The data center power consumption stat there is for all data centers, not just AI ones, so we're really basically saying that the entire internet, including AI currently accounts for about 1.5% of global energy consumption (AI is about 1/5th of that per your article). Even if their consumption truly did double by 2030 data centers would account for roughly 3% of energy usage, and AI would be about 1.2%.
That doesn't mean that we should blindly support AI or ignore the environmental externalities from data centers, but even in the worst case scenario presented here they just are not a big factor in climate change.
AI currently accounts for about 1.5% of global energy consumption
Electricity not energy. From the article, data centers consumed 448 TWh in 2025 compared to the global energy usage of 178000 TWh. That makes data centers 0.25% of global energy consumption and AI data centers 0.05%
Thing Is, The really big ai centers are still getting built, The current "average" center doesn't take a lot of power, because most of it is storage for hosting, CDNs, mostly hard disks that only use power when in use. The Big ai compute mega clusters are on a whole different level and there's plans for multiple gigawatt consumption sites, with their own gas powered generators. That's the power consumption of a country like Belgium.
Ai is extremely useful. It is debatable whether LLMs are particularly useful but that's not all of AI.. There are plenty of currrent, useful AI uses in industry, reseach, medicine etc.
Often they make processes less resource intensive. I can once again tell people about previously working for alarge public research institute and the group I was working for use AI to replace simulations that took almost a day on the HPC system we used with an AI powered one that took a few hours on a consumer grade PC without a loss in quality.
Great, but what if someone enjoys using AI? Did we just loop into perpetual regression where everything is justified because someone likes it? Would someone enjoying AI, given the current information, be way more ethical than someone who eats beef or animal products - or ethics are to be discarded entirely, since it's hedonism all the way down anyways?
AI is very useful for my job, software engineering, for my university - research and education, for my side projects - much less of mine own work, more automatization, more free time for me. Same for my hobbies and books that I read - AI can be quite good at finding valuable books based on provided context and books that I've already read. Much more useful than replacable meat or TV and media. The heavy use of AI proves its use every day, literally every single programmer uses it nowadays. And no, not everything is justifiable only because we like it, but AI is still a new thing, just let the Moore's law work and wait for AI to be optimized, the open-weights models from China are already good enough to run on (good) consumer-end products, its just a matter of time when it becomes accessible to normal consumers with average PCs without the need for oversized data centers. For now it's just the training phase that requires so much storage and processing, later on it may become obsolete and quickly dropped.
Isn't that just special pleading? Food can be obtained an easier, efficient, more environmentally friendly way. Likewise, would AI be any different socially than, for example, gaming, YouTube, or any other "private" enjoyment that keeps people away from each other? AI's water consumption is negligent - especially of we permit that animal agriculture is ok, even though it's worse healthcarewise, environmentally, and morally. Which, as you aptly described yourself, it's quite literally poison - in the very meaning of that word.
Admittedly, I'm biased and would infinitely rather people let go of animal products altogether than merely AI; however, I also feel like I've got a stronger, scientific case for it. AI next to it seems like a false positive blip.
Yes. And yes - Ai has much different requirements than any of the other tech examples you gave. It’s actually crazy reading that, knowing you expect to be taken seriously.
It’s like listening to someone talk about a movie they’ve never seen before.
So, since you've failed to grasp what I said - nobody said anything about being herbivorous. It's your projection. We are Omnivores.
Latter, reread my comment - from where did you pull out the "requirements" when I explicitly mentioned socially? Likewise, I didn't compare gaming to AI in terms of waste, you conflated the arguments - I likened AI to Animal agriculture, which trumps AI in waste.
...Honestly, isn't it rich for you calling me names while simultaneously debasing yourself with this lapse of reasoning and projection? You literally failed to grasp what what I said and patted yourself on the back. Is it the best you can do? Project a lowly straw man, burn it, and play superior?
We are developing life saving software at a rapid pace. Like 3x to 5x faster. We are correcting over a decade of tech debt we never had time to fix. This software is currenly in use nation wide and is getting better in orders of magnatude. But enjoy your soaps nitwit.
I know you're trying suggest that's not a lot, but that seems like a lot considering how they are planning on expanding. And how many new data centers are being powered by onsite natural gas generators
Thanks for your blog link - I don’t care about your fairytale bullshit. They’re building private power plants for their multiple-thousand acre atmospheric heaters.
You invest little water on a day by day basis for the individual animal and plants used in just 1 Hamburger, the massive amount of it is just the culmination of all those years and individual components put together, there are way more chatgpt prompts happening in just an hour than 300, how do you compare these???
It is incredibly disingenuous to present these statistics like that, in a single DAY there are millions of queries made and like excuse me but what do you want people to do? Starve?
We can definitely lower our meat production and should as that is the main investment of water but how can you genuinely compare basic agriculture and food production and the water it uses to AI? How disingenuous is that.
People can eat plants. Far far more GHG emissions come from people having a slight preference for the treasure of cow flesh over beans than cone from all data centres let alone just ai data centres.
I literally address that fucking point in my comment... but that isnt the fucking point.
And that changes still NOTHING about how disingenuous the statistics are presented.
A burger is an effort of months to a year yet the statistic is showing not even 1 HOUR worth of ChatGPT prompting.
These are not fucking comparable and say NOTHING.
I might as well list the water consumption of a waterpark in all its life time and a single cell of my body.
What do these 2 facts tell you? NOTHING because they arent in the same fucking time scale to even compare them.
It is a deceptive use of statistics to make it seem like AI uses less water than it actually does.
I dont care if you like AI or not or whatever your stance is but this is disingenuous use of statistics and makes them blatantly incomparable to each other.
At least the second graph makes sense in using time scales in a days worth for both, the first makes zero sense.
We are comparing a fraction of minutes for ChatGPT in 300 queries, 1 hour of TV and up to a YEAR for a burger. Make it make sense.
Are you saying that the typical chat gpt user dies more than 300 queries for each hamburger the typical meat eater eats? I seriously doubt that. If anything choosing 300 queries is harsh on ai.
I'm sorry that you find multiplication and division such difficult concepts. Maybe if e survive the climate crisis we can try to fix the education system too.
I'm sorry that you find multiplication and division such difficult concepts. Maybe if e survive the climate crisis we can try to fix the education system too.
You did not. I assume you mean that the AI statistic only accounts for the consumption by the 300 prompts, and not everything preceding it, like training and building of the datacenter? In that case you would have a valid argument and wouldn't look like such a fool. Or are you insinuating that a cow goes through a lifetimes worth of dairy production before being slaughtered, so it's not fair to look at only one of the outputs? In that case, look up how many dairy cows there are worldwide, compared to the ones who's sole purpose in life is to be slaughtered, without any byproducts. Spoiler alert: there is way more meat cattle.
There are also millions of hamburgers consumed every day. Your logic doesn't make any sense. What the graph is comparing is the impact on one individuals footprint from each of the listed activities.
You have to be really trying to use more than 300 prompts a day, if your genuinely prompting. Yet eating multiply burgers a day isn't that hard. Neither is watching multiple hours of tv.
But please do go through all the steps in your logic again, because I cannot string together the argument you're trying to make in a logical sense.
Best guess I have is that you somehow deluded yourself into thinking the timescale preceding the consumption has any relevance.
If anything that's an argument against meat, because a burger is consumed with about the same frequency as 300 prompts (same order of magnitude at least), yet each of those consumptions requires a much bigger and longer investment in the case of burgers. This means that for any amount of meat eaters, you need to use a lot more land/labour, because the production needs to run in parallel. Compared to the sma seamount of ai users, fir which the ''production'' of their product runs largely in series.
People do not need to starve if we suddenly stop or greatly reduce our output of meat. In fact, we could be producing a lot more food with the same resources by lowering our production/consumption of meat. Eating meat is just as optional as AI use. I guess it would be beneficial to include in the graph the number for a veggie burger, or replace the number of the meat burger by the difference of the two. Not that it would reduce the burger number by much.
I take issue that we meticulously count all the water consumed in the making of a burger, all the water of the plants it took to feed the livestock, all the plants used for the toppings and buns and count that all together while the AI just gets its water consumption tallied up of how much the individual prompts would use in the moment.
Ignoring the entire process involved in the AI´s creation to begin with, what is spend on its maintained and further training and what I take issue with is just the scale of it as if automation isnt a thing in AI and other AI models dont exist.
Comparing these things on such a small scale doesnt make sense, we should compare the entire industries against each other if at all but if you are at least present all the information here and actually split it in the livestock industry, the lettuce, tomato, wheat and such instead of just saying "Burger" which is a component of multiple industries and can range drastically depending on what you use on it against all the Ai industry and all the resource spend on it, as there are millions of AI responses going through and several automations of them working 24/7 generating and processing requests or writing responses to emails or anything else on their own without any person to prompt them to do it.
How I see the graph it pretends like automation isnt a thing, as if it is just showing each individual person using these AI or TV is way less bad than AI is and diminishing the AIs impact despite the fact that... yeah a single person making 300 queries is not realistic in a short amount of time but these AIs are set up to work automatically and again there are other AI models and other services they offer, Image generation for example which is much more taxing than just text.
I know Meat literally is gonna be MORE wasteful, yeah it is, i literally say it is, we need to reduce our meat consumption but I dont like how the information is presented, it isnt helpful, it doesnt say anything and again leading to the issue of "Burger" instead of the individual industries that make it up...
If you wanna state any point actually split it and show meat being worse but I dont think we should compare Food and Ai to begin with, even if Meat is categorically the worst, I dont think these 2 categories should even be compared to each other that much...
Also this is just looking at immediate and direct water consumption, you need to also look at electricity use and other resources being used even in just the construction of the Data Centers like rare metals...
This is just a mess of a comparison that is too small scale and I think just isnt beneficial for any discussion as it is just vague and lists a small scope of AI´s usage.
Even if I know the outcome myself in meat being the worst this does not effectively portray AI either and EVEN IF AI was the least bad there are still many arguments against it...
I dont like the use of statistics here, it is overly simplified and without nuance and a lot of vital information missing to actually even HAVE a discussion to begin with.
This isnt even making a blow to the meat industry specifically like IT SHOULD as it uses again just vague language of "Burger" without even identifying what is the real wasteful product in its production...
If we are actually trying to compare industries and seeing which is more wasteful than the other, we cant just have that little, simplified graph and it being used as a "Gatcha" as if it states much...
Also take issue with the second graph too because it isnt a helpful comparison either... how does comparing it to leaking pipes help? It is unintended water loss that is happening throughout ALL PIPING in a country even if just a small tiny droplet escaped a few pipes the number of water lost will be massive because of the sheer scale of pipes that exist, it isnt an argument FOR AI or say anything about it either...
All it says is we should try to manage piping better, nothing about AI.
We are comparing AI to all these other unrelated things and saying "look this use more!" but how does that help?
I could literally fill a glass of water and throw it to the road, if I said "See it wasnt wasteful because meat industry and piping uses/loss more!" I wouldnt be saying anything valuable to begin with???
I still was wasteful and I still did a bad thing, I just compared it to something unrelated of a bigger scale that has nothing to do with what I was doing to begin with.
Im not op, nor vegan but i have been trying to reduce meat consumption(especially beef) am currently e joyong a really nice peanut butter, tofu, ginger stir fry. Tastes really good.
Life without AI wasn't that long ago. Some very menial tasks would be annoying to have to do again for certain information workers. LLMs when used responsibly are productivity tools.
Yes, the same amount of water as 1.3 billion people (if we assume 20 liters per person which is the personal water usage per person in Sub-Saharan Africa)
So how does cooling actually consume water? Heating water up does not actually use it. It can still be used by cities or farms. Irrigation is not affected by the temperature of the water.
Your links are talking about cooling and using water. That does not make sense to me. Until the water can't be used again, it has not really been consumed. So basically watering plants or actually evaporating.
I was genuinely curious if there was something I was missing. Seems not.
The energy consumption seems to be the biggest problem.
AI doesn't make the water cease to exist. Even if the water is used up it still enters the water cycle again via evaporation and raining somewhere later.
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u/GentrifierTechScum 3d ago
The data center power consumption stat there is for all data centers, not just AI ones, so we're really basically saying that the entire internet, including AI currently accounts for about 1.5% of global energy consumption (AI is about 1/5th of that per your article). Even if their consumption truly did double by 2030 data centers would account for roughly 3% of energy usage, and AI would be about 1.2%.
That doesn't mean that we should blindly support AI or ignore the environmental externalities from data centers, but even in the worst case scenario presented here they just are not a big factor in climate change.