AI’s emissions are about to skyrocket even further

Since 2018, carbon emissions from U.S. data centers have tripled. In the 12 months to August 2024, data centers emitted 105 million tons of carbon dioxide₂accounting for 2.18% of national emissions (for comparison, emissions from domestic commercial airlines are approximately 131 million tons). About 4.59% of all energy used in the United States goes to data centers, a number that has doubled since 2018.

Artificial intelligence has been booming since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, and it’s difficult to pinpoint the extent to which artificial intelligence is responsible for this surge. That’s because data centers handle a lot of different types of data – in addition to training or pinging AI models, they do everything from hosting websites to storing photos in the cloud. However, researchers say AI’s share is sure to grow rapidly as nearly every sector of the economy attempts to adopt the technology.

“That’s a pretty big surge,” said Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at the Energy Innovation think tank who was not involved in the study. “There’s a lot of amazing analysis of how fast this exponential growth is going to happen. But in terms of determining efficiencies or different types of chips, the business is still in its early stages.

It is worth noting that the source of all these powers is particularly “dirty”. Because many data centers are located in coal-producing regions such as Virginia, the energy “carbon intensity” they use is 48% higher than the national average. The paper was published in arXiv It has not yet been peer-reviewed and found that 95% of data centers in the United States are built in places with dirtier power sources than the national average.

Falco Bargagli-Stoffi, the paper’s author, said there are other reasons besides being in coal country. “Dirty energy is available around the clock,” he said, and many data centers need it to maintain peak operations 24-7. “Renewable energy sources such as wind or solar may not be available.” Political or tax incentives and local resistance can also influence where data centers are built.

A critical shift in artificial intelligence means emissions from the sector could soon surge. Artificial intelligence models are rapidly moving from fairly simple text generators such as ChatGPT to highly complex image, video, and music generators. Until now, many “multimodal” models have remained in the research stage, but that is changing.

OpenAI releases video generation model sola The product opened to the public on December 9, and its website is still not functioning properly due to an influx of traffic from people eager to test it out. Competing models like Google’s Veo and Meta’s Movie Gen haven’t been publicly released yet, but if these companies follow OpenAI’s lead, as they have in the past, they may soon. Suno and Udio’s music generative models are growing (although litigation) and NVIDIA release Last month its own audio generator. Google is working on its Astra Project, this will be a video artificial intelligence companion that can talk to you about the surrounding environment in real time.