archive.is link to article from allabout.ai at https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-environment/
idk if that’s the intended takeaway from those numbers.
According to AllAboutAI analysis, global AI processing generates over 260,930 kilograms of CO₂ monthly from ChatGPT alone, equivalent to 260 transatlantic flights, with 1 billion daily queries consuming 300 MWh of electricity.
according to the faa there are on average 5500 planes in the air every day, and while i couldn’t find an exact number there seem to be between 350 and 1 200 transatlantic flights every day, depending on season.
260 tons is still massive, but let’s not kid ourselves. it’s about equivalent to producing 12 new american-size cars.
Thank you.
Idk if LLMs can tell which number is bigger. But we already knew humans can’t.
Just goes to show that you don’t even need AI to spread misinformation! Haha
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Frankly focusing on the carbon output of AI models is a red herring. It’s not a significant part of the problem and just makes people complacent in the form of feeling like we’ve achieved something if it succeeds. It’s not worse than stuff like video games
Focus on the actual negative effects of AI, but carbon intensity isn’t a major one
I’m much more concerned about AI datacenters’ use of evaporative cooling draining freshwater reserves than the carbon footprint atm
we do a lot of things for no benefit. video games, golf, horse racing, grilling… all those have far larger carbon footprints. as someone else said, focus on the actual negatives of generative ai, like the proven cognitive decline and loneliness.
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in the comment i replied to you only mention that there’s no benefit, and you replied to me talking about carbon footprint.
“AI” and related tech does a lot of useful translation work. It translates speech to text, one language to another, maybe skilled people can do these jobs more elegantly and correctly, but certainly not more cheaply.
260,930 kilograms of CO₂ monthly from ChatGPT alone
ChatGPT has the most marketing, but it’s only part of the AI ecosystem… and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if other AI products are bigger now. Practically every time someone does a Google search, Gemini AI spits out a summary whether you wanted it or not — and Google processes more than 8 billion search queries per day. That’s a lot of slop.
There are also more bespoke tools that are being pushed aggressively in enterprise. Microsoft’s Copilot is used extensively in tech for code generation and code reviews. Ditto for Claude Code. And believe me, tech companies are pushing this shit hard. I write code for a living, and the company I work for is so bullish on AI that they’ve mandated that us devs have to use it every day if we want to stay employed. They’re even tracking our usage to make sure we comply… and I know I’m not alone in my experience.
All of that combined probably still doesn’t reach the same level of CO² emissions as global air travel, but there are a lot more fish in this proverbial pond than just OpenAI, and when you add them all up, the numbers get big. AI usage is also rising much, much faster than air travel, so it’s really only a matter of time before it does cross that threshold.
they list the others in the article.
Which is why I threw up in my mouth a little when my boss said we all need to be more bullish on AI this morning.
My boss is also a fuckwit
Same. And they basically jizz their pants when they see a practical use for AI, but 9 out of 10 times there’s already a cheaper and more reliable solution they won’t even entertain.
There’s practical use for AI?
I’ve mentioned it before but my boss’s boss said only 86% of employees in his department use AI daily and it’s one of his annual goals to get that to 100%. He is obsessed.
They’re salivating at the chance to reduce head count and still make money. Employees are by far the largest cost for any company. They hate paying it out when it could be for them.
Replace your boss with it.
You should correct their spelling of “bullshit”
Your article doesn’t even claim that. Do you have any idea just how carbon intensive a flight is?
300,000 liters of jet fuel to send one 747 across the Atlantic Ocean - one time.
Or a LLM query?
It’s so important to differentiate between commercial LLMs and AI as a general concept.
It also pollutes the mind of ignorant people with misinformation. Not that that is anything new. But I do think objective truth is very important in a democratic society. It reminds me of that video that used to go around that showed Sinclair Broadcasting in like 20 some different ‘local’ broadcast news all repeating the same words verbatim. It ended with ‘This is extremely dangerous to our democracy’. With AI being added to all the search engines, it is really easy to look something and unknowingly get bombarded with false info pulled out of the dregs of internet. 90% of people don’t verify the answer to see if it is based in reality.
The emoji usage, heading & bold text pattern makes me certain the article was written using AI.
Yeah, AI is shit and a massive waste of energy, but it’s NOTHING compared to the energy usage of the airline industry.
Friend, did you actually follow the link? Maybe just read the pictures?
Just because something has a pretty infographic doesn’t make it true.
Picked at random, It also claims this:
Why does nighttime AI use burn dirtier energy? Fossil fuel dominance: Coal and gas supply up to 90% of overnight electricity. Solar drop-off: Solar disappears after sunset, while wind delivers only ~30% capacity at night. Peak carbon hours: Between 2–4 AM, grid intensity rises to 450–650 gCO₂/kWh, compared to 200–300 gCO₂/kWh in the afternoon.
This is complete bullshit in the UK, where energy is greenest in the small hours of the night when demand is low and the wind turbines are still turning. Least green and most expensive is late afternoon and evening, when energy usage spikes.
Let me reiterate. AI is crap. AI is a massive waste of energy, but your website has its calculations off in terms of order of magnitude when it comes to comparing the airline industry pushing tons of metal fast and hard into and through the sky with AI pushing a bunch of electrons through a bunch of transistors. Seriously, way off.
I checked. The IEA says airlines generate about a gigaton of CO2, and it’s still growing since the dip of covid, which is perhaps where your infographic authors got their screwy figures, which are, like I suggested, the wrong order of magnitude.
Cite your source and compare also using your source?
https://lmgtfy2.com/query/?q=IEA
Like I said, the IEA. The International Energy Agency. I wonder if you’ve heard of them.You can throw scepticism as much as you like, dude, but
(1) I did not lie and
(2) your website is unreliable. Give it up.Again. LLMs are crap, they spout falsehoods all the time, they use unreasonably large amounts of data, but the airline industry pollutes a LOT more.
I begin to wonder whether your website was itself written by an LLM.
That says national not global
both those numbers are insignificant.
But remember, one almond uses at least as much water as two requests to ChatGPT (sources: almonds, queries, data centers), so if you’re eating almonds at all then you’re being inconsistent.
I appreciate you sharing sources for that. I know almond use a lot of water. But one of the things you mentioned is food, and the other is a liar.
that’s very pragmatic, but you can also flip this around – almonds are a luxury compared to other more practical foods, whereas LLMs can help a coder net an income if used properly. I don’t think you can justify almonds if you’re going to claim AI usage is unethical on purely environmental grounds. And dairy milk is twice as much as almond milk in terms of water, so if you have dairy in your diet, cutting that out is going to be a lot more effective for reducing your water footprint than not using LLMs.
Anyway, check out the third link for more info on the total water usage of data centers; it doesn’t really add up to much compared to much larger things like golf courses. I don’t get why anyone would use water usage as a reason to agitate against AI for given that there are so many worse problems AI is causing.
almonds have value, while data centers dont generate profit.
Makes me wonder what they are doing to reach these figures.
Because I can run many models at home and it wouldn’t require me to be pouring bottles of water on my PC, nor it would show on my electricity bill.Well, most of the carbon footprint for models is in training, which you probably don’t need to do at home.
That said, even with training they are not nearly our leading cause of pollution.
Basically every tech company is using it… It’s millions of people, not just us…
Billions. Practically every Google search runs through Gemini now, and Google handles more search queries per day than there are humans on Earth.
Ew, who still uses Google Search?
Most of these figures are guesses along a spectrum of “educated” since many models, like ChatGPT, are effectively opaque to everyone and we have no idea what the current iteration architecture actually looks like. But MIT did do a very solid study not too long ago that looked at the energy cost for various queries for various architectures. Text queries for very large GPT models actually had a higher energy cost than image gen using a normal number of iterations for Stable Diffusion models actually, which is pretty crazy. Anyhow, you’re looking at per-query energy usage of like 15 seconds microwaving at full power to riding a bike a few blocks. When tallied over the immense number of queries being serviced, it does add up.
That all said, I think energy consumption is a silly thing to attack AI over. Modernize, modularize, and decentralize the grids and convert to non-GHG sources and it doesn’t matter–there are other concerns with AI that are far more pressing (like deskilling effects and inability to control mis- and disinformation).
I did some research and according to some AI’s this is true. According to some other AI’s this is false.
“Dear expensive thing: Are you wasteful?”
“Uh…yes? Wait! No…”
The statement strikes me as overblown extreme position staking.
I use AI in my work, not every day, not even every week, but once in a while I’ll run 20-30 queries in a multi-hour session. At the estimated 2Wh per query, that puts my long day of AI code work at 60Wh.
By comparison, driving an electric car consumes approximately 250Wh per mile. So… my evil day spent coding with AI has burned as much energy as a 1/4 mile of driving a relatively efficient car, something that happens every 15 seconds while cruising down the highway…
In other words, my conscience is clear about my personal AI energy usage, and my $20/month subscription fee would seem to amply pay for all the power consumed and then some.
Now, if you want to talk about the massive data mining operations taking place at global-multinational corporations, especially those trolling the internet to build population profiles for their own advantages and profit… that’s a very different scale than one person tapping away at a keyboard. Do they scale up to the same energy usage as the 12 million gallons of jet fuel burned hourly by the air travel (and cargo) industries? Probably not yet.
9.6kWh of energy in a gallon of jet fuel, so just jet fuel consumption is burning over 115 Gigawatts on average, 24-7-365.
I hope you recycle as well!
I hope your recycling is net carbon neutral as well. Example: how much CO2 is released by a recycling program which sends big diesel trucks all over the city to collect recyclables including cardboard, sorting that cardboard at a facility, shipping a small fraction of that to a pulp recycling facility and making recycled cardboard from the post-consumer captured pulp? Consider the alternative to be: torching the cardboard at the endpoint of use - direct conversion to CO2 without the additional steps.
Don’t forget: new from pulpwood cardboard also is contributing to (temporary) carbon capture by growing the pulpwood trees which also provides groundwater recharge and wildlife habitat on the pulpwood tree farms - instead of the pavement, concrete, steel, electricity and fuel consumption of the recycling process.
It’s using energy, we need more renewables. That’s not a problem with AI. Direct your opprobrium where it belongs
What does it mean to consume water? Like it’s used to cool something and then put back in a river? Or it evaporates? It’s not like it can be used in some irrecoverable way right?
“using” water tends to mean that it needs to be processed to be usable again. you “use” water by drinking it, or showering, or boiling pasta too.
if they take the water and don’t return to the source, there will be less available water in the water body, and it can lead to scarcity. If they take it and return, but at a higher temperature, or along with pollutants, it can impact the life in the water body. If they treat the water before returning, to be closest to the original properties, there will be little impact, but it means using more energy and resources for the treatment
I think the point is that it evaporates and may return as rain, which is overwhelmingly acid rain or filled with microplastics or otherwise just gets dirty and needs to be cleaned or purified again.
They need to use very pure water, and it evaporates completely, so it must be continually replenished.
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To be clear: I’m saying that an ongoing supply of pure water is a requirement of the cooling method they chose, not that they were required to choose that method. The poster I was replying to asked how water could actually be consumed and not just reused.
I kind of wondered the same thing in the past, but the other day I read an LA Times article that illustrated the extent of the problem of water loss (not particularly related to data centers although we know they contribute to it). The main problem with evaporating water seems to be that it was water that we could have used which ended up in the ocean instead.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-09-03/global-drying-groundwater-depletion
I infer that evaporation is worse than flushing it down the drain, so to speak, because if it were flushed you would at least be able to treat and recover much of it using much less energy than recovering it from the ocean. So it sounds like evaporation is largely (but obviously not completely) a one-way street, especially in arid regions, since only a tiny portion of the evaporated water would come back there as rain.
Shame to see this clickbait blog misinfo here, but the anti-ai sloppers wont let that stop them.
Wth?
It’s a shitty biased site with incorrect data, ironically what looks to have been written by an AI.
Have anything to back that up or are you just saying it’s FUD?
Generating bullshit that isn’t really that useful.
Remember when the Apple Newton “revolutionized” computing with handwriting recognition?
No, of course not, because the whole thing sucked and vanished outside of old Doonesbury cartoons. LOL
