Can clean energy handle the AI boom?

How our digital lives are impacting our climate goals.

This video is presented by Klaviyo. Klaviyo has no editorial influence on our work, but their support makes videos like these possible.

In our new series, Explain it To Me, Vox takes audience questions and we do our best to report, investigate and deliver an answer. For this video, a retired schoolteacher in New York named Kathy submitted a question to us about how things like cryptocurrency, cloud storage and artificial intelligence are impacting our climate goals.

Crypto, AI and cloud storage are all a part of the carbon footprint of data centers. In this video we unpack what exactly we know about data centers’ growing electricity demands, how AI is factoring into that picture, and whether clean energy can keep up.

Here are links to the sources we mention in the video:

[AnotherFreakingDude]

Next up on Vox: Do companies fuel military conflict? Sponsored by Lockheed Martin.

[howdee_]

That ad is kinda awkward giving the subject matter today but get that bag lol this is good content

[mikeroller]

These days, Vox videos have comments about why the ad breaks feel disingenuous and are signs of a lack of independence in their reporting. I have to agree. I know they say, "Klaviyo has no editorial influence over our work, " but that would certainly ~feel~ more believable if the video was about something other than AI and data storage... The farther apart the advertiser and the reporting are, the more confident I am that the ad has nothing to do with the content of the video; it's just that simple. This is a real opportunity for Vox. They need to be better on this front.

That being said, this is an excellent piece and discusses an incredibly important aspect of the climate crisis. No hate to Laura, this was a great video. I am also not hating on Vox needing to use ads; they certainly can; it's just that the impression of independence can often be substantial for some people.

[kingace]

For some reason, Vox has a habit of getting very ironic/counterproductive sponsors for very meaningful videos.

[theaidanator]

Big oversight in this is not mentioning geothermal power - Google, Microsoft etc have invested a lot of money in running data centers using geothermal energy, which doesn't have the reliability issues of wind and solar. The US Department of Energy is also putting huge investment into this, I'm surprised it was overlooked in this video.

[alexaramachandran]

kinda weird sponsor to have for this video vox 😭

[srwapo]

You hadn't thought about this at all? It's like one of the two topics I hear about all the time when AI comes up.

[sciekimike]

Why isn't nuclear the focus on this video? It's literally the ONLY scalable low carbon energy source with the correct generation profile required by data centers.

[joeentwisle]

Electricity is only one part of the problem. The amount of water these data centers are using is astronomical.

[svenkites]

Great vid, ironic though that the sponsor for a video on AI creating energy crisis is a company that uses AI?

[shrimpdance]

A missed opportunity was eschewing generative AI when possible. Unless your job is forcing you to, don't use platforms like ChatGPT, Midjournery, Sora, etc. The best way to save energy in this area is to deflate the AI boom.

[shantanusapru]

Short answer: No. Unless you involve nuclear, which should have been done a long time back!!

[DustinMaxim]

“A low lumen LED bulb” at 5:04 should not have had an incandescent bulb image and sound effect

[kingace]

The solution is the same as the solution for climate change. Hold the biggest emitters/data centers accountable by making sure they don't shift blame onto individual consumers.

[demian]

ngl i was waiting for the punchline during that ad 😂 and then i was like, “oh they’re serious” 😂😂

[kentslocum]

I wouldn't be surprised if Vox used AI to generate the text for this video. 😂

[GooiYingChyi]

LLMs also require massive amounts of human inputs, as they need to manually categorize and clean up data, which not only require electricity for the computers that they work on, but potentially require more offices to house them, admin to manage those people, which indirectly contributes to the overall footprint

[lucasabbade]

Wild that you released a video on data center power usage one week after the news of microsoft's billion dollar nuclear deal to power data centers and **checks notes** the word "nuclear" isn't said on the video a single time.

[NicoleHennig]

The guy interviewed in this video made it sound like Google was refusing to say how much of the workload is AI.
But here’s the full sentence: “As we deeply integrate AI across our product portfolio, the distinction between AI and other workloads will not be meaningful.”

Which to me sound like it will be impossible to count AI separately from other uses of data centers as it gets built in to everything.
(Also, in the past Google has said that machine learning counts for about 15% of their data center use).

[xZaapKaT]

I’m very surprised nuclear wasn’t mentioned once. Microsoft has moved toward this idea for data centre power. I personally think nuclear seems like the most reasonable option. Nuclear is always on as are data centres. no ramp up or ramp down required.