190
AI boom has caused same CO2 emissions in 2025 as New York City, report claims
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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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?
I don't know about the carbon emissions, the water thing in the article is extremely misleading. It claims that AI is using up more water than the entire yearly consumption of bottled water. The water usage estimates include the water used to cool the power plants generating the power (running the data center).
The last study on this said that the actual usage of water in the data centers is 12% of the total water usage estimate. Data centers don't normally use that much water. It would be like Niagra Falls pouring water over every data center.
Simple reality check: If you look at the cooling system outside any given data center—if they're using as much water as d article suggests—they'd be emitting a massive cloud of water, 24/7. It would be so much, they'd need a cooling tower on par with a nuclear power station.
So what's with the statistic? If you look at any given power plant on Google Maps you'll see cooling ponds all around it. That's the water they're talking about. It's part of the build of the power plant. It's not using potable water that would be going into people's houses.
Having said that, 12% of the water usage is potable water—in the worst-case data center/power plant matchup scenario. Where you have an older data center that doesn't use modern closed loop cooling systems that don't lose as much water to evaporation. I don't know what the statistic is, but I can sure you it's a lot better than 12%. A wild guess would be 4-6%.
Background: I was a security consultant for many years and traveled all over the US going into many data centers (sometimes, by breaking in! Hah). Inside, they're loud AF (think: standing next to a jet engine) and outside they'll have some big ass cooling units that are also kinda loud but not as loud as some of these articles make them out to be.
That was about 7 years ago but I doubt much has changed since then. I guarantee that those data centers are still being used and have been renovated to support AI-style hardware. The power from the utility was just increased and more cooling units were added. I seriously doubt they did much more than that.
From what I've read about the new "giga scale" data centers, they're much more efficient (and quieter... Outside). Those are the ones we want. If we replaced all the old stuff with new stuff, the statistics in articles like this would drop by and order of magnitude (just a guess).