[HN Gopher] Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence
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Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence
Author : doener
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-06-23 19:34 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.greenpeace.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.greenpeace.de)
| djoldman wrote:
| > Greenpeace calls for the following measures to minimize the
| environmental impacts of Artificial Intelligence:
|
| > 1. An energy-efficient AI infrastructure powered 100% by
| renewable energy. This green power must be additionally
| generated.
|
| > 2. AI companies must disclose: a. How much electricity is used
| in operating their AI. b. How much power is consumed by users
| during their use of AI. c. The goals under which their models
| were trained, and which environmental parameters were considered.
|
| > 3. AI developers must take responsibility for their supply
| chains. They must contribute to the expansion of renewable energy
| in line with their growth and ensure that local communities do
| not suffer negative consequences (e.g., lack of drinking water,
| higher electricity prices).
|
| Is there a term for "energy neutrality," the cousin of "net
| neutrality"?
|
| Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people
| what kinds of activities they can use energy for?
|
| If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to
| look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of
| internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to
| lots of folks.
| doener wrote:
| > 2. AI companies must disclose: a. How much electricity is
| used in operating their AI.
|
| Doesn't training the model consume the most energy in most
| cases?
| gruez wrote:
| Depends. For CoT models inference is significantly more
| costly (compared to regular models).
|
| Also,
|
| >Brent Thill of Jefferies, an analyst, estimates that
| [inference] accounts for 96% of the overall energy consumed
| in data centres used by the AI industry.
|
| https://archive.is/GJs5n
| jnieswl wrote:
| Foreword Author here. I agree, even early estimates e.g.
| from Meta (2022) suggested 20% Training, 10% Experiments,
| 70% inference. And adoption is rising from month to month.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| This is changing rapidly.
|
| Google announced they are serving 500T tokens per month.
| State of the art models are currently trained with less than
| 30T tokens. Even if training tokens are more costly to run
| (eg, a factor of 3x for forward, backward, and weight
| updates, and take another factor of 2x for missing
| quantization), you end up in a situation where inference
| compute dominates training after a very short time of
| amortization.
| doener wrote:
| Thank you!
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| This is a good point. Another point is that the better
| models get, the less wasted tokens there will be on
| unproductive token generation for answers that are wrong in
| some way. Better answers might lead to increased demand of
| course. But less waste is not a bad thing in itself. And
| improved quality of the answers has other economical
| advantages.
|
| My view is that increased energy demand is not necessarily
| a bad thing in itself. First, it's by no means the dominant
| source of such demand, other things (transport, shipping,
| heating, etc.) outrank it; so a little bit of pressure from
| AI won't move the needle too much. Our main problem remains
| the same: too much CO2 being emitted. Second, meeting
| increased demand is typically done with renewables these
| days. Not because it's nice to do so but because it's cheap
| to do so. That's why renewables are popular in places like
| Texas. They don't care about the planet there. But they
| love cheap energy. And the more cheap, clean power we bring
| online, the worse expensive dirty power actually looks.
|
| Increased demand leads to mostly new clean generation and
| increased pressure to deprecate dirty expensive generation.
| That's why coal is all but gone from most energy markets.
| That has nothing to do with how dirty it is and everything
| to do with how expensive it is. Gas based generation is
| heading the same direction. Any investment in such
| generation should be considered as very risky.
|
| Short term of course you get some weird behavior like data
| centers being powered by gas turbines. Not because it's
| cheap but because it's easy and quick. Long term, a cost
| optimization would be getting rid of the gas generators.
| And with inference increasingly becoming the main thing in
| terms of energy and tokens, energy also becomes the main
| differentiator for profitability of AI services. Which
| again points at using cheap renewables to maximize profit.
| The winners in this market will be working on efficiency.
| And part of that is energy efficiency. Because that and the
| hardware is the main cost involved here.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Net Neutrality is a really bad awkward term that constantly
| confuses laypeople. I get what you're saying, but don't lean on
| the term Net Neutrality in the hopes it will help people
| understand by building off something else they understand:
| People don't understand Net Neutrality.
| mbgerring wrote:
| As long as energy production and consumption has severe
| downstream impacts, yes, we do need to wade into this
| territory.
|
| All serious, viable plans for decarbonization include a massive
| increase in electricity consumption, due to electrification of
| transportation, industrial processes, etc, along with an
| increase in renewable energy production. This isn't new, but AI
| datacenters are a very large net new single user of
| electricity.
|
| If the amount of money already poured into AI had gone into the
| rollout of clean energy infrastructure, we wouldn't even be
| having this conversation, but here we are.
|
| It makes perfect sense from a policy perspective, given that
| there are a small number of players in this space with more
| resources than most governments, to piggyback on this wave of
| infrastructure buildout.
|
| It also makes plenty of financial sense. Initial capex for
| adding clean energy generation is high, but given both the high
| electricity usage of AI datacenters, and the long-term impact
| on the grid that _someone_ will eventually have to pay for,
| companies deploying AI infrastructure would be smart to use the
| huge amount of capital at their disposal to generate their own
| electricity.
|
| It's also, from a deployment standpoint, pretty straightforward
| -- we're talking about massive, rectangular, warehouse-like
| buildings with flat roofs. We should have already mandated that
| all such buildings be covered in solar panels with on-site
| storage, at a minimum.
| nico_h wrote:
| Sadly we're already in the long term impact of the previous
| energy revolution, so we'd better get starting now instead of
| when we'll feel the impact of this next compute evolution.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| > If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places
| to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption
| of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable
| to lots of folks.
|
| I agree that in general, if the goal is to limit CO2 emissions
| and use renewable sources of energy, we ought not to focus on
| AI first, because it is dwarfed by many other things that we
| take for granted today. My canonical example I give folks is
| that the latte they order every day from Starbucks involves
| substantially more energy and water use than most uses of
| ChatGPT on a daily basis.
|
| But as we move to digitize more and more of this world, and now
| create automated cognitive labor, we should start with the
| right foundations. I'd rather we not try to disentangle
| critical AI infrastructure from coal power plants, and I'd
| rather we try to limit the compute available to workloads in
| ways that encourage people to use the tech actually befitting
| of their use case rather than throw it all into the most
| expensive model every time.
| nico_h wrote:
| Oh wow, growing, drying, transporting, roasting,
| transporting, brewing something takes more energy and
| physical resources than a single query in a computer?
| Physical goods are amazing like that. I wonder how margins on
| software stuff are so high!??!
|
| More seriously, i'm not too sure about the energy cost and IP
| infringed during the training and the value added to society
| by providing generic and mostly accurate but sometimes wildly
| wrong answers. Or from generating text or pretty pictures for
| a few milli-cents in cooling and electricity vs asking a
| human to do the same for a few kilo-cents.
|
| It's a lot of ladder kicking in the software industry these
| days.
| TimPC wrote:
| How about the silly treadmill where we waste billions of
| compute to compute useless proof of work type behaviours and
| whenever more compute gets thrown at the problem we just make
| it harder to ensure there isn't better output. I believe it
| was called buttcoin or something silly like that.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Using a subpar model and having to run multiple requests may
| not be a better deal for climate than a sota model one-
| shotting the right answer.
| atonse wrote:
| Technically, if it's all clean energy, does it matter if it's
| "energy-efficient"?
|
| So it seems like the better goal is to just aim for more clean
| energy.
| mcv wrote:
| Once we've got abundant clean energy, it might not matter so
| much anymore, but as long as we're still burning carbon, it
| matters a lot. And until we get there, we should probably do
| both.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We should probably just do a carbon tax and not wade into that
| morass.
|
| There's a lot of focus on the carbon cost of various digital
| goods. I get it. Destroying the environment is a big problem.
| But like, maybe we also should not make a bunch of plastic crap
| and ship it around the world a bunch of times.
| jnieswl wrote:
| Disclaimer:Foreword Author here. I agree that there are may
| things one could change, however for many other services or
| objects you buy, you are able to estimate the env. footprint
| or you can change your consumer behaviour. However for the
| top AI-models one has no clue how much energy is used.
| Therefore the demands are among others for transparency from
| the ai companies.
| mumbisChungo wrote:
| I have no idea what the carbon footprint of the coffee I
| drink or chair I sit in or netflix program I watch is. I
| can control my consumption of LLMs just as easily as those
| things.
| bbor wrote:
| Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling
| people what kinds of activities they can use energy for?
|
| I mean, yeah, that's just basic civil regulation. Energy
| generation has massive negative externalities, and preventing
| waste is a worthy cause. I don't agree that AI must be singled
| out in that sense, but even it were, I imagine a modest push
| for efficiency would only help us in the long run.
| If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places
| to look.
|
| Well put, but I think it's important to bring the analysis one
| level up, and look at _emissions_. In that paradigm, meat
| eating and non-essential travel (yes, including vacations to
| Rome, business meetings, scientific conferences, and other
| perceived-to-be-unalienable rights) are punching way above
| their weight class.
|
| For anyone who's curious on specifics re:AI emissions, the
| recent MIT article is the gold standard in terms of
| specificity, neutrality, and nuance:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
| .
|
| I also did some napkin math here in 2024.12:
| https://bsky.app/profile/robb.doering.ai/post/3lckwra33vk2t
| _TL;DR:_ Eating one less burger affords you ~300 chatbot
| inferences, and avoiding a flight from ATL to SFO affords you
| _~16,000_.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think if we do want to do this then banning bitcoin proof
| of work behaviours seems far more important.
| jcynix wrote:
| > If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places
| to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption
| of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable
| to lots of folks.
|
| Air conditioning for example would be a good place to save
| energy, as the world wide energy consumption is a multiple of
| AI's consumption. But climate change will push the need (not
| luxury) for air conditioning up, which is the Catch-22 in this
| case.
|
| The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that 10% of the
| globally generated energy is used for sir conditioning. But it
| would nevertheless be a good idea to require AI companies to
| care for renewable energy before they reach similar consumption
| levels.
|
| Regarding the "morass" ... we tell people how fast they can
| drive, or companies to limit air pollution (at least in some
| countries) so no problem here.
| masswerk wrote:
| > Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling
| people what kinds of activities they can use energy for?
|
| This really applies to any application which consumes high
| percentages of the resources available. (Compare, data centers
| are responsible for almost 80% of the electricity consumption
| in the Dublin area according to the paper.) The rational of
| purpose and resource demand and expected effects is secondary
| to this. The primary question is about (significant)
| quantities.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| We didn't care about the environmental impacts of all of the
| other stuff that made a few people obscenely rich; we're not
| gonna start now.
|
| I mean, should we? Yeah. But we're not gonna.
| FredPret wrote:
| Everything you say is valid, but you left out the part where,
| in addition to new tech making a few "obscenely" rich, it also
| makes a layer of very many people under them extremely rich,
| and almost everyone else a lot better off in the long run.
|
| Here's some stats showing the growth of the millionaire class,
| now up to 7% of the population:
| https://www.statista.com/chart/30671/number-of-millionaires-...
|
| At the same time, here's some stats showing extreme poverty
| falling off a cliff:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-wor...
|
| Such a thing was completely unthinkable before disruptive tech
| and the associated mega-rich became the new normal 200 years
| ago.
|
| Having said that, you're correct to point out that negative
| externalities haven't really entered our minds until about
| 50-75 years ago, but it seems tech progress has even made
| clean, green living at scale possible at least in principle.
| coliveira wrote:
| > poverty falling off a cliff
|
| This is 80% due to the Chinese government, if it was for
| billionaires they would all be as poor as before.
| FredPret wrote:
| Amazing feat by the Chinese government to boost the whole
| planet like that. Do you have numbers for that, or are you
| just a committed tankie?
|
| Also, ~100% of China's growth started when they embraced
| market economics in 1990. Read US business books from the
| 80's. It's rare to even see China mentioned at all until
| the late 90's. Everybody was worried about Japan overtaking
| the US and nobody talked about the Chinese economy, because
| it barely existed.
| mulmen wrote:
| > We didn't care about the environmental impacts of all of the
| other stuff
|
| Speak for yourself. Environmentalism has been a thing for
| longer than I have been alive. Clearly we care.
|
| And before you reply with even more toxic cynicism stand behind
| an idling 1960, 1980, 2000 and 2020 sedan and tell me you can't
| tell the difference.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| As long as India and China are dumping obscene amounts of
| plastics into the ocean, I don't really wanna hear it. AI drop in
| the bucket. The measures imposed on Americans and worse Europeans
| is an insult.
| mbgerring wrote:
| China is going to beat the U.S. to decarbonization. This excuse
| never made sense, and by the end of this decade it will be
| unintelligible.
| FredPret wrote:
| They pollute because they've turned into the West's industrial
| zone. They only make a bunch of stuff because we buy it
| imnotlost wrote:
| Just build a bunch of nuclear power plants around the world. If
| we can spend a trillion or two bombing the taliban back into
| power we can afford some energy projects.
| melling wrote:
| Greenpeace is likely opposed to that.
| mcv wrote:
| Nuclear power plants are expensive and take time to build,
| though. At the moment we're still burning way too much oil and
| coal for our energy, and everything that drives up demand,
| contributes to that.
| melling wrote:
| We've had 40 years and we're still burning all the coal Carl
| Sagan warned us about.
|
| https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=3uhneUSoiZaUKS9M
|
| So, after 40 years I'm a little tired of hearing it takes too
| long to build nuclear power plants.
|
| On the bright side, we've almost reached peak coal:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-
| to...
| elpocko wrote:
| There are many more millions of GPUs in computers and game
| consoles around the world burning electricity for your
| entertainment, for decades. The same class of devices. The
| environmental impact of having pretty pixels on your screens is
| at least an order of magnitude higher than what it is for AI, for
| inference _and_ training. I don 't see anyone being up in arms
| about that.
| coliveira wrote:
| Your calculations must be severely off, because I never heard
| anyone advocating for the construction of nuclear reactors to
| power game consoles around the world. However, we hear everyday
| that we need to build these reactors right now if we want to
| have AI.
| mulmen wrote:
| Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are
| geographically distributed and so is their power generation.
| Data _centers_ are ...centralized. Dedicated power plants for
| large data center installations are not new.
| gruez wrote:
| >Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are
| geographically distributed and so is their power
| generation.
|
| This is irrelevant because most "Xboxes, smartphones, and
| personal computers" are powered by centralized fossil fuel
| power plants that could plausibly be replaced with nuclear
| reactors, just like the power plant for a datacenter can be
| replaced with nuclear reactors.
| Kudos wrote:
| My Xbox is powered by solar. I can't say the same for my
| use of Claude, and I do not have the same agency to
| change that.
| elpocko wrote:
| I hear people advocating for the construction of nuclear
| reactors every day. They don't mention gaming, just like they
| don't mention refrigerators or washing machines specifically.
| A gaming machine consumes the same amount of energy as a
| machine used for AI, it's the same hardware. AI consumes it
| for seconds per user, while one gaming machine is used for
| hours per session. The energy required by one human to play a
| game for one hour could serve hundreds or thousands of AI
| users.
| rybosworld wrote:
| The GPU's used for AI have significantly higher utilization
| rates than gaming GPU's...
|
| Here's some napkin math:
|
| H100: 61% utilization / 700W ~ 3.7MW/year
|
| RTX 3080: 10% utilization / 320W ~ 0.27MW/year
| elpocko wrote:
| How many AI users are served using a single H100 per
| time, and how many gamers are served using a single 3080
| per time? How many gamers are simultaneously running a
| 3080 or equivalent for their entertainment?
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Yes, AI users are being served by much more than one GPU
| at a time.
|
| Which is why the power used is so much higher than a
| single gaming pc
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Indeed. But how many gaming GPUs are out there in the
| world?
| gruez wrote:
| That's his point? Greenpace wants AI datacenters to be built
| with clean energy. elpocko points out that plenty of other
| pointless electricity consumers also aren't being built with
| clean energy today. That's not an argument against green
| energy, but is pointing out that greenpace isn't very
| rigorous with their pleas. They're seemingly picking whatever
| is the most topical. We should be against this, because
| latching on to the latest thing basically guarantees that the
| next thing rolls around, all the momentum will be lost.
| Remember when everyone was up in arms about crypto mining?
| How it's barely brought up because everyone's focused on AI.
| namuol wrote:
| Show your math.
| elpocko wrote:
| Besides common sense, I can tell you about my kW h counter
| going brrr when playing games (400 W continuously, sometimes
| for hours on end) vs. running Stable Diffusion or Llama-
| whatever (400 W for 15 seconds every 3 minutes for an hour or
| two). Extrapolate from that.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| The GPUs in PCs, consoles and phones aren't running full tilt
| 24/7. They run very bursty workloads for a couple hours a day
| at most.
|
| Those in AI data centers never stop running and completely
| utilize their capacity. The difference in power usage is
| astronomical.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Can you please at least do the back-of-the-envelope math
| behind the "astronomical"?
|
| I don't claim to know, but we ought to be able to have a
| rational debate on this.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's not the same class of device.
|
| A typical NVIDIA server GPU consumes 700W, and a server might
| have eight of them, so 5.6kW.
|
| A PlayStation 5 consumes 200W total.
| gruez wrote:
| A PS5 serves a single person, maybe two. A datacenter GPU
| might be shared by dozens or hundreds of people, depending on
| how you count occupancy.
| jonas21 wrote:
| A typical server is serving hundreds or thousands of user
| sessions, while a PlayStation 5 is serving only one.
| nemo wrote:
| There are a lot of folks who vastly underestimate the carbon
| output of current AI training and work, and you're among them.
| The number of data centers being raised right now with
| increased power planning around data centers around the globe
| points to a reality of energy consumption that's probably an
| order of magnitude higher than you imagine. At a time when the
| costs of carbon poisoning the oceans is getting really ugly and
| driving extinctions, melting polar ice, and driving global
| warming, writing off a major new generator of atmospheric
| carbon is dangerously irresponsible.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
| narrator wrote:
| Wait till the mining gets automated, the transportation gets
| automated, the manufacturing and construction gets automated.
| There won't be that much labor and we will run into our
| ecological limits to growth at meteoric speed since that will be
| the limiting factor on the AI/robot genie. The only job at the
| government will be who gets to use the AI/robot genie and
| frantically running about trying to play whack-a-mole with
| paperclip maximizers that will appear everywhere. The whole
| economy will collapse to that. Basically, central planning all
| over again. This is why we need Free Market Ecology. I'll post a
| link if anyone's interested.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Is Greenpeace still a thing? I thought that Greta Thunberg and
| Just Stop Oil stole their thunder.
| sien wrote:
| 100 M Euro budget , 3.4 K staff, 34 K volunteers.
|
| They are a big thing. Old people still donate to them.
|
| They are a big reason Africans don't grow GMOs that can help
| children avoid blindness.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace
| MoonGhost wrote:
| Realistic calculations should include both sides. New way vs old.
| In this case AI assisted vs manual. Here intentionally only one
| side considered. Because comparison does not produce desirable
| result. Which makes in attention attracting BS.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Fuck off Greenpeace, they recently got Germany nuclear energy
| shut down.
|
| Which also increased reliance on Russian gas. If you thought
| Greenpeace couldn't be more evil.
|
| Why is HN listening to dirty activists who can't even bathe talk
| about tech?
|
| Is this how low HN is now? Redditors going to Greenpeace to do
| project estimates for them? This is your tech level?
| platevoltage wrote:
| It is kind of weird to see the same people who have been saying
| "Our grid can't support electric cars" also not seeing any issue
| with the injection of AI into everything we see and do.
| grej wrote:
| Linking energy use to the environment is a political choice, and
| Greenpeace are some of the worst offenders for making the
| situation worse by opposing nuclear power at every turn.
| dydghks2033 wrote:
| Interesting point about energy cost. If GPT inference keeps
| scaling, latency + watt efficiency might become central to AGI
| deployment.
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