Welcome to Eye on AI! In this edition...Ilya Sutskever says he is now CEO of Safe Superintelligence…Chinese AI companies erode U.S. dominance…Meta’s AI talent bidding war heats up…Microsoft’s sales overhaul goes all-in on AI.
As an early-summer heat wave blanketed my home state of New Jersey last week, it felt like perfect timing to stumble across a sobering new prediction from Accenture: AI data centers’ carbon emissions are on track to surge 11-fold by 2030.
The report estimates that over the next five years, AI data centers could consume 612 terawatt-hours of electricity—roughly equivalent to Canada’s total annual power consumption—driving a 3.4% increase in global carbon emissions.
And the strain doesn’t stop at the power grid. At a time when freshwater resources are already under severe pressure, AI data centers are also projected to consume more than 3 billion cubic meters of water per year—a volume that surpasses the annual freshwater withdrawals of entire countries like Norway or Sweden.
Unsurprisingly, the report—Powering Sustainable AI—offers recommendations for how to rein in the problem and prevent those numbers from becoming reality. But with near-daily headlines about Big Tech’s massive AI data center buildouts across the U.S. and worldwide, I can’t help but feel cynical. The urgent framing of an AI race against China doesn’t seem to leave much room—or time—for serious thinking about sustainability.
