AI utilizes immense amounts of energy, contributing to climate change.

by Lilah Boig ‘26

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacts increasingly more aspects of people’s lives, many are aware of concerns about it, from students having easier access to cheating, to privacy concerns as companies and governments harness it. However, the environmental impacts of AI often go unnoticed.

In order to produce AI, it has to be run through a large facility, called a data center, where the infrastructure used to train and send out AI services is housed. These centers consume enormous amounts of energy and to obtain that energy, they often burn fossil fuels, releasing harmful greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere and contributing to pollution.

Any addition to the amount of fossil fuels in the environment worsens global warming, but   according to the Yale School of environment it’s predicted that by 2026 AI data centers in the United States will consume as much energy as all of Japan does today. The more AI is used and in demand, this will only exponentially increase. “A request made through ChatGPT, an AI-based virtual assistant, consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google Search,” reported the International Energy Agency.

In addition to the tremendous amount of energy used by AI, it’s hardware also requires a lot of precious materials, including “cobalt, silicon, gold, and many other metals,” reports Yale Professor Yuan Yao, who is part of a National Science Foundation-led research initiative aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of computing.

Many of these metals are imported from all over the globe, primarily from China and South American countries. While the United States is pushing for new initiatives to have local mining, it nonetheless takes billions of dollars from the economy and disrupts land around it. Almost every mining ground releases harmful toxins into the soil and uproots the habitats previously there. Although AI is predicted to be able to be used to streamline some mineral mining expeditions, the process of gaining the materials to construct AI in the first place adds harmful mining grounds to the earth’s environment.

A more local concern of AI is the amount of water necessary to keep the production centers running due to the extreme amount of heat released from the large amounts of energy consumption. According to a study done by the Washington Post in 2024, “a 100 word email done through ChatGPT once weekly for a year by 1 out of 10 working Americans requires 435,235,476 liters of water.”  These levels of water consumption take away from the finite amount of fresh water the world has access to. They also pull from the local water sources where the data centers are located, driving up water bills for residents.

While AI presents itself as modern technology that will propel humans into the future, the damage it is doing to the environment will accelerate climate change. Due to AI’s rapid development, it’s hard for people to keep up with all of the facts on the effects; but no matter what these new “AI footprints” will certainly have even more lasting effects on Earth.