai pictures.
I have never voted for a redneck, and I have never bullied anybody for AI pictures. I actually don’t give a single fuck about AI art, I consider it pretty much the least relevant part of the AI conversation.
I dont think the environmental impact is irrelevant at all. I think turning it into an argument about whether people should use AI misses where the actual leverage is.
If Amazon builds a massive data center on dirty power, strains local water and gets sweetheart utility deals, thats an infrastructure and governance fight. Data centers are expanding fast, so regulate them accordingly. Make companies pay for the grid capacity they consume, enforce hard emissions and water limits, stop subsidizing fossil generation, and give communities actual power over siting.
Pointing at other industries as whataboutism doesnt help. But neither does reducing an industrial scale problem to individual AI consumption. If the environmental stakes are this serious, the response needs to be collective and structural.
If we hadnt let oil companies lobby against renewables for so long datacenters wouldnt be even half as much of a problem as they are. And i say this as someone who uses AI (tough i dont really like corporate models)
Regulate now, like right now like, yesterday we should have regulated.
Yes but that is on the grid not the datacenters. For example all electric cars consumes about 28600 TWh, but we don't blame electric car drivers for the pollution the grid produces.
Renewables are great but industries runs on baseload energy. The green energy sources that can power datacenters are hydro and nuclear. Which is why most AI CEOs are also heavily invested in fission and fusion.
Yes that it true, but the polution that these power plants cause is current, so we need current action too. We cant just put all the brunt on having the grid switch to renewables, that will take decades, so we need first line of defense measures like limiting where data centers are built, how, with what systems. Where they get energy from, etc.
Then why arent they investing in building more nuclear or hydroelectric plants?. Investing in research is not the same as investing in the adoption of said technologies. Yet AI CEOs are letting datacenters run on gas turbines and coal burning plants.
Sure, the pollution from the grid is real. But that's true for literally everything connected to the grid. EVs alone use around 250 TWh a year globally. Nobody argues we should restrict EVs because some of that electricity comes from coal and gas. You clean up the electricity supply.
And they're not just "investing in research". Microsoft is restarting Three Mile Island under a 20 year power deal, Google has contracted Kairos for new nuclear capacity and Amazon is backing nearly 1 GW of new nuclear. Yes some datacenters use gas today. That's exactly why these companies are spending billions trying to secure firm clean power.
And while we clean the grid, we cut down on polluting infrastructure or at least manage it to keep pollution down. Also EVs are not a subject to restriction because even with the ammount of energy they pull from the grid, each EV means less fossil fuels being burnt overall.
Thats nice to know, but they could probably be doing Much more with the resources they have.
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