Texas data center is full of servers
Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service (via Getty Images)
Data centers consume more energy to meet the intensive computing needs of artificial intelligence, which increases air pollutant emissions. This may already be impacting public health, causing an estimated 600,000 annual asthma cases and 1,300 premature deaths in the U.S. by 2030, which is the highest annual asthma death in the country. This will account for more than one-third of the total.
“Public health impacts are direct and tangible impacts on people, and these impacts are significant and not limited to the narrow areas in which data centers operate.” Ren Xiaolei At the University of California, Riverside. Because air pollution can travel long distances, rising levels of pollutants can affect the health of people across the country, he said.
Len and his colleagues Adam Wierman The Caltech researchers created these estimates based on predicted power demand from data centers. In the United States, some of that demand is met by burning fossil fuels, which produce air pollutants such as particulate matter that are known to cause health problems. For example, the electricity usage required to train one of today’s large-scale AI models can generate air pollutants equivalent to driving a passenger car between Los Angeles and New York City more than 10,000 times. Researchers say that there is.
To model the effects of these air pollution and emissions in the United States, researchers tool Provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They estimated that nationally, total public health costs for data centers could exceed $20 billion by 2030. This is about twice the public health costs of the U.S. steel industry and perhaps comparable to the health impacts of tens of millions of steel industry pollutants. According to researchers, the number of vehicles in the largest U.S. states, such as California, is
Energy-intensive data centers are already impacting public health. Researchers found that gas-powered generators used as backup power for facilities in a data center array in Virginia already cause 14,000 asthma symptoms per year, with emissions from the generators as low as 10%. We estimate that it could impose public health costs of $220 million to $300 million. Percent of level allowed by state authorities. At the maximum allowable level, total public health costs could increase tenfold, estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion annually. These problems not only affect local residents, but also people in states as far away as Florida.
Some high-tech companies rushing to build data centers are supporting low-emission energy sources, funding the construction of renewable energy projects, and investing in both conventional nuclear power plants and new reactor technology. There are some places where there are. But for now, many data centers still rely heavily on fossil fuel electricity such as natural gas, and previous research has predicted that by 2030, data centers will be roughly equivalent to one state in the United States and another in California. It has been suggested that this could increase gas demand.
“The questions about the impact of artificial intelligence and data center computing on health are important,” he says. benjamin lee at the University of Pennsylvania. He called the paper “the first to estimate and quantify these costs in dollar terms,” but the underlying approximations and assumptions behind the specific numbers remain to be determined by additional research. He also warned that it needed to be verified.
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