A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play.
The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.
Looks like AI will eliminate any gains we have in climate change. Too bad for us.
Gotta remember that AI is going to solve the climate crisis! \s
Over time, it is. It’s eliminating the source. In Terminator, Matrix, and others they say that the AI took a split second to act, but our AI doesn’t have those connections. It’s working with what it’s got.
It’s scary how our corporate overlords watch all the distopian films and are like: Let’s turn that into a reality!
the most fucked up part about this is that it’s not like regular people account for more than a fraction of the AI usage, most of it is just other companies using it to replace workers or just… paying for AI usage instead of fucking paying a stock photo company instead…
i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations
Every negative article I read about AI is simply an attribution to capitalism. It’s incredibly funny.
it’s literally just mechanical looms all over again, this shit happens over and over and over and at no point do people learn that this will continue as long as we allow capitalism to persist.
Our planet is literally dying, and humankind is going to be decimated (at least) directly due to the actions of corporations.
Love to burn down an acre of rain forest to generate a picture of an ape.
you wouldn’t understand “progress”
Anything but paying for the labor of a person to draw such a picture.
Or (heaven forbid) learning to draw!
slaver mentality 101
Consider this: climate change is being accelerated at a time when we are overdue to reduce it and what we are getting out of it is plagiarism and wrong answers.
God damnit not this swill again. It’s not even close to triple, it’s like 15%. Read. The. Reports.
For real. Why does this misinformation keep spreading? I have the actual real numbers right in front of me now.
And it’s the same as what MIT Technology Review reported and what Google reported publicly.
The EU’s CSRD requires most of these companies to disclose their carbon emissions. So just go look it up, ya taints.
Could you cite the reports for us?
And then people were complaining about cryptocurrencies… Look at this AI joke… Come on…
ow nevermind, bitcoin mining alone is consuming 112.31 TWh annually (it’s a guess). While AI is using 29.2 TWh annually (also a guess).
I can guess too! With my guess, AI is already using 420 TWh annually!
What if we wouldn’t guess anything like this? This is not just not meaningful, but straight out misleading.
Well… the numbers were from Wired: https://wired.me/science/energy/ai-vs-bitcoin-mining-energy/
Maybe the Butlerian Jihad had a point.
Few months ago it was bitcoin mining. They both need curtailment for other reasons as well.
I am curious who buys generative AI services? The consumers seem to be people making memes or questionable porn with free services. It can’t prepare food, unblock drains or tile a bathroom. You can’t use it for anything like medicine, law or engineering where you would be professionally liable if it fucks up. How is it sustainable?
A lot of companies buy it so their employees have acres to it. Like Microsoft 365 copilot for example
My company buys it. No idea what they use it for since I work in IT and I don’t use it for anything.
It’s good for making up stories and making suggestions. I worked with chatGPT on how to power up a mothballed Galaxy Class starship. We created the procedure to bring the ship from inert and vacuumed to ready for warp flight.
Uhh, soo many datacenters run off wind. So this is pretty disingenuous
Tell me about it. In the Netherlands wind farms are built, and, on paper, these datacenter companies buy up all of the energy from them. Meanwhile, the reason why these wind farms were built is to burn less fossil fuels, but that won’t work now because of all the extra energy consumption.
You mean wind turbines.
This is a good thing. So wind turbine companies take that money and use it to build more wind turbines
What you call a good thing, I call green washing.
Power is only part of it. Concrete production is a huge greenhouse gas source.
U.S. vehicles currently emit 2 billion tons. So that’s very bad news.
However – I think 2030 is waaay too far in the future to predict anything about AI.
A few years ago was the Cryptomining today the IA
