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Will AI Really Kill Our Planet?
Written By: Chloe Drieu, Staff Writer
The mainstream conversation around artificial intelligence struggles to find a middle ground. On one end, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that “AI will be the most powerful technology ever created by humanity, and it has the potential to improve every aspect of our lives.” Likewise, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has described AI as “more profound than electricity or fire,” arguing that it will fundamentally transform society for the better.
On the other end of the spectrum, environmental activists and critics paint a far darker picture.
Writer and researcher Kate Crawford told The Kennedy Human Rights Center, “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. [There is an] enormous environmental footprint—the minerals, the energy, the water—that drives AI. This is the opposite of artificiality. It’s profound materiality.”
This polarization extends far beyond experts, now dominating both print media and social media. Headlines warn of AI’s enormous electricity consumption, water use, and carbon emissions, raising questions about whether the technology’s benefits can justify its environmental cost.
But is the AI-versus-the-environment debate really that black and white?
Before discussing AI’s environmental impact, it’s important to define what artificial intelligence actually is. The term gets thrown around a lot, and it’s often used to describe everything from chatbots to robots to futuristic supercomputers.
Simply put, artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of computer systems to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as recognizing images, understanding language, learning from data, solving problems, and making decisions.
Of course, AI isn’t one single technology. It encompasses everything from recommendation algorithms on streaming platforms to self-driving cars, image generators, and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. There are many different types of AI, each with its own capabilities and environmental footprint.
How Much Water Does AI Use?
Modern AI runs on massive data centers: warehouses filled with thousands of servers that require significant amounts of electricity. Many data centers rely on water-based cooling systems to keep these servers from overheating.
This has sparked a wave of alarming headlines online. One viral claim suggests that asking ChatGPT to help write a short email consumes an entire half-liter bottle of water. Google, however, estimates that a typical AI prompt uses somewhere between 0.3 and 17 milliliters of water. This equates to between a few drops and about a tablespoon.
So which number is right?
The answer is: both are, but based on different assumptions.
Some estimates measure only the water used directly to cool the servers during a single query. Others include indirect water consumption, such as the water required to generate the electricity powering the data center. The size of the AI model, the length of the conversation, the location of the data center, and even the local climate can all dramatically change the estimate.
In short, there’s no universally accepted way to calculate AI’s water footprint, which is one reason calculations vary so dramatically.
Regardless of which estimate you use, AI’s water consumption is undeniably growing. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Lab estimate that U.S. data centers used approximately 228 billion gallons of water in 2023, with about 211 billion gallons tied to electricity generation and the remainder used directly for cooling.
The numbers are staggering—it is, admittedly, hard to grasp just how much 228 billion really is, but numbers without context can be misleading.
For comparison, irrigation for U.S. agriculture withdraws roughly 118 billion gallons of water every day. This is more than 43 trillion gallons each year. Agriculture remains by far the country’s largest freshwater user because producing food is an extraordinarily water-intensive process.
Though data centers only consume about 0.5% as much water as agriculture does, this comparison doesn’t excuse AI’s water use. Food is an indispensable necessity, while AI isn’t. Instead, it illustrates an important point: asking whether AI uses water isn’t the right question. The better question is how much water it uses, where that water comes from, and whether the benefits justify the resources consumed.
Advantageous Intelligence
AI’s environmental costs only tell half the story. Like electricity or the internet, artificial intelligence is a tool. Whether it harms or helps the planet depends largely on how we choose to use it.
Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico devastated thousands of acres of rainforest, leaving scientists with an enormous challenge: how could they possibly determine which tree species survived and which were destroyed? NASA had collected high-resolution aerial images of the forest, but analyzing millions of trees by hand would’ve taken years.
Instead, researchers at Columbia University trained an AI model using data from forests where every tree had already been identified. Once the system learned what different species looked like from above, it could rapidly analyze the rest of the island’s canopy. This feat would have been nearly impossible for humans alone.
Understanding which forests recover after major storms matters because healthy forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If climate change leads to more frequent and severe hurricanes, scientists need accurate data to predict how much carbon forests will continue to store in the future.
However, AI’s environmental potential stretches far beyond a single rainforest.
That Columbia study was conducted in 2019. In the years since, AI has advanced at an astonishing pace, becoming faster, more capable, and dramatically more accessible. If researchers could accomplish that with the technology available seven years ago, imagine what today’s systems can do.
Scientists are now using AI to detect methane leaks from space, monitor deforestation in real time, optimize renewable energy grids, reduce water and fertilizer use in agriculture, and improve the climate models that governments rely on to prepare for hurricanes, droughts, floods, and wildfires.
AI isn’t a silver bullet for climate change, but in the right hands, it has the potential to become one of our most powerful environmental tools for scientists.
So, Is AI The End of Earth?
Well, it depends.
Artificial intelligence undeniably consumes an immense amount of energy, water, and resources, and its environmental footprint deserves scrutiny. As AI becomes more powerful and widely used, improving the sustainability of data centers, expanding renewable energy, and developing more efficient models will become increasingly important.
At the same time, AI is already helping scientists understand our changing planet, detect environmental problems sooner, improve renewable energy systems, and make better-informed decisions about our future.
Like nearly every transformative technology before it, AI is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It is a tool capable of causing harm or creating extraordinary good.
Whether AI becomes a burden on the planet or one of its greatest allies won’t be decided by the technology itself. Every tool amplifies the user’s intentions, and AI is no different.
AI won’t decide the future of our planet: we will.
Works Cited
Columbia News. “Combating Climate Change with Artificial Intelligence.” Columbia News, news.columbia.edu/news/combating-climate-change-artificial-intelligence.
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. “Atlas of AI: Examining the Human and Environmental Costs of Artificial Intelligence.” Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, www.kennedyhumanrights.org/our-voices/atlas-of-ai-examining-the-human-and-environmental-costs-of-artificial-intelligence/.
CBS News. “How Much Water AI Uses.” CBS News, 2026, www.cbsnews.com/projects/2026/how-much-water-ai-uses/.
