AI has a climate problem — but so does all of tech

We’ve been talking about AI a lot on Decoder lately; it’s unavoidable. But there’s one piece of feedback we’ve gotten that I really wanted to spend some time on: how the lightning-fast explosion of AI tools affects the climate.

After all, to run AI at scale, we need to build a lot of data centers and pack them full of power-hungry GPUs. That takes a lot of energy, and whether using all that juice is worth it comes up frequently when we talk about AI. It’s both a matter of practical concern — “can our aging grid support all of this?” — and a moral objection — “we shouldn’t build these systems because they’ll wreck the planet.”

What’s particularly complicated is that big tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have spent the...

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