The impact artificial intelligence has had on the environment has been nothing short of devastating. The data centers powering the boom have been spewing out a staggering amount of pollution by relying on fossil fuel-powered generators. And given the industry’s unrelenting appetite for more infrastructure supporting ever-more-resource-intensive AI models, the trend is only going to get worse from here.
It’s reached the point that AI is giving the fossil fuel industry a substantial leg up, as a new paper published in the journal NPJ Climate Action details. The authors found that the industry has been using AI to increase productivity, drill for more oil, and reap even greater profits, vastly outweighing any benefits from AI-enabled advances in the renewable energy sector.
Put simply, AI’s impact on the environment greatly exceeds emissions linked to data centers.
“Predominant analyses examine the relationship between datacenter energy demand, renewables optimization, and demand-side efficiencies, but insufficiently address how AI also reshapes fossil fuel supply economics,” wrote authors, led by former Microsoft managers turned sustainability researchers Will and Holly Alpine, who are married.
They concluded that AI’s “enabled emissions,” meaning additional pollution a new tech enables, “exceed avoided emissions,” or pollution reductions due to advances in renewable energy. Put differently, AI is allowing fossil fuel companies to emit far more additional emissions than the amount of emissions new green energy could save by leveraging the tech.
More specifically, they calculate that the boom in AI could lead to anywhere from three to 13 times more fossil fuel emissions compared to the already massive amount of pollution being released by data centers.
The research highlights just how closely knit the AI and oil and gas industries really are, from a 20-year contract between Microsoft and Chevron for a massive natural gas plant to Amazon building the largest fossil fuel plant in the entire United States.
“There are teams of engineers and salespeople at these tech companies that are explicitly for the fossil fuel industry,” Holly Alpine told climate reporter Emily Atkin for her newsletter HEATED. “They are engineers writing code explicitly in partnerships with oil majors to expand production.”
“It is difficult and frustrating for us to see the conversation around ‘the true climate impacts of AI’ just stop at operational emissions,” she added. “We cannot get across enough how important it is to include what [AI] is used for.”
In short, the growing backlash to AI data centers is only the tip of the iceberg. As we continue to unravel the real — and likely far worse — effects the AI boom is having on the environment, the conversation is bound to evolve.
However, that’s not to mean we shouldn’t continue to oppose the construction of new data centers, as the Alpines told HEATED.
To save us from being pushed “toward a climate-negative future,” the Alpines are now calling for tighter “guardrails” as the level of emissions continue to rise, straying us ever further from the path needed to meaningfully address the planet’s growing climate crisis.
More on AI and emissions: Amazon’s New AI Data Center Is So Enormous That It Appears It Will Become the Largest Single Source of Pollution in the United States