Behind AI Hype, Climate Consequences

What started as rivulets of hype, hope, and alarm over artificial intelligence have combined into a tsunami-level wave washing over the American consciousness. ChatGPT is the most downloaded application in history, AI stock prices are hitting record market highs, and the American public is giddy about its potential technological upsides and devastated by its role in mental health crises.

Less discussed but deeply important are the AI boom’s clear and present dangers to our environment, health, and wallets.

That lack of attention to these issues is exactly how President Donald Trump, Big Tech, and the oil and gas industry want it.

As Trump attacks climate progress on all fronts, his administration is in lockstep pushing for a fast-tracked AI data center boom fed by gas and coal.

It’s critical that AI become part of global climate negotiations—not as an escape hatch for how it could save the planet, but as an urgent threat to people, wildlife, and the atmosphere.

It may not be immediately obvious, but AI is a gift to the fossil fuel industry. That’s because AI’s massive energy use is giving fossil fuels a lifeline when they should be rapidly phased out in response to the climate emergency.

It’s a huge problem for world leaders as they gather in Brazil for this year’s annual global climate talks, known as COP30. In one of the biggest shifts since last year’s talks, data center expansion to feed energy-intensive AI is straining grids and leading companies and some countries to walk back domestic climate pledges.

The Trump administration has cited the power-hungry AI beast as one big excuse for abandoning climate efforts, even as the US disproportionately leads the world in data center pollution.

And the great AI energy suck is just getting started, with dozens of massive new data centers slated for construction across the country—and hundreds more around the world. Mark Zuckerberg says one Meta data center will be the size of Manhattan. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said recently, “I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.”

These data centers demand immense amounts of power, land, and water for cooling. As one point of comparison, a ChatGPT AI search consumes 10 times as much energy as a normal Google search.

Just how bad could data center expansion be for the climate? That’s what we set out to find in our report, Data Crunch: How the AI Boom Threatens to Entrench Fossil Fuels and Compromise Climate Goals.

We found that plans for US data center growth, set to be powered primarily by fossil gas, as well as notoriously dirty coal, could triple by 2035. That comes with a huge cost to efforts to preserve a livable planet and limit the deadly flooding, extreme heat, and destructive fires of the climate emergency.

Unchecked, the fossil-fueled data center expansion could account for 10% of US economy-wide emissions and 44% of the power sector emissions allowable to meet the US climate target under the Paris Agreement.

With a gas-fed AI boom, all other electricity-consuming sectors, like homes and buildings, would need to cut their emissions by 60% more to keep pace with that target, set by former President Joe Biden and still in effect under Paris Agreement terms.

Amid all the hype and seeming inevitability of AI dominance, human beings have a chance now to proactively consider what relationship we want with this technology—and the environmental price we’re willing to pay.

If new AI data centers were instead powered by renewables like solar and wind, they’d be only 4% of power sector emissions and would barely affect our ability to meet the US climate goal.

Despite Trump exiting the Paris Agreement, Biden’s target stands as the United States’ contribution to global efforts to combat climate change.

While Trump dismisses climate change as a “con job,” there is broad scientific agreement that every degree of global heating worsens its deadly, destructive effects on people and wildlife.

A study last month found that accelerating climate harms mean that half a million people now die every year from extreme heat—an average of one person a minute.

The unbridled expansion of data centers to feed AI will only further intensify such fatal consequences and others, including crop loss to drought, spread of disease, and loss of imperiled plants and animals.

These consequences are exactly what world leaders gathered in Belem, Brazil, for COP30 are trying to prevent, by limiting global heating by every fraction of a degree that they can. That goal can’t be achieved without serious guardrails on AI data center development.

It’s critical that AI become part of global climate negotiations—not as an escape hatch for how it could save the planet, but as an urgent threat to people, wildlife, and the atmosphere.

Before AI unleashes a fresh hell of global heating, countries should commit to zeroing out the emissions from data centers by using renewable energy and storage.

From Virginia to Tucson to Kosciuko County, Indiana, communities around the country have sprouted near-overnight campaigns to protect their water and electricity from being consumed by data centers and to prevent rate hikes to subsidize two of the wealthiest industries on Earth.

Besides playing defense, now is the time to be proactive and question whether data centers serve the public interest despite their many harms. If local communities still think so, they can pass strict regulations to ensure that data centers are powered fully by on-site renewable energy and batteries. If more power is needed, Big Tech companies can pay for residences to get rooftop solar and storage, heat pumps, and energy efficient appliances to free up capacity on the grid for data center neighbors.

Amid all the hype and seeming inevitability of AI dominance, human beings have a chance now to proactively consider what relationship we want with this technology—and the environmental price we’re willing to pay.

The COP30 climate talks will be a starting place for the world to look carefully at AI’s climate consequences. The tsunami of AI hype and the Trump destruction machine make for daunting foes. But they don’t have to wash away our resolve to leave this world better than we found it.