The United Nations wants artificial-intelligence companies to stop treating the environmental bill as somebody else’s problem.
In a call amplified this week by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the organisation is pressing the firms behind the AI boom to disclose the carbon, water, and land their systems consume, and to switch their data centres and supply chains to clean power before the costs land on the communities least able to absorb them.
The disclosure demand rests on a fresh evidence base. A June 2026 report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) warns that AI’s environmental footprint is expanding rapidly across all three dimensions, and calls for urgent action to keep the technology inside what it terms planetary limits.
The report reframes a debate that has largely fixated on electricity as one about water and land as well.
The headline number is the power. Data centres are projected to draw about 945 terawatt-hours of electricity a year by 2030, the report estimates, a figure it sets against the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, three countries whose populations together exceed half a billion people.
