is AI bad for the environment?
One AI question isn't bad for the environment; the honest answer is about scale. Data centers used about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, around 1.5% of global electricity, and the International Energy Agency projects 945 by 2030, driven mainly by AI.
The honest complication: a short text answer and a multi-step image or video generation use very different amounts of power, and much of a data center’s draw isn’t the AI chip itself — it’s cooling, networking, and spare capacity kept ready for demand spikes. That’s a real reason per-query estimates from different studies can disagree by more than 100x.