Energy-hungry AI is already harming health – and it's getting worse

 

As data centres consume even more energy to serve the intensive computing needs of artificial intelligence, they increase the emissions of air pollutants. This could already be impacting public health and, by 2030, it could contribute to an estimated 600,000 asthma cases and 1300 premature deaths per year in the US – accounting for more than a third of asthma deaths annually in the country.

“Public health impacts are direct and tangible impacts on people, and these impacts are substantial and not limited to a small radius of where data centres operate,” says Shaolei Ren at the University of California, Riverside. Because airborne pollution can travel long distances, increasing levels of pollutants can affect the health of people across the country, he says.

Ren and his colleagues developed those estimates based on the projected electricity demand from data centres. In the US, some of that demand is being met by burning fossil fuels, which produce air pollutants known to cause health problems, such as fine particulate matter. For instance, the electricity usage required for training one of today’s large AI models could produce air pollutants equivalent to driving a passenger car for more than 10,000 roundtrips between Los Angeles and New York City, according to the researchers.