The data center boom is a ticking carbon bomb, but not for the reasons you might think. New findings show that the real issue isn’t how much power data centers consume—though make no mistake that those needs are massive—but how much planet-warming emissions they will help the oil and gas industry unleash.
Fossil fuel companies have used various models for decades to figure out where to drill. Artificial intelligence is now promising to speed up that process by crunching more data, faster.
A study from two former Microsoft researchers found that AI could help boost global energy-related emissions by as much as 4.8 percent. That’s significantly higher than multiple projections of the emissions from data center energy use.
“The scale of this was staggering,” says researcher Will Alpine, who co-authored the peer-reviewed paper with his wife Holly and two others. Their findings show that the AI boom could be great news for fossil fuel profits and not-so-great news for the climate.
It’s no wonder some gas and oil firms—notably Chevron—are doing deals to power data centers and then using some of the computing capacity from those facilities to turbocharge their own operations.
Check out Molly Taft’s piece from Climate Desk partner Wired on the risks of fossil fuel companies using AI as a growth hack. And for even more context, see their piece on why a growing number of the gas plants powering data centers are particularly terrible for the climate. (Hint: the turbines.)
—Brian Kahn
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