Generative AI is a climate disaster
Remember a couple years ago when everyone was talking about how Bitcoin alone was using as much energy as a medium-sized country to enable rampant speculation and financial scams? The demand was so high in some jurisdictions that it was keeping fossil-fuel power plants from being taken offline, and even reactivating some defunct polluting generation infrastructure. Crypto’s environment toll was rightfully seen as unconscionable to many people following the industry. But the generative AI boom is taking it to a whole new level.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in December 2022, the entire tech industry has reoriented itself to try to get a boost from the interest in generative AI and many sectors beyond have pretended they’re doing something with artificial intelligence (AI) too in the hopes of increasing their share price. But if there are any winners from the AI hype, it’s the companies running the data centers — especially Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — and those making the chips that power it all. Nvidia is the standout example in that category, given its ascent to become one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world and the questions that’s prompted about the AI bubble.
All those generative AI tools are incredibly computationally intensive, which means they require a lot of dedicated hardware within massive hyperscale data centers owned by the cloud oligopoly, and all that computing power requires a immense amount of water and electricity to keep it running. If you’ve followed tech investment news over the past year, you’ve been seeing the effect of that as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have dropped billions of dollars every few weeks on new communities around the world for new data center projects.
