Can you be allergic to micellar water? How long do I need to wait to take more Advil? Will laying on my side help with nausea? Is it bad if my fingers hurt after I play the guitar? These are just a few examples of the questions I’ve asked ChatGPT in the past month — questions that could easily be searched up on the internet, yet I opted to ask artificial intelligence.
Generative AI models, especially ChatGPT, has become increasingly used among society and is now a convenient, normalized source of information. A Pew Research study, conducted in Dec. 2022, showed that 27 percent of Americans interact with AI several times a day. On a broader scale, ChatGPT alone is estimated to have 400 million users a week.
The concerns of AI’s increasing presence in our daily lives have been widely discussed: the fear that AI will replace people’s jobs, the overwhelming use of ChatGPT to cheat in schools and the overall unknown territory of such a new form of technology. However, an issue that often remains overlooked is the astounding environmental impact of deploying and using artificial intelligence.
AI isn’t all bad — while many have a negative outlook on the use of artificial intelligence, it was designed with positive intentions. With unique skills, AI has the ability to program, analyze data, machine learn and more, making it a fundamental factor in improving environmental challenges worldwide. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), AI is already taking action against climate issues by monitoring methane emissions, tracking air quality, measuring environmental footprints and more.
But what are the environmental consequences of the increasing use of AI? Paradoxically, even though AI was intended to improve modern technology, it simultaneously contributes to the demise of our planet.
Data centers, which are used to train and deploy AI services, are one of the largest factors contributing to AI’s carbon footprint. Each data center houses an enormous amount of electronic hardware, which requires an extreme consumption of energy in order to operate. An article by MIT News states that power requirements of data centers in North America have “increased from 2,688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatts at the end of 2023” and risen 460 terawatts globally, making data centers the 11th largest source of electricity consumption in the world.
Though there have been efforts to implement more renewable energy sources for these data centers, most of this energy is generated by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere. ChatGPT is estimated to emit 8.4 tons of carbon dioxide per year, as stated by an Earth.Org article, which is more than twice the amount from an individual. Such an enormous amount of energy needed to power data centers for the purpose of AI contributes to about 2.5 to 3.7 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a value that has already surpassed even that of the aviation industry.
With the rise of generative AI, the demand and production of data centers has grown expeditiously. According to an article by Forbes, the data center market in the United States has doubled in size since 2020. There are now thousands of data centers in the United States alone.
As well as energy consumption, a large amount of water is used in the production and deployment of AI models. As explained in another Forbes article, massive amounts of water are consumed at data centers with the purpose of dissipating heat, with around 9 liters of water being used per kWh of energy used. This translates to about 16 ounces — around one water bottle — of water used per AI prompt, according to the Washington Post. Water usage of AI is projected to hit 6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027. To put that into perspective, that’s around 2.6 million Olympic swimming pools, the annual water usage of 14.5 households combined or around half of the United Kingdom’s annual water usage.
While generative AI may have the intention of improving modern technology, its negative impacts on the environment must not be ignored. In the year 2025, global greenhouse gas emissions have already increased by 54 percent since 1990, and UN studies project that 30 nations will be water scarce in 2025, a 50 percent increase from 1990. It is imperative that action is taken now to check the consequences of the demand for artificial intelligence, or AI may do irreversible damage to our climate.
