Technology AI, Science and New Things
Data centres in the US are responsible for nearly as much emitted carbon as the country's commercial airlines, and they're just getting started.
They produced 105 million tonnes of CO2 in the year to August, when the airlines produced 131 million, according to the MIT Technology Review. A reason the number is already so big is that data centres are disproportionately located near and reliant on coal-powered energy because they can't risk intermittent supply, making their output filthily carbon-intensive.
A reason the CO2 tonnage is going to get much bigger is video AI. Sora, OpenAI's video-generation model, proved so popular when it went live on 9 December that it nearly crashed its own website.
Google's Veo and Meta's Movie Gen are due soon – and every bot you ask to make a movie will use far more energy doing so than search engines use telling you how to do it yourself.
