AI servers use an order of magnitude more power than cloud storage servers. Combined with all the other problems of AI, do we really want it?

The energy consumption of AI server farms is so excessive that even Open AI CEO Sam Altman admits there’s a crisis. Altman’s solution is nuclear power (he’s invested at least $375 million in fusion startup Helion Energy), but even if that were a solution, AI’s increasing energy use will become an environmental disaster long before nuclear capacity comes online. It’s a problem that underscores the problems with our increasing reliance on cloud computing, and may make us question whether we even need it.

“Data centers play an important role in providing processing power to businesses, but they also consume a lot of energy to operate and large amounts of water to cool the servers,” sustainability expert and activist Seth Siegel told Lifewire via email.

According to a new paper in Nature by researcher Professor Kate Crawford, Open AI’s ChatGPT already uses as much energy as 33,000 households. What’s more, a search using an AI search engine uses four to five times as much energy as a regular web search.