AI’s Outrageous Environmental Toll Is Probably Worse Than You Think

Ai powered robot stands in a server room with an artificial intelligence emblem displayed on its chest - symbol for the large consumption of computing.

By now, you’re probably well aware of the staggering energy and resource costs of generative AI. But even if the whole industry is a bubble ready to burst, chances are that the environmental toll we’re hearing about now is only going to get worse — because AI’s appetite is absolutely insatiable.

Consider the obscene amounts of water that’s needed just to cool the data centers that train and host generative AI models, which is somewhere in the millions of gallons per year. Internal estimates from Microsoft about its data facility in Goodyear, Arizona, for example, show that it’s set to annually consume 56 million gallons of drinking water — which is more than a drop in the ocean for such a water-scarce region.

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