Green energy transition at risk from unrestricted data centre development

A new report by the Öko-Institut, commissioned by Greenpeace, shows that unregulated data centre development could serve as a boost for fossil fuels and limit renewable energy development, and that strict new guidelines are required to ensure artificial intelligence doesn’t threaten climate goals.

The study projects the power consumption of data centres servicing the needs of various applications of AI will be 11 times higher in 2030 than in 2023, with a subsequent increase in emissions from 29 MTCO2-e in 2023 to 166 MTCO2-e in 2030 (a calculation that factors in an increasing share of renewables).

Other environmental burdens include the water required for cooling, which will almost quadruple to 664 billion litres, and the additional electronic waste generated by the expansion of data centres and AI capacity, which will amount to up to 5 million tonnes, over the same period. In addition, 920 kilotonnes of steel and around one hundred kilotonnes of critical raw materials will be required.

While major data centre operators such as Amazon, Meta and Google have played a central role in signing power purchase agreements with many renewable energy facilities, incentivising their growth, the vast power consumption of these companies generally far exceeds deals done with clean power providers, resulting in a net addition of greenhouse gases thanks to their new demand.

The result, says Jens Gröger, Research Coordinator for Sustainable Digital Infrastructures at Öko-Institut, is that ‘in the years ahead, data centres will continue to rely on fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal – with correspondingly high environmental costs.’ The major technology companies are also investing in nuclear power plants and small modular reactors (SMRs).

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be understood by the machine. The Meta CEO has recently been pitching a future where his AI tools give people something that “knows them well,” not just as pals, but as professional help. “For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist,” he told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, “I think everyone will have an AI.”

The jury is out on whether AI systems can make good therapists, but this future is already legible. A lot of people are anecdotally pouring their secrets out to chatbots, sometimes in dedicated therapy apps, but often to big general-purpose platforms like Meta AI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or xAI’s Grok. And unfortunately, this is starting to seem extraordinarily dangerous — for reasons that have little to do with what a chatbot is telling you, and everything to do with who else is peeking in.

This might sound paranoid, and it’s still hypothetical. It’s a truism someone is always watching on the internet, but the worst thing that comes of it for many people is some unwanted targeted ads. Right now in the US, though, we’re watching the impending collision of two alarming trends. In one, tech executives are encouraging people to reveal ever more intimate details to AI tools, soliciting things users wouldn’t put on social media and may not even tell their closest friends. In the other, the government is obsessed with obtaining a nearly unprecedented level of surveillance and control over residents’ minds: their gender identities, their possible neurodivergence, their opinions on racism and genocide.

And it’s pursuing this war by seeking and weaponizing ever-increasing amounts of information with little regard for legal or ethical restraints.

Via Garbage Day: Just the regular kind of authoritarian purge