Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030
The United States emitted 4.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024.
So by 2030 the AI industry CO2 release might be 0.9% of total US emissions.
That ‘almost’ in “Almost Incomprehensible” is doing a lot of work there.
.9% from a single source is RIDICULOUS though
Ok how much is beef farming accountable for
A huge amount too, 37.9%
But more than one thing can be bad a time, a novel idea, I know
And how many beef farms are there compared to data centers? A lot of a lot more.
If a tiny amount of physical space can do such a large amount of pollution, that’s a worry, when the plan is to increase the amount of them.
Well, sure, but when everyone loses their fucking minds about the tiniest thing, that even requires us to buy all the lies from billionaires about how much the build out will be, while having never done anything about the biggest thing they could personally change, it starts sounding mightily hypocritical.
It seems like the personal responsibility to boycott polluting and unnecessary industries is limited to whatever doesn’t require any personal effort from the person speaking.
Napkin math:
- 40% of americans are very or extremely concerned about AIs environmental impact
- To save 34 million tonnes of CO2e, you need about 5.2 million vegans from now until 2030
- So only 5% of ONLY the complainers would need to go vegan to make up for this “tremendous” impact
- That’s 2% of all americans
That’s the thing we’re even attacking random strangers online for. The thing that we pretend is going to bring about the end times. But sure, veganism is the extreme position…
By the way, what other resources are we saving?
- Water — about 8.8 trillion gallons (~33 billion m³)
- Land — around 1–1.5 million acres of forest/land
- Animals — roughly 8 billion animals including fish and shellfish
Much more realistic: 6% of amicans that eat mostly vegan
12% of Americans that often choose a vegan meal multiple times per week, seems realistic too.
A quarter of Americans eating more chicken because it’s better for the environment is even more realistic. Chicken is tasty!
More than one thing can be bad.
Why don’t we do both? Less AI, Less Meat
Also, I’m not American, don’t insult me by assuming I’m one
Or, just eat less meat and you can still have AI
Personally I’ll never go Vegan simply out of spite because no matter what is being discussed there’s ALWAYS some asshole inserting veganism into the topic.
Veganism might be great for the environment, but as long as you(they) continue to act worse than especially obnoxious Jehovah’s Witnesses, veganism can go fuck itself.
If I devoured one cow every time some vegan asshole spoke up in a thread that was on a completely different topic, cows would be extinct.
I’m not vegan and yours is a shitty take, sorry to have to tell you this.
What a whiny little bitch you are.
I’m not even vegan. But meat eating morons signal posting that they’re sick of vegans are way more common and annoying than vocal vegans.
Its such a overplayed prejudice for as long as i can remember. I came across overreaching vegans which actually annoyed me maybe five times in my life. Signalposting meat heads are more like a weekly occurance.
Random vegan at a bbq “hey, can i have small sliver of aluminum foil for my stuff and if you guys dont half intentionally wrench the meat juices over my veggies, that would be cool”
What always follows: 10-30 minute moronic rant of some meathead because eating meat is his whole personality.So you’re a childish contrarian asshole, who cares
Finally looked in a mirror eh?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
I love Lemmy math nerds and honestly appreciate how there’s always at least one to put things in perspective for those of us who worked really fucking hard to get a C in college algebra. Cheers.
But…but…but… the RAGE! With a measured approach to topics like that, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUEL THE RAGE!!!11
Consider how rapidly they have been built, and the capitalists’ plans to make many many more. Now also consider the state of the planet’s ecology and the already terrible effects of climate change.
To me, it’s incomprehensible that regular people haven’t already revolted against the death spiral the capitalist class has put us on.
Can you name a moment in time when regular people did stand in solidarity and revolt against something that wasn’t already at the point of causing them grave, direct, unavoidable, and consistent harm?
I present to you…the French.
The French that started by beheading kings and nobles… and shortly after anyone who had a slightly different opinion? The French who shortly after that madness had a new Emperor? THAT French?
Billionaires trying to kill the rest of us faster.
Sometimes I wonder where we could be if all the AI money was spent on e.g. fusion energy research instead.
I guess we would be 30 years from stable scalable fusion reactions?
Remember when Elon was all about “transitioning the world to sustainable transportation”? LOL
He was never about that.
He said he was, but actions speak louder and if he ever was he’d be promoting Hydrogen-electric with a Hydrogen ICE transition* instead of battery electric which isn’t sustainable and is environmentally disastrous in its own way.
*Diesel ICE can be converted to Hydrogen ICE (note: they still need ~5-10% diesel, so it’s not a forever technology) - https://www.unsw.edu.au/engineering/research-technology/is/converting-diesel-engines-to-run-on-hydrogen
Found the Toyota rep
Batteries have a much smaller overall environmental footprint than traditional ICE vehicles. Hydrogen is also produced at scale in a super dirty way right now. There is no clean way to produce hydrogen fuel. So, our goal should be less travel overall, public transit, and EVs, in that order.
If we find a way to mass produce hydrogen in a clean way, then I’m all for hydrogen vehicles. But, we aren’t there yet.
My diesel car has run on B100 (100% biodiesel) just fine for years. That’s already good enough and requires no new technology or infrastructure. Hydrogen is stupid as hell.
Hydrogen can make some degree of sense if we take as an energy reserve, stockpileable, for an event where it is necessary to suplement energy needs.
So many countries with solar farms being turned off to prevent grid collapse could consider building hydrogen plants or, those with sea acess, dessalination stations, to stockpile fresh water underground and extract minerals directly from the water.
Give it up. Hydrogen is not happening. Batteries have won. Now we need to move to more sustainable chemistries.
Oh, and yeah, Elon was always just posing.
While I believe that the various pushes for hydrogen in cars and light trucks is a shameless attempt at replacing the revenue stream from petrol, hydrogen does make a lot of sense for heavy trucks, trains, ships - anywhere diesel or bunker fuel is used now.
We really have literacy crisis on our hands. Their estimates put the industry (if we pretend it’ll not crash and keep growing) at 34 million tonnes of CO2. What percentage of USAs yearly emissions is that? 0,6% of net emissions.
It’s not the animal AG that’s doing it, not the oil industry, and not the car industry. It’s the 0,6% that MAYBE might happen.
I say this not to ignore those things, but to sensitize your valid impulse to fix global climate change issues to the real culprits. Most importantly, I’d like people to adjust their levels of effort and outrage to the actual impacts instead.
If you cared as much as you pretend you do, you’d already be vegan.
Obviously the AI rollout should be slowed down and AI use regulated, like stopping any replacement of workers by AI.
But China is set to win the AI race with their open weight models on par with the current frontier models. And they are building nuclear power and solar and wind like no tomorrow. And they just started to produce sodium ion batteries to solve the grid storage problem.
Spurned by the embargo they are developing more efficient algorithms and “Extreme UV lithography” to catch up to the embargoed chips. The neoliberal model of the west is now falling behind even the high tech sectors.
In case anyone is curious it takes 8 Nvidia B300 cards to run this Kima K3 frontier model yourself (2.8 trillion parameters), costs about half a million. For a big corporation or institutions even in the global south that is relatively cheap and that is the top tier option for running a frontier model. Including complete data sovereignty. Using AMD will be cheaper, and prices will go down once China catches up in like 2030. And you could run that on solar panels and batteries and regenerative water cooling. 8x 1.4kW x24 so maybe 300 kWh LiFePo4 battery so another 50k.
To power one complete AI server you’d need about 134 m² in solar panels which are basically free these days.For solar panels you’d need about 270 / 6 * 24 = ~1000kW. With about 175€/kWp panels that is another 175 thousand plus installation. And something like 4000m². Plus chargers, and large public pool to cool those 270kW. But that is all the energy costs for 30 years up front. The bigger constraint is the land use then.
So basically less than
10%50% extra costs upfront to make AI data centers sustainable. This is a capitalism problem, both the hype / bubble / psychosis (b2b marketing induced) as well as the sustainability question.Question is, how long are they going to keep making their new models open weight? GPT2 was open too, y’know. Hell, the company that made it is called "Open"AI. Money corrupts.
And how many concurrent users do you get with 8 B300s on the Kimi K3? I’m not 100% sure on the math, but apparently about <= 4 with full context size.
They can make these models open weight because basically nobody’s gonna be able to run them and you can’t just build a brand new model out of it like you can with regular open source software. That 8 nvidia B300 card minimum isn’t enough to run it commercially, it’s good for like a small 10-20 person company of fairly heavy users, or slightly more if not using heavily.
Money corrupts.
You say it as if OpenAI started with good intentions and got corrupted by the money. But the most likely explanation is that it was a scam from the start.
“AI is a tool stop being a luddite” mfs when being exposed to this reality
To make AI data centers sustainable with solar and batteries costs about 10% of the price of the base hardware. The AI hype is still insane but we can have a little AI.
Man I want your supplier for batteries and panels tbh.
A single DGX B300 that could run Kimi for a few concurrent users, uses 14 kW. Costs about 500k. Assuming you live far enough from the equator to have seasons, you’ll have about 8 hours of daytime at the worst points of the year (less at my latitude for an example, we get ~6 hour days in the dead of winter, with sun angles below 10 degrees and sunshine available… not every week)
Even in a slightly less extreme location, You’d be looking at roughly a 100 kW array to fill the battery and power that one server reliably like when there’s clouds, about 300 kWh battery capacity to get through long nights. Easily 6 figures total cost, maybe 20-40% of the server itself. This assumes no electricity used for cooling, so it’s very much back of the envelope math, reality could be much worse or a tiny bit better depending on your latitude.
Looking at the actual numbers (less than 1%) other commentors are posting as opposed to clickbait headlines, I’m not seeing the issue.
I’m exhausted of all this. The data centers have been so pervasive that some communities have been thinking about rationing electricity to get around the requirements. That’s… a dystopia future if Ive ever seen one.
The politicians of those communities have failed their constituents.
When a data center permit is applied for, it should be weighed against the state of the grid. If there’s not enough production, it should not be allowed unless they also build a bunch of electricity production capacity, which needs to come online first.
There are instances where this could actually be a net benefit for the grid. Right now in my country, power prices go negative at peak sunlight hours in the summer because we have nothing to do with all that electricity. If you produce solar, gotta disconnect from the grid at those points. A reliable consumer working 24/7 would help even things out for the consumption side of the grid math.
Not that I want them in my country, we have a very dirty grid (shale plants, yay) and live far enough north that solar only works for about 7-8 months a year. But somewhere more moderate in terms of solar availability, it would be fine. Here we need more consumption in the summer and less in the winter.
Hyperbole is hyperbole. I refuse to fall for bullshit just because it’s aligned with my views and opinions.
I personally think it’s bullshit that these things are happening to begin with, not that people are ringing the alarm to our new reality. The latter is just us doing our part to fix this.
to be fair, the scale of pretty much any global industry is incomprehensible to most people
Yep. Also look at animal agriculture which we also do not need and is a huuuuuge amount crueller and orders of magnitude more polluting. Get rid of both and we’d be like a quarter of the way to fixing our emissions
AI datacenters are 3-4 orders of magnitude more polluting than agriculture comparatively. There’s just currently more agriculture than datacenters, which is something these AI companies would like to change
I’d love to see any kind of sources on this. From what I can tell animal agriculture emits roughly 20–30× more CO2e than all data centers combined.
Animal agriculture: The FAO’s most recent estimate puts livestock supply chains at roughly 6.2 Gt CO2e per year, about 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions Data centers (including AI): The IEA puts all data centers at about 0.5% of global CO2 emissions today (~180 Mt CO2), projected to reach 1–1.4% by 2030
