this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Study author says tech companies are reaping benefits of artificial intelligence age but society is left to pay cost

The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed.

The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday, which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand.

The figures have been compiled by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a company that researches the unintended consequences of digital trends. He claimed they were the first attempt to measure the specific effect of artificial intelligence rather than datacentres in general as the use of chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini soared in 2025.

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[–] plantfanatic@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (10 children)

I mean this just makes it sound like New York City needs to lower their emissions.

All the AI is as bad as ONE city, that really doesn’t sound that bad in that case, but when you start realizing, coal country, reliant on cars. Where does New York fit in? Middle? Top of the list of most pollutant cities?

Without context it doesn’t mean much. If it’s the lowest emitting city, well then This is good isn’t it?

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago (5 children)

What a terrible take. NYC houses like 9 million people, with even more coming from all over the world for work. What does AI do for that same footprint?

[–] plantfanatic@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Tokyo has more population in a smaller footprint. What’s your point? Is Tokyo above or below New York? Makes an important reference point.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It's a different discussion, because you're comparing a city to a city. The original comparison shows just how insanely inefficient and dirty these data centers are. Any city with millions of residents should have orders of magnitude higher rates of pollution than any data center.

[–] ngdev@lemmy.zip 1 points 12 hours ago

all ai data centers* but yes still agree with you

[–] verdi@feddit.org 2 points 23 hours ago

Tokyo is arguably civilized...

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