In a study published on Monday by the peer-reviewed journal Patterns, data scientist Alex de Vries-Gao estimated the carbon emissions from electricity used by AI at between 33 million and 80 million metric tons.
That higher figure would put it above last year’s totals for Chile (78m tons), Czechia (78m tons), Romania (71m tons), and New York City (48m tons, including both CO2 and other greenhouse gases).
At what point do people just start sabotaging these things? Datacenters and AI may represent things that only exist virtually but they must exist in our physical world as well