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Cleaning up the technology industry was supposed to be easy.
Powering server racks and personal computers isn’t nearly as energy-intensive as making concrete or steel.
So until recently, eliminating planet-warming emissions in the tech sector was expected to be relatively straightforward. Tech companies positioned themselves as climate leaders and boasted of their eco-friendly bona fides.
But the sudden emergence of artificial intelligence is casting doubt on those assumptions.
Big tech companies’ bets on a new generation of power-hungry computer chips and data centers are forcing them to significantly increase their power usage.
Microsoft, Google and Amazon are investing in nuclear power. Energy demand, including from Google and Meta, is helping to keep a coal plant in Nebraska running. Natural gas providers are hatching ambitious expansion plans as they prepare to meet the new demand from the tech sector.
At the center of the A.I. boom is Nvidia, the chip-making juggernaut that has, over the past few years, become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Nvidia’s chips are incredibly power-hungry. As the company rolls out new products, analysts have taken to measuring the amount of electricity needed to power them in terms of cities, or even countries.
There are already more than 5,000 data centers in the U.S., and the industry is expected to grow nearly 10 percent annually. Goldman Sachs estimates that A.I. will drive a 160 percent increase in data center power demand by 2030.
Dion Harris, Nvidia’s head of data center product marketing, acknowledged that A.I. was creating a huge spike in power usage. But he said that over time, that demand would be offset as A.I. made other industries more efficient.
“There is sort of a myopic view on the data center,” he said, “but not really an understanding that a lot of those technologies are going to be the main way that we’re going to innovate our way to a net-zero future.”
What A.I. might do for climate
The notion that A.I. can solve climate change is deeply alluring.
Global warming is one of the biggest challenges we face as a species, and the promise of a new technology magically making an existential problem evaporate holds deep appeal.
So far, however, there is scant evidence that A.I. will deliver a miracle fix.
Incremental gains are possible. Harris told me that already, Nvidia is helping companies in a range of industries make their operations more efficient. It recently helped Foxconn, a major producer of electronics such as iPhones, use A.I. to design a new factory, reducing energy demands by 30 percent.
“They’re doing things that they used to do before, and they’re figuring out a way to do it much faster, much more efficiently and actually use less energy,” he said.
Last year, we reported on Google’s use of A.I. to create a system for reducing aircraft contrails, which can lead to additional global warming. Utilities are looking to use A.I. as they work to keep the lights on after storms.
Harris also said that while Nvidia chips and data centers might be straining power grids today, a handful of developments could make the A.I. industry more efficient in coming years.
A new generation of chips has the ability to break down complex tasks, ultimately using less energy. And companies are looking at putting data centers used to train A.I. models close to remote energy sources, such as hydroelectric or geothermal facilities.
“The important thing to realize about A.I. is that it doesn’t necessarily care where it learns,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said last month in Washington. “We can build a data center near where there’s excess energy and use the energy there.”
A ‘confluence’ behind rising power use
The surge in power demand from the technology sector is just one part of a broader spike in power use.
For the past 15 years or so, the United States experienced relatively modest growth in energy demand. Offshoring sent many energy-intensive factories overseas. Growth in the U.S. economy was coming from tech and finance, two industries with relatively low emissions.
But now manufacturing is coming back to America. Electric cars and heat pumps are adding additional demands to the power grid.
At the same time, the tech industry is no longer looking so efficient.
Even before A.I. began straining the grid, there were signs that the efficiency gains that powered the past few decades of technological growth were faltering.
One of the fundamental selling points of the biggest tech companies was that they were scalable — producing web products that reach larger audiences at marginal cost. But that dynamic has broken down in recent years.
Cryptocurrency brought the advent of Bitcoin mining, which requires huge amounts of electricity. And now we have the A.I. boom.
“You have this confluence that is leading to a spike in demand,” Harris said.
For tech companies, which have long pledged to rapidly draw down their planet-warming emissions, the A.I. revolution has disrupted their climate ambitions.
Microsoft said its emissions had soared 30 percent since 2020 because of its expansion of data centers. Google’s emissions are up nearly 50 percent over the past five years because of A.I.
Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, recently said that the artificial intelligence boom was too powerful, and had too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.
Schmidt, somewhat fatalistically, said that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway,” and argued that rather than focus on reducing emissions, “I’d rather bet on A.I. solving the problem.”
The A.I. boom is leaving the tech industry in an awkward spot. After years of claiming to be environmentally friendly, some of the biggest companies in the world are making hard trade-offs between increasing profits and lowering emissions. It’s the kind of conundrum that often leaves executives wanting to have their cake and eat it, too.
“A.I. is a problem,” Harris said, “and a solution.”
Ask NYT Climate: How can I slash Halloween waste?
Halloween shoppers in the United States are expected to spend more than $11 billion this year on candy, costumes and decorations like giant cobwebs, skeletons and enormous inflatable ghouls.
Unfortunately, a lot of those things will end up in a landfill quicker than you can cut eye holes into a spooky old bedsheet.
“It’s definitely morphed over the course of my lifetime into something that generates a lot more waste,” said Sabina Magliocco, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. (Her favorite Halloween costume: when she dressed up as roadkill.)
The good news is, there are ways to make Halloween more sustainable. Experts offered a few tips. — Austyn Gaffney
A global summit to protect nature
On the agenda is life on earth, in all its forms and diversity. The big question is how far nations will go to stop the disastrous declines underway.
Representatives from more than 175 countries are gathering to negotiate answers, starting yesterday in Cali, Colombia, at what is expected to be the largest United Nations biodiversity conference in history.This session, known as COP16, can sometimes feel absurdly bureaucratic and frustratingly toothless.
But, participants say, global cooperation is fundamental to tackling issues like biodiversity loss and climate change, sprawling environmental crises that transcend national boundaries.
How the talks unfold over the next two weeks will help determine, for better or worse, the planet’s future. Biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history, an intergovernmental panel of scientists found in 2019. It estimated that a million species were in danger of extinction. — Catrin Einhorn
More climate news:
Bloomberg reports that one of the sticking points in next month’s U.N. climate summit is whether China should still be considered a developing nation.
Heat pump sales are slowing in the U.S. and Europe, The Washington Post reports.
Inside Climate News reports that, since 2019, a candidate running for the Texas Railroad Commission has raised more than $10 million, including from local fossil fuel billionaires. Her opponents have raised less than $30,000 in total.
Correction: Because of an editing error, the Thursday newsletter described incorrectly the risks associated with improperly vented gas furnaces. While carbon dioxide can be dangerous, the more immediate deadly threat is carbon monoxide.
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