I posted a similar topic early today but worded it wrong that was my mistake. I’m genuinely curious how people have reached to this point and what they hope to achieve after. I understand getting rid of AI/LLM is the obvious one. What do you think we should do to get to that goal or your personal goal.
Total Datacenter energy use globally is about 1.5% of total Electricity use, which electricity usage itself only makes up about 20% of total global energy use. All Datacenter use isn’t even AI use, it’s every single datacenter holding up the internet from Netflix to Amazon to the Wix page created for your home business.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/data-centers-share-electricity-demand?country=~OWID_WRL
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
So again I assert (with sources that back me up) that AI energy use/pollution is a small fraction of a single percent of overall use.
You’ve been lied to, now you need to ask WHY you’re being lied to about AI energy use and pollution being a problem.
You’re also absolutely wrong about heating and transportation being necessities in their current form. There are real choices you can make to drastically reduce your footprint on the environment including things like living in a smaller home, or with more people under the same roof. Those choices can quite literally reduce your individual heating requirements by 70-90%, and often those housing options are located in higher density urban locations where public transit, walking, and cycling are significantly easier to do. Practically everyone in the world could live in Cities and realize these efficiencies, there’s no real reason stopping that from happening other than personal choice. People in North America have just normalized this ultra-spread out suburban bullshit that’s literally costing us the planet.
Why are you guessing when there is a lot of information available?
https://www.hanwhadatacenters.com/blog/what-are-the-power-requirements-for-ai-data-centers/
AI data center power demand will surge 160% by 2030, requiring 68 gigawatts of capacity compared to 10 gigawatts in 2025.
1 gigawatt is equivalent to about the energy usage for 800,000 homes. That is 8 millions homes right now projected to be 54 million homes of electricity in the next 4 years an increase of 580%
You have the gal to try and blame a single end user for their consumption when faced with this? You are clearly being disingenuous.
How much pollution does 68 gigawatt make!? Anywhere from 300-600 million metric tons of C02. This doesn’t include all the other pollution this energy generation will make. Just the C02.
“China makes one-third of all global carbon dioxide emissions, emitting roughly 13 billion metric tons annually. By contrast the United States, emits about 4.6 billion metric tons a year.”
Once again, just the C02 and wow. I am sure it is all the suburban populations fault in the US. Man you act like a corporate shill trying to blame pollution on the individual to shift the blame. Acting so dumb it hurts.
https://medium.com/@brendacovarrubias/carbon-footprints-the-individual-vs-the-corporate-giant-165b0c75dd11
“according to a groundbreaking 2017 report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Climate Accountability Institute, just 100 companies were responsible for over 70% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.”
People need to do their part to reduce waste and people in North America definitely produce more than average. Pretending they are the problem is pure bullocks though.
You simply don’t seem to understand scale.
Lets use your article’s number. 68 Gigawatts of capacity required Globally, which is a little under 600 Terawatt hours per year. Global electricity production is around 29,000TWh Global total energy consumed per year (including non-electricity sources) is about 150,0000 to 160,000TWh
That puts AI use at about 2% of electricity use, and about 0.38% of total energy consumption. It’s quite literally a fraction of 1% even by your own numbers.
Your China argument math is bad as well. You can remove a billion people from China’s population, and they would still have more people than the US. They have 4.2x more people, and have only 2.8x as many carbon emissions.
I just explained the scale. Saying 2% is a nonsensical and reductionist argument that ignores the projected increase and the reality we don’t actually need AI at all.
It is not my math dude. If you want to argue the experts take it up with them, not me.
China produce 3 times as much pollution. Are you saying their 300 million rural farmers produce this pollution!? You are acting impossibly dumb right now.
The problem is industry, it always has been. Your ignorance to this issue and trying to shift the blame is pathetic.
That’s the projected increase from YOUR OWN FUCKING SOURCE by 2030, and it’s not 2%, it’s 0.38% of global energy use.
You’re clearly moving the goalposts because you recognize you’ve lost. I know it, you know it, and you’re still choosing to be mad about it instead of mad that global meat production uses somewhere between 12% and 20% of global energy usage. We could all literally start eating vegetarian, and save somewhere between 31x and 52x more energy than AI datacenters are projected to use. You could eat vegetarian just one day a week, and you’d still save somewhere around 5x as much energy.
You don’t practice what you preach, you’re a hypocrite.
There is no goalpost to move. You want to blame pollution on US suburbanites as a way to discredit the environmenal impact of AI datacenters. I pointed out you are full of shit. You have no rebuttal.
I said that US citizens create more pollution and everyone should do their part. This is a fucking given.
Meanwhile 70%+ of pollution comes from industry. Your inability to see the bigger picture is stunning to say the least.
I’m not full of shit. Suburbanites have been blasting carbon into the atmosphere for a century at a rate the AI datacenters could only dream of. You’ve given no evidence to prove otherwise while I backed up my numbers.
Industry exists so that humans can consume. There is no industry on the planet who’s production (and energy use/pollution) can’t be directly or indirectly attributed to a human customer.
You buy the electricity that’s generated from the natural gas power plant. The pollution to produce and burn that is yours. Your car is made of metals that produced pollution and used energy (which also produced pollution) to extract and refine. That pollution is yours. The energy that went into rendering Toy Story 5, and building the movie theater, and growing the popcorn. That’s all yours.
Stop blaming industry, industry doesn’t exist unless people buy their products. You make the choices with your wallet.
Yes you are. You are an apologist for corporations. Pathetic. You have not disproven one thing I have said.
Industry wastes and produces products we don’t need. Take cooking pots and the forever chemicals fiasco. Corporations developed cheaper disposable cookware and in doing so poisoned every single human on the planet. Was this suburbanites fault? Fuck no. Corporations drove the adoption not the other way around to make MORE Money.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2022/01/31/climate-change-fossil-fuel-industry-individual-responsibility
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-people-are-blamed-for-climate-change
Take recycling plastic for our second example. Companies fucking knew recycling plastic was not feasible but they created an entire campaign around it to blame the consumer.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
You are acting so fucking ignorant it isn’t funny.
You literally just admitted that people got tricked by a company through propaganda to buy their products, while people knew and said there was a problem, ignored those people, and bought the products anyways. Then blamed the company.
It must be so easy to live your life in such ignorance. You never have to think hard about anything, just believe the marketing campaigns and ignore everything else.
This is exactly the same situation. You’re being lied to about AI, there is literally massive amounts of money flowing into anti-AI marketing right now, and instead of asking why anyone would spend money on that, you just accept it as truth because it doesn’t come from a company.
Yes, and me burning tires in my backyard accounts for an even smaller portion of global emissions, so why does my HOA make such a big deal of it?
Care to explain your logic that would make those things similar?
I’m pretty sure AI running in a datacenter isn’t causing someone to have an asthma attack, or forcing them to close their windows to avoid a horrific smell.
https://tennesseestar.com/justice/federal-class-action-lawsuit-claims-xai-turbines-powering-memphis-area-data-centers-caused-nuisance-for-mississippi-residents/tpappert/2026/06/11/
A) That datacenter is breaking the law, and the government isn’t enforcing it. The government absolutely should shut them down.
B) That’s only a single datacenter, we’re discussing Global usage and trends, not individual situations. As far as I know that’s the only datacenter doing that. There’s individual idiots who burn tires in their backyard too.