Study author says tech companies are reaping benefits of artificial intelligence age but society is left to pay cost
The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed.
The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday, which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand.
The figures have been compiled by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a company that researches the unintended consequences of digital trends. He claimed they were the first attempt to measure the specific effect of artificial intelligence rather than datacentres in general as the use of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini soared in 2025.
I don’t know about the carbon emissions, the water thing in the article is extremely misleading. It claims that AI is using up more water than the entire yearly consumption of bottled water. The water usage estimates include the water used to cool the power plants generating the power (running the data center).
The last study on this said that the actual usage of water in the data centers is 12% of the total water usage estimate. Data centers don’t normally use that much water. It would be like Niagra Falls pouring water over every data center.
Simple reality check: If you look at the cooling system outside any given data center—if they’re using as much water as d article suggests—they’d be emitting a massive cloud of water, 24/7. It would be so much, they’d need a cooling tower on par with a nuclear power station.
So what’s with the statistic? If you look at any given power plant on Google Maps you’ll see cooling ponds all around it. That’s the water they’re talking about. It’s part of the build of the power plant. It’s not using potable water that would be going into people’s houses.
Having said that, 12% of the water usage is potable water—in the worst-case data center/power plant matchup scenario. Where you have an older data center that doesn’t use modern closed loop cooling systems that don’t lose as much water to evaporation. I don’t know what the statistic is, but I can sure you it’s a lot better than 12%. A wild guess would be 4-6%.
Background: I was a security consultant for many years and traveled all over the US going into many data centers (sometimes, by breaking in! Hah). Inside, they’re loud AF (think: standing next to a jet engine) and outside they’ll have some big ass cooling units that are also kinda loud but not as loud as some of these articles make them out to be.
That was about 7 years ago but I doubt much has changed since then. I guarantee that those data centers are still being used and have been renovated to support AI-style hardware. The power from the utility was just increased and more cooling units were added. I seriously doubt they did much more than that.
From what I’ve read about the new “giga scale” data centers, they’re much more efficient (and quieter… Outside). Those are the ones we want. If we replaced all the old stuff with new stuff, the statistics in articles like this would drop by and order of magnitude (just a guess).