The soaring electricity demands of artificial intelligence are straining grids and fueling air pollution.
How much energy does AI require?
A lot. The graphics processing units (GPUs) that perform the complex calculations needed to train and run generative artificial intelligence bots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT are about four times as power hungry as traditional servers. Those GPUs also run hotter, and so more power and water are needed to keep them cool. Studies show that a ChatGPT query uses about 10 times more electricity than a Google search, and that an AI chatbot needs about 18 ounces of water to generate a single 100-word email. With AI use exploding and new AI data centers coming online almost every week—think warehouses the size of football fields with perpetually running servers—projections about the technology’s power use are soaring. By 2030, data centers could use 8 percent of total U.S. power, up from 3 percent in 2022, according to Goldman Sachs. One study found that in a middle-ground scenario, new AI servers sold in 2027 alone could account for 0.5 percent of the world’s current electricity demand, roughly what Argentina or Sweden uses in a year. “It’s truly astronomical potential load growth,” said Ben Inskeep of Citizens Action Coalition, a nonprofit that is tracking data centers’ energy consumption.
Can the U.S. meet that demand?
Not without a massive increase in electricity generation. The roughly 5,000 data centers that are already running in the U.S.— which support everything Americans do online, from watching Netflix to storing photos in the cloud—have already strained power grids and jeopardized state and federal efforts to meet clean-energy targets. Some 220 new natural gas–burning power plants are now under construction nationwide, a boom partly driven by data-center needs. And planned closures of heavily polluting coal plants are being delayed in numerous states. Around Salt Lake City, where Meta is building a $1.5 billion data campus, utility officials and lawmakers pushed back the closure of two coal plants to 2036 and 2042. It’s “a challenge like we have never seen before,” said Jason Shaw, chair of the Public Service Commission in Georgia, where projected power needs for the next few years have spiked 17-fold. It’s also a challenge for the residents of communities where data centers are being built.
What problems do they face?
For starters, strain on the grid is leaving some communities vulnerable to blackouts. Virginia’s Loudoun County, known as “data center alley,” has added more than 90 data centers over the past five years that together consume about 4 gigawatts of energy—enough to power 3 million homes. In the spring of 2022, state utility Dominion experienced 18 load relief warnings, which is when a grid operator tells the company it needs to interrupt power to customers. “This is far outside of the normal, safe operating protocol,” Dominion told regulators in a letter requesting permission to build new substations and powerlines to serve “unprecedented” load growth. The cost of building such infrastructure is often passed along to residential customers: in Georgia, demand from more than 50 data centers sent the average electric bill up $200 a year. There are other complaints, including water usage—Google’s data centers in The Dalles, Ore., account for about 30 percent of the city’s water consumption—and the constant noise from data centers’ cooling systems.
Have residents pushed back?
In Georgia, voter anger led the state legislature to pass a two-year moratorium on tax incentives for builders of data centers; Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed the bill in May. In Arizona, Illinois, Arkansas, and Virginia, lawmakers have either curtailed data-center development or added restrictions on where they can be built. And residents have fought planned facilities in locales including Chesterton, Ind., and Memphis. Tech companies “think they can go into these small towns because they think they’re stupid,” said Stefanie Grunwald of Peculiar, Mo., where a planned 500-acre campus was halted. But such opposition has done little to slow the industry’s growth or its appetite for energy. “Everyone is chasing power,” said Andy Cvengros, an analyst at commercial real estate firm JLL. Tech giants are also trying to generate their own.
How are companies trying to power their operations?
Google, whose greenhouse gas emissions surged 48 percent over the past five years, has announced a $20 billion investment in renewable energy and helped fund a recently opened geothermal power plant in the Nevada desert. Meanwhile, Microsoft last year announced a deal to reopen a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania that will supply power to its data centers. The tech colossus has also invested in Helion, a startup that aims to generate zero-emission electricity from nuclear fusion; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pumped at least $375 million into the firm. But a fusion power plant remains entirely hypothetical, and many of the tech sectors’ other clean-energy initiatives will likely take years to come online.
Is there a short-term fix?
Some experts say tech firms should consider energy usage as they build new AI software and hardware. “Maybe we need to ideally slow a bit down,” said Roberto Verdecchia, of the University of Florence’s Software Technologies Lab. “Let’s not make a new model to improve only its accuracy and speed.” But tech advocates claim such worries are overblown—and that AI will ultimately help speed the development of less energy-intensive technologies. Data center company Equinix said it used AI to create a “digital twin” of one of its facilities and improve efficiency by about 9 percent. But with tech firms now planning AI data centers that would have 5 gigawatts of demand—that’s about the same as Miami—improved efficiency will do little to curb the industry’s hunger for energy. As Michael Ortiz, CEO of Phoenix-based Layer 9 Data Centers, noted, “These problems are not going to go away.”
Musk vs. Memphis
Last summer, Elon Musk announced that his startup, xAI, would build the world’s largest data center in an industrial stretch of southwest Memphis. The announcement was hailed by city officials but angered residents living in the mostly Black, low-income communities nearby. They called out the potential impacts on power-grid reliability, water supplies, and already poor air quality—which is now being made worse by the nearly 20 mobile gas generators temporarily powering the new center. “We’re getting more and more days where it is unhealthy for us to go outside,” said KeShaun Pearson of Memphis Community Against Pollution. Opponents lost a key battle in November, when the Tennessee Valley Authority approved xAI’s request for access to 150 megawatts of power, enough for 100,000 households. Much of that electricity will come from gas- and coal-burning plants. “The dissonance of having, essentially, the future of technology powered by fossil fuels,” said Pearson, “just leaves me speechless.”
