\n<\/p>\n
Using artificial intelligence can feel like magic. You type a prompt, and your answer instantly, effortlessly appears. But the magic is an illusion. This one prompt uses roughly 10 times more energy than a standard search. Pull back the curtain, and you discover vast warehouses of computers with a voracious appetite for energy, water and raw minerals. New data centers are fueling a trillion-dollar industrial revolution. \u201cThis is the biggest infrastructure project in history.\u201d All of this, quite literally, scars the earth. Right now, A.I.\u2019s environmental impacts are growing, and the consequences are hitting home. \u201cMy car is gone.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m OK. It\u2019s OK.\u201d \u201cEverything\u2019s gone.\u201d Spruce Pine is like a secret. It\u2019s a small, sleepy town in North Carolina. Very few people realize how crucial it is in the A.I. supply chain. I came here last fall as part of my work to map the hidden costs of artificial intelligence. I\u2019ve been studying the impacts of A.I. for over a decade. I didn\u2019t realize it, but I was about to see those costs up close and personal. But first, let me show you what I came to see. Below us is the world\u2019s main source of high-purity quartz. As much as 90 percent of the world\u2019s supply of this crucial mineral comes from this five-square-mile quarry. This is what it looks like before it\u2019s mined. This is pegmatite that I picked up in Spruce Pine. It was formed in a rare deposit about 300 million years ago. So what has this ancient rock got to do with A.I.? First, the quartz from these rocks is shipped east to China and Taiwan. The purity and heat resistance make it essential in producing this. A semiconductor microchip. They perform the millions of calculations needed to run A.I. models. But to do this work, they demand vast amounts of power and water. Demand that is expected to dramatically increase in the next decade. \u201cWell, we needed a building. We looked, basically, for factories that had been abandoned, but the \u2014\u201d Take Elon Musk\u2019s company xAI, which boasts that it has built the world\u2019s largest A.I. supercomputer, in South Memphis. Musk calls it Colossus. The local power grid couldn\u2019t support its energy demands, so the company set up dozens of methane gas generators, releasing nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde into the air. This historically Black community was blindsided, and they\u2019re calling for fines and an investigation. \u201cEveryday people don\u2019t get a deal, but Elon Musk does.\u201d In Virginia, data centers already consume more than a quarter of the state\u2019s total electricity. \u201cPeople\u2019s utility bills may double in the next seven to 10 years just to power data centers. Pollution is rising, and water supplies are being stretched thin.\u201d Worldwide, data centers will soon be using as much energy as Japan and are predicted to match India\u2019s energy usage by 2030. It\u2019s like adding a whole new industrial nation onto the grid. But instead of limiting the environmental impacts, this is happening. \u201cStargate, put that name down in your books. A new American company that will invest $500 billion, at least, in A.I. infrastructure in the United States.\u201d Just days after he pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, President Trump announced plans to build sprawling A.I. data centers across the country. \u201cThe fact that we get to do this in the United States is, I think, wonderful. OpenAI\u2019s new data center, code-named Project Ludicrous, is being built right now in Texas. It\u2019s larger than Central Park. There are plans to construct at least 20 of these across the country. Now generative A.I. will compete with you, for power, water and land. It\u2019s driving up electricity bills while releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. All of this comes at a cost. \u201cWe\u2019re back with more breaking news on Hurricane Helene. Now a very powerful Category 4 storm.\u201d Days after I visited, Hurricane Helene slammed into Spruce Pine. The deadliest U.S. hurricane since Katrina, it killed more than 200 people in the region. The plane that I\u2019d flown in over the mines just a few days earlier, destroyed. The North Toe River, poisoned with sewage, oil, and mining runoff. People had lost everything. With all the focus on the rapid build-out of A.I. factories, what gets less attention are the real risks they pose to our environment. Of course, we can\u2019t pin one hurricane on climate change, but the science is clear. The warming planet will produce more dangerous storms and in places that have never seen this level of severity, like Spruce Pine. This is the reality we face. Now, tech evangelists claim that A.I. will fix climate change in the future. But right now, A.I. is making the situation worse. None of this is inevitable. A.I. technologies could still benefit societies as a whole, or they could enrich a small cadre of interests. Washington has made its choice. It will be up to local communities to take up a grass-roots fight to protect their land, air and water. Because technological progress that isn\u2019t sustainable isn\u2019t really progress. It\u2019s borrowing against the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Using artificial intelligence can feel like magic. You type a prompt, and your answer instantly, effortlessly appears. But the magic is an illusion. This one prompt uses roughly 10 times more energy than a standard search. Pull back the curtain, and you discover vast warehouses of computers with a voracious appetite for energy, water and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[14589,7727,2599,265,440,4772,773],"class_list":{"0":"post-23966","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-a-i-s","9":"tag-chain","10":"tag-environmental","11":"tag-impact","12":"tag-opinion","13":"tag-supply","14":"tag-threaten"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}