A new United Nations report warns that the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence technology posed a threat to global resources, projecting that AI data centers could consume as much water as the basic needs of 1.3 billion people by 2030. The comprehensive study, titled “Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints,” was published by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).
The study highlighted that evaluating AI solely by carbon emissions overlooks devastating localized impacts on water and land systems.
Every AI query, image generation request, or chatbot interaction relies massively on the physical infrastructure and at the center of this infrastructure are data centers; large facilities made up of servers, processors, networking equipment, and storage systems. Because these facilities generate lots of heat, an extensive cooling system is needed to operate safely. And most is done through water—a cooling process that prevents the servers from overheating.
The strain on raw resources include:
Water Consumption: The projected 9.3 trillion liters used per year by 2030 matches the entire minimum annual domestic water needs of every resident in Sub-Saharan Africa
Electricity Demand: AI data centers will consume roughly 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity by 2030. This triples previous averages and equals nearly 3 percent of the world’s total power use.
Land & Waste Footprint: The land required for these centers will exceed 14,500 square kilometers (twice the size of the Jakarta metro area), while producing 2.5 million tonnes of electronic waste annually.
Some industry leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have minimized the resource panic, arguing that the energy and resource cost of developing AI is justifiable compared to the biological cost of raising and educating human workers.
“The cooling loop is filled once, and the data center can operate effectively with zero water consumption,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, said. “The daily water usage over the course of an entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use.”
The study is tasking tech companies to come up with a plan to meet their “water-positive” goals, or look closer at the geographic regions most vulnerable to data center water shortages.
COMMENTS