Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030
The United States emitted 4.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024.
So by 2030 the AI industry CO2 release might be 0.9% of total US emissions.
That ‘almost’ in “Almost Incomprehensible” is doing a lot of work there.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
I love Lemmy math nerds and honestly appreciate how there’s always at least one to put things in perspective for those of us who worked really fucking hard to get a C in college algebra. Cheers.
But…but…but… the RAGE! With a measured approach to topics like that, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUEL THE RAGE!!!11
.9% from a single source is RIDICULOUS though
Ok how much is beef farming accountable for
A huge amount too, 37.9%
But more than one thing can be bad a time, a novel idea, I know
And how many beef farms are there compared to data centers? A lot of a lot more.
If a tiny amount of physical space can do such a large amount of pollution, that’s a worry, when the plan is to increase the amount of them.
Well, sure, but when everyone loses their fucking minds about the tiniest thing, that even requires us to buy all the lies from billionaires about how much the build out will be, while having never done anything about the biggest thing they could personally change, it starts sounding mightily hypocritical.
It seems like the personal responsibility to boycott polluting and unnecessary industries is limited to whatever doesn’t require any personal effort from the person speaking.
Napkin math:
- 40% of americans are very or extremely concerned about AIs environmental impact
- To save 34 million tonnes of CO2e, you need about 5.2 million vegans from now until 2030
- So only 5% of ONLY the complainers would need to go vegan to make up for this “tremendous” impact
- That’s 2% of all americans
That’s the thing we’re even attacking random strangers online for. The thing that we pretend is going to bring about the end times. But sure, veganism is the extreme position…
By the way, what other resources are we saving?
- Water — about 8.8 trillion gallons (~33 billion m³)
- Land — around 1–1.5 million acres of forest/land
- Animals — roughly 8 billion animals including fish and shellfish
More than one thing can be bad.
Why don’t we do both? Less AI, Less Meat
Also, I’m not American, don’t insult me by assuming I’m one
Or, just eat less meat and you can still have AI
Sounds like a bad solution to me
or have double meat and no ai.
So less food variety and I get trash for the trade, are you the White run merchant buying any random crap the Dragonborn drags in by any chance?
Much more realistic: 6% of amicans that eat mostly vegan
12% of Americans that often choose a vegan meal multiple times per week, seems realistic too.
A quarter of Americans eating more chicken because it’s better for the environment is even more realistic. Chicken is tasty!
Personally I’ll never go Vegan simply out of spite because no matter what is being discussed there’s ALWAYS some asshole inserting veganism into the topic.
Veganism might be great for the environment, but as long as you(they) continue to act worse than especially obnoxious Jehovah’s Witnesses, veganism can go fuck itself.
If I devoured one cow every time some vegan asshole spoke up in a thread that was on a completely different topic, cows would be extinct.
So you’re a childish contrarian asshole, who cares
Finally looked in a mirror eh?
I’m not vegan and yours is a shitty take, sorry to have to tell you this.
Too much too.
But muh brisket…
I’m sure that my argument isn’t bullet-proof, but raping animals, raising their babies based on the profit you can make out of processing their corpses and running an endless ad cycle and bribe system aimed at making people want to participate in and perpetrate this practice of cynical violence on sentient beings doesn’t scale well.
PS: I’m not even a vegetarian, but the argument may be unpleasant in terms of form, not of content.
Consider how rapidly they have been built, and the capitalists’ plans to make many many more. Now also consider the state of the planet’s ecology and the already terrible effects of climate change.
To me, it’s incomprehensible that regular people haven’t already revolted against the death spiral the capitalist class has put us on.
Can you name a moment in time when regular people did stand in solidarity and revolt against something that wasn’t already at the point of causing them grave, direct, unavoidable, and consistent harm?
Abolitionists are an easy example.
Now if you mean a majority of people, yeah not really. But people in general, it happens.
I present to you…the French.
The French that started by beheading kings and nobles… and shortly after anyone who had a slightly different opinion? The French who shortly after that madness had a new Emperor? THAT French?
To me it seems the root of the problem is that humanity depends on fossil fuels for energy.
AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO2 emisions.
Lond tsory short, humanity needs to start getting it’s energy from non CO2 emmiting sources (solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear).
“AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO2 emisions.”
A useful perspective is to reverse how we frame the causative logic here; the fossil fuel industry is contributing to the AI data centre madness. There’s a lot of evidence of fossil fuel executives and lobbyists pushing for AI because it helps to justify their existence in a world where renewable energy isn’t just cleaner, it’s cheaper.
What this means is that we have two problems to solve when it comes to CO2 emissions:
- Humanity’s apparent level of dependence on fossil fuels, when accounting for deliberately wasteful endeavours like mega data centres. and
- Humanity’s actual level of dependence on fossil fuels. This is higher than it should be and requires some changes to society to improve, but it’s not nearly as high as it might seem at a glance.
These are both problems we need to solve, but the method is different for esch
Listen, an AI waifu is worth the increased speed of destruction to the planet.
You: “How much will this speed up our doom?”
Your waifu: “Calculating… oh, it’s actually less than 1%.”
tears in your eyes the Old Yeller soundtrack starts playing
I probably should have /s this comment. I don’t have or want at AI waifu. If I’m wrong please say so, but it sounds like you’re nbd’ing AI waifus because they aren’t the worst offender.
P.S. Please cite ya sources for this 1% number.
P.S. literally the comment you were initially responding to sources it.
“AI is a tool stop being a luddite” mfs when being exposed to this reality
To make AI data centers sustainable with solar and batteries costs about 10% of the price of the base hardware. The AI hype is still insane but we can have a little AI.
Man I want your supplier for batteries and panels tbh.
A single DGX B300 that could run Kimi for a few concurrent users, uses 14 kW. Costs about 500k. Assuming you live far enough from the equator to have seasons, you’ll have about 8 hours of daytime at the worst points of the year (less at my latitude for an example, we get ~6 hour days in the dead of winter, with sun angles below 10 degrees and sunshine available… not every week)
Even in a slightly less extreme location, You’d be looking at roughly a 100 kW array to fill the battery and power that one server reliably like when there’s clouds, about 300 kWh battery capacity to get through long nights. Easily 6 figures total cost, maybe 20-40% of the server itself. This assumes no electricity used for cooling, so it’s very much back of the envelope math, reality could be much worse or a tiny bit better depending on your latitude.
A single DGX B300 that could run Kimi for a few concurrent users, uses 14 kW.
Huh? 1400 TDP = 1.4 kW. This is official I believe.
And maybe my sources are off but: “As of July 2026, a single B300 GPU purchased outright runs about $53,000 (Spheron Network, July 5, 2026)” https://tech-insider.org/nvidia-blackwell-gpu-pricing/
Uh you’re right, you need about 4x so 270 kWh over the day, which requires about 270 / 6 * 24 = ~1000kW. With about 175€/kWp panels that is another 175 thousand plus installation. And something like 4000m². But that is all the energy costs for 30 years up front. The bigger constraint is the land use then.
Looking at the actual numbers (less than 1%) other commentors are posting as opposed to clickbait headlines, I’m not seeing the issue.
I’m exhausted of all this. The data centers have been so pervasive that some communities have been thinking about rationing electricity to get around the requirements. That’s… a dystopia future if Ive ever seen one.
The politicians of those communities have failed their constituents.
When a data center permit is applied for, it should be weighed against the state of the grid. If there’s not enough production, it should not be allowed unless they also build a bunch of electricity production capacity, which needs to come online first.
There are instances where this could actually be a net benefit for the grid. Right now in my country, power prices go negative at peak sunlight hours in the summer because we have nothing to do with all that electricity. If you produce solar, gotta disconnect from the grid at those points. A reliable consumer working 24/7 would help even things out for the consumption side of the grid math.
Not that I want them in my country, we have a very dirty grid (shale plants, yay) and live far enough north that solar only works for about 7-8 months a year. But somewhere more moderate in terms of solar availability, it would be fine. Here we need more consumption in the summer and less in the winter.
The politicians of those communities have failed their constituents.
Sure, but have they failed their own bank accounts? Need to ask the important questions…
Hyperbole is hyperbole. I refuse to fall for bullshit just because it’s aligned with my views and opinions.
I personally think it’s bullshit that these things are happening to begin with, not that people are ringing the alarm to our new reality. The latter is just us doing our part to fix this.
Note that the negative impact of these facilities are, by designed, concentrated on the communities that get stuck with them. The overall percentage has to be considered in the context of them focusing that impact into relatively small, super dense footprints.
Also, the percentage is higher than 1%, and in the US is about 5%. This reflects the current situation that the AI companies lament is just too constrained on them, with ambitions of getting to 20% if circumstances allow them to build up the way they want. So it’s already somewhat significant, especially with the way it gets concentrated, and further they want to bump it up at least four fold beyond what they’ve managed to do so far.
In anticipation of that, energy strategies that planned to be more tame and grow by renewables got pushed aside in favor of more natural gas, and especially portable power generation which tends to be more polluting.
And when the AI bubbles bursts and the memory is spent it’s all going to be e-waste
You’re kidding yourself. They’re going to be bailed out by our fascist oligarchies, with contracts to use the data centers for totalitarian mass surveillance “to protect our freedom and national security”.
Except the bailout at this point is more money than exists, you’d have to print so much money as to cause instant hyper inflation and cause an even worse economic crash that would take AI with it anyway.
The data centers will be deemed more necessary to keep track of all the possible dissidents caused by the hyper inflation
For a while, I thought their end-game was simply to get “too big to fail” before the bubble burst and get that bailout. But you are right - they either overshot or have some other idea in mind because now they are too big to bailout.
Not if you organize and do something against it
Hey, at least we’ll be able to make one last upgrade before we die.
Oh my sweet summer child…
Headline is very sensational. The article says the estimates greenhouse emissions are ~24-44 million metric tons, which is about .69% of the estimated emissions of the entire country, according to the EPA estimate of 6343 million metric tons.
Less than 1% of all emissions is hardly incomprehensible.
The source the article draws from also says they could reduce the emissions by 73% and water usage by 86% range with proper infrastructure, so that’s cool.
I personally believe the political and socioeconomic impact I’d far worse. We’re being shown very clearly how easily bought out local governments and regulatory agencies are. Explaining why the proper infractructure to resolve these data center issues is so difficult to enforce.
to be fair, the scale of pretty much any global industry is incomprehensible to most people
It’s true, I can not understand how all grocery stores constantly have fruit and vegetables available.
That always blows my mind, still. If you ever grew cherry tomatoes, you know how long it takes and how much it yields. Even the smalltest corner super market has cherry tomatoes, every day of the year. It’s not even a necessity, it’s just there.
Yeah, and most the time they dont taste good
Obviously the AI rollout should be slowed down and AI use regulated, like stopping any replacement of workers by AI.
But China is set to win the AI race with their open weight models on par with the current frontier models. And they are building nuclear power and solar and wind like no tomorrow. And they just started to produce sodium ion batteries to solve the grid storage problem.
Spurned by the embargo they are developing more efficient algorithms and “Extreme UV lithography” to catch up to the embargoed chips. The neoliberal model of the west is now falling behind even the high tech sectors.
In case anyone is curious it takes 8 Nvidia B300 cards to run this Kima K3 frontier model yourself (2.8 trillion parameters), costs about half a million. For a big corporation or institutions even in the global south that is relatively cheap and that is the top tier option for running a frontier model. Including complete data sovereignty. Using AMD will be cheaper, and prices will go down once China catches up in like 2030. And you could run that on solar panels and batteries and regenerative water cooling. 8x 1.4kW x24 so maybe 300 kWh LiFePo4 battery so another 50k.
To power one complete AI server you’d need about 134 m² in solar panels which are basically free these days.For solar panels you’d need about 270 / 6 * 24 = ~1000kW. With about 175€/kWp panels that is another 175 thousand plus installation. And something like 4000m². Plus chargers, and large public pool to cool those 270kW. But that is all the energy costs for 30 years up front. The bigger constraint is the land use then.
So basically less than
10%50% extra costs upfront to make AI data centers sustainable. This is a capitalism problem, both the hype / bubble / psychosis (b2b marketing induced) as well as the sustainability question.Question is, how long are they going to keep making their new models open weight? GPT2 was open too, y’know. Hell, the company that made it is called "Open"AI. Money corrupts.
And how many concurrent users do you get with 8 B300s on the Kimi K3? I’m not 100% sure on the math, but apparently about <= 4 with full context size.
They can make these models open weight because basically nobody’s gonna be able to run them and you can’t just build a brand new model out of it like you can with regular open source software. That 8 nvidia B300 card minimum isn’t enough to run it commercially, it’s good for like a small 10-20 person company of fairly heavy users, or slightly more if not using heavily.
Money corrupts.
You say it as if OpenAI started with good intentions and got corrupted by the money. But the most likely explanation is that it was a scam from the start.
Iirc it was mainly a novelty thing for playing video games. A DOTA2 tournament was one of their big breakthroughs
I couldn’t find anything about concurrency. But I assumed it’s more like ~1000 users? B300 has something like 100,000+ tok/s, not sure about context size. I also was wrong on my math for the solar panels, see above. It’s more like +50% costs than 10%. Obviously all of this is napkin math, but even 50% isn’t too bad. My point is that with a slightly saner rollout of AI there seems to be absolutely no problem to make it sustainable. And if you buy your tokens in China you can select a data center that gets it’s power from nuclear or solar.
And yeah we don’t know how long they will release open weight models. Once hardware to run such open weight models become available they might change tactics. But right now China releasing these open models has a serious impact on the stock price of these AI companies, which is a good thing. The sooner the AI bubble pops the better.
And like 7 of the top 10 suppliers of tokens right now is from China apparently. What Xi himself said is that the world needs a multilateral approach and AI should not become a monopoly. And while that is clearly propaganda aimed at the global south, China does have a different approach. They spend peanuts on their AI models compared to the west (and the algorithmic breakthroughs done by Chinese AI researches afaik have also been published).
But you actually can use an existing model to generate training data for a new model. Which is what the US corporations are currently accusing China of doing, which is of course hilarious. Of course China has generated huge amounts of training data themselves. So basically any industrial country could in the future fund a research effort to produce a new AI model and make it open weights. A monopoly situation would be another huge issue with AI.
Basically in regulation, sustainability and democratizing access China is doing very good. And in poking the AI bubble.
i think the layoffs/hiring kinda past the point of no return, i think they will be even more reluctant to hire back all these people and fresh graduates anytime soon. essential become like research/lab industry, barely hiring because they want already “trained” people upon graduation. people have posting on other sites, being unable to look for said job, and they do admit using Ai to generate/mass apply too.
The billions in funding for the AI corporations also went into B2B marketing, presentations for businesses and schools etc. A problem of neoliberalism / capitalism. The techbro half of AI psychosis is deliberately inflicted.
And the US / western economy collapsing isn’t only related to AI though. When the bubble pops there would have been massive layoffs anyways. The techno barbarians behind Trump literally want to dismantle and destroy the US to create their own fiefdoms from the rubble: The Nerd Reich”: Author Gil Durán on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, JD Vance & the War on Democracy - Lemmy. So DOGE, the tarrifs, even Iran shutting down the oil supply is all desired by these people.
If we don’t solve the cause of these symptoms we’re not going to fix it.
it’s very well comprehensible if you’re good with numbers.
AI will solve this! We just need more data centers!
/s
“But but but! If we’re going to solve pollution, we’ll need more of those AI data centres!”
It’s going to be so funny when they build their god AI and ask it to save us and it spits out “should’ve build solar panels 30 years ago”
well, they train their AI with pro fossil propaganda as you see in forums like this. in fact, AI searches forums like this and makes summaries to answer questions you might ask it.
The real Roko’s Basilisk is that it’s disappointed in you and thinks you wasted your life playing with computers.
“The answer to pollution is 42.”
If only we had invested in renewables we could power all the AI we could ever want…
No but we gotta use fossil fuels still you guys! - the top suits
by the current weight of growth my niece will weigh 260.000 kg by 2030
“Futurism” hits like a religious word now that you need a blind faith that’s contrary to logic to believe there’s a future for us at all.
i wish we could focus on making small LLMs better.
some companies are doing this. some definitely aren’tI’m keeping an eye on Hailo for this purpose. I think the future is small embedded AI systems, not massive data centers.
Woth thé Qwen 3.6 3.8 something nice happened most US company LLM got beat by miles. NVIDIA nemotron 27b isn’t as good as qwen two version prior than the one just released. US are beaten on Local LLMs already.
if you start excluding the 1000+ B param models …
using smaller models, would initially ease hardware demand by 60% .
OFC you cant… and probably shouldnt, ignore and disrespect SOTA flagship modelsEven “big” open source models like DSV4 and Ling/Ring are very efficient. They’re big, but (seemingly) sparser than US models, so they’re cheap.
They run surprisingly well with hybrid CPU+GPU inference on desktops. And thats not even getting into the efficient attention mechanisms.
I can run DSV4 Flash, barely quantized, with ~1M context on my Ryzen desktop at ~11 tokens/s. If you told me that two years ago, I would not have believed you.
But it’s WORTH IT when ChatGPT will be able to DIAGNOSE your CANCER because you ate WOODCHIPS after using a Recipe ChatGPT gave you when you asked for Advice on SWIMMING!
And it’ll tell me this directly, rather than passing that data to my insurance company to deny my claims, and telling banks to deny my long term loans because I have a known expiration date, right?
and texas was going to add another 1800 datacenters, until they saw thier elections of the gop is jeopardy.
They will add them after the elections…
it will be hilarious when they try to power them up
