Pranshu Verma and Shelly Tan of The Washington Post report that AI bots generate a lot of heat, and keeping their computer servers running takes a toll on the environment. They write:
Roughly a quarter of Americans have used ChatGPT since the chatbot’s 2022 release, according to the Pew Research Center — and every query exacts a cost.
Chatbots use an immense amount of power to respond to user questions, and simply keeping the bot’s servers cool enough to function in data centers takes a toll on the environment. While the exact burden is nearly impossible to quantify, The Washington Post worked with researchers at the University of California, Riverside to understand how much water and power OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using the GPT-4 language model released in March 2023, consumes to write the average 100-word email. […]
A 100-word email generated by an AI chatbot using GPT-4 once weekly for a year by 1 out of 10 working Americans (roughly 16 million people) requires 435,235,476 liters, equal to the water consumed by all Rhode Island households for 1.5 days
Big tech companies have made numerous pledges to make their data centers greener by using new cooling methods. Those climate pledges are often not met.
In July, Google released its most recent environmental report, showing its carbon emission footprint rose by 48 percent, largely due to AI and data centers. It also replenished only 18 percent of the water it consumed — a far cry from the 120 percent it has set as a goal by 2030. “Google has a long-standing commitment to sustainability, guided by our ambitious goals—which includes achieving net-zero emissions by 2030,” said Mara Harris, a spokesperson for Google. […]
Even in ideal conditions, data centers are often among the heaviest users of water in the towns where they are located, environmental advocates said. But data centers with electrical cooling systems also are raising concerns by driving up residents’ power bills and taxing the electric grid.
Read more here.
Also, read AI’s Significant Water Consumption
