alt Hacker NewsUS grid carbon intensity is 0.384 gCO2/kWh (source: ourworldindata). US datacenter energy use in 2023: 176 TWh (excluding crypto, source US congress). How much of that is AI, I couldn't find.
So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546
For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030. Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5% today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable).
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-c...
Thanks, that’s interesting. IEA definitely seems like a solid source for this kind of thing.
1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.)
Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.