A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play.
The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.
Between AI and shitcoin mining, these two "technology branches" already consume more power than all the green power added to the grid combined.
It's why humans will always remain de facto slaves to a few masters. Anything that could potentially be advantageous to all life on Earth? Only if the ones at the top get to profit first. No profit? Enjoy scorching to death on hell-planet for the next forty years!
Between AI and shitcoin mining, these two “technology branches” already consume more power than all the green power added to the grid combined.
And your sources? I only did a cursory search, and according to the IEA data centers are responsible for somewhere in the range of 2-6% of electricity demand. Renewables are currently around 30% globally.
I feel like some people are just emotional reactionaries. They see a certain story, and in their own mind they make the story worse than it is, and treat their feelings as fact.
I have no sources on this, or proof that this guy in particular is doing that.
AI consumes power, yes, it's projected to triple its environmental impact, yes, but its environmental impact is much less than most other things. If anything, the AI hate train draws angry peoples' focus off the big polluters that matter.
"Arrghle AI is in everything and modern cars track you, I'll just drive a 30+ year old pickup truck because they don't has no AI tracking nonsense"
Proof of Stake (PoS) is just dollar bonds without regulations. There's no "difficulty adjustment" to minimize profits, so inequality will just get worse and worse.
Between AI and shitcoin mining, these two "technology branches" already consume more power than all the green power added to the grid combined.
I think you would be shocked if you learned what some other things in our world cost in CO2.
The energy costs of cryptocurrency mining are easy to calculate because the system is extremely transparent. AI is a little muddier, but we know how much big tech is expanding data centers, and we know how many enterprise GPUs Nvidia sells, so we get a decent estimate.
But these things don't actually do as much damage as compared to other things. Imagine how much energy is used for Gaming PCs and consoles. It's probably up there with Crypto and AI if you consider all running consoles and PCs, plus all the multiplayer infrastructure. But we don't have numbers because this is hard to calculate.
And then there's stuff like personal automobiles, that completely blow these other things out-of-the-water.
I dont think much will remain after this extinction event. Do you know how long it takes niches to refill in an ecosystem? We're going to get to a point where industry collapses and we are reset if we survive at all.
We wouldn't even be able to restart. All the easily available resources have been delved. Three thousand years ago people could scoop pure gold from rivers by the kilos. Today, all decent deposits lie kilometers below the surface.
But it'll be for the best. We had our shot and blew it.
If I run some AI model on my GPU and power my computer via solar power and some batteries, am I actually contributing significantly to GHG emissions?
Like what is the embodied energy of an AI model?
As usual, pundits and scientists confuse what is and what could be with the truth. For example plastic recycling isn't possible because "right now economics don't make it profitable". Meaning capitalism is killing us, not plastics. I suspect the same is true for AI.
yea but the models are already trained and noone pays to use the open source ones, so you're not really contributing to the training greenhouse gas emissions if you use an open source gen ai model locally.
Now that big companies and rich investors saw the potential for profit in AI the paradigm has shifted to "throw more compute at the wall until something sticks", so it's not surprising it's affecting carbon emissions.
Besides that it's also annoying that most of the time they keep their AIs behind closed doors, and even in the few cases where the weights are released publicly these models are so big that they aren't usable for the vast majority of people, as sometimes even Kaggle can't handle them.
Look, i'm not saying that this isn't a problem. My only question is, is this one of those "global warming is because people don't recycle their soda bottles" things? In other words, How concerned should I be about this vs, taking attention away from the energy, beef, and transportation industry?
It's a percent against the world's emissions. Be concerned less with this. AI is the current hate train whipping boy, and takes the pressure of public focus off the biggest polluters.
I don't have more recent data (if it's in the article, I didn't see it at a skim) but I feel like oil, gas, and agriculture are the bigger long-term targets.
Looks like Techradar misunderstood parts of the source story.
The projected emissions over the next 10 years is equal to 40% of all US emissions.
The Register
This is the "carbon footprint" fallacy created by big oil. We should vote left and unionize until either the external cost of pollution is internalized with pigouvian taxes, or electricity is rationed by a community-owned organization.
Nobody will notice us shooting ourselves in the foot and expecting corporations to do it too. They don't care if we lead by example unilaterally.
Where are their numbers coming from? The central registry of carbon emissions for genAI data centers? They know shit. They're probably shorting Nvidia and are crying over their losses. Fuck Morgan Stanley