A few days ago we learned that Anthropic had joined the carbon-removal coalition Frontier together with some other Big Tech companies, but even if that will help removal startups in the next few years, the big elephant in the room with Artificial Intelligence companies has always been the real environmental footprint they leave.
Therefore, UN chief Antóni Guterres is calling for more transparency in this regard, as he wants major AI firms to publicly disclose the full water, carbon, and land-use impact of their heavily consuming data centres. The energy powering these facilities, added to their intensive use of water for cooling purposes, has become a major climate concern for the past decade. Guterres warns that by 2030 they could consume more electricity than almost five countries combined, and enough water to met the basic needs of the 1.3 billion people living in sub-Saharan Africa for a full year.
The UN's goal is to see AI growth powered by renewables, and not by more fossil fuels. Guterres urges these companies to run all data centres on clean energy in four years' time, at the same time calling on the fossil fuel industry to cut methane emissions by fixing leaks and putting routine flaring (the regular practice of burning off excess gas at oil and gas facilities) to an end.
