Study author says tech companies are reaping benefits of artificial intelligence age but society is left to pay cost
The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed.
The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday, which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand.
The figures have been compiled by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a company that researches the unintended consequences of digital trends. He claimed they were the first attempt to measure the specific effect of artificial intelligence rather than datacentres in general as the use of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini soared in 2025.
Tokyo has more population in a smaller footprint. What’s your point? Is Tokyo above or below New York? Makes an important reference point.
It’s a different discussion, because you’re comparing a city to a city. The original comparison shows just how insanely inefficient and dirty these data centers are. Any city with millions of residents should have orders of magnitude higher rates of pollution than any data center.
all ai data centers* but yes still agree with you
Tokyo is arguably civilized…