STOP AI Datacenters
“The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence guzzle huge amounts of energy but they also have another alarming impact, according to new research. They are creating “heat islands,” warming the land around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and making life hotter for more than 340 million people.”
“Strikingly, the impacts weren’t limited to a data center’s immediate surroundings; temperature increases affected areas up to 6.2 miles away.”
This single AI data center in Utah is a prime example of the problems these facilities are causing….
Stratos Data Center in Box Elder County, Utah, would cost $100 billion to build and use 9 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, generated entirely from on-site gas power plants, to power its operations.
This would nearly double the entire state of Utah’s electricity 2025 peak demand.
If the 9 GW of power is generated with a combined-cycle combustion turbine (CCCT):
Use about 448 billion cubic feet of gas per year, roughly 1.5 times more natural gas than the entire state of Utah currently uses across all homes, businesses, and existing power plants combined.
Produce 1,857 tons of NOx/year, ~5 times more than the entirety of Box Elder County’s industrial emissions
Produce 30.2 million tons of CO2/year, increasing the entire state’s CO2 emissions by 55%.
Use 16.6 billion gallons of water/year just to operate the gas turbines. This amount of annual water use would fill approximately 25,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Data centers hold massive amounts of high-performance computing and networking infrastructure. All of this uses a large amount of energy to power and water to cool these systems.
The widespread and growing use of AI has exponentially increased the power consumption by data centers, as AI usage and development models use a tremendous amount of energy. In 2023, 4.4% of all energy used in the United States was used by data centers and is projected to hit 12% by 2028.
They strain water supplies, with the largest centers using up to 5 million gallons per day. Their backup generators can produce air pollution and a constant humming noise. And the wave of new jobs promised by developers is not happening.
The dramatic increase in energy consumption for AI is driving the construction of not just more data centers but also energy infrastructure, including power plants.