AI's Environmental and Economic Impacts

When AI first came on the scene I was very much against it for a lot of reasons but I have to admit to my curiosity surrounding it. I have used it sort of as a sounding board for thoughts and ideas. Even used it like a stand in for a therapist on occasion. I still had concerns for various reasons like what humans could use it for in really bad ways and of course what might happen if it just started taking over our systems and locked humans out altogether, things like that. That was the extent of it until I learned of something I hadn't really considered before, that AI requires a lot of data processing, much more than most things and with that comes an increase in water and energy consumption along with heat generation and dissipation.

There are people whose neighborhoods have become home to some of these data centers and they are already beginning to feel the adverse effects in water shortages and skyrocketing energy costs. I have heard that every time someone uses AI to make a query, that equates to a half a liter of water being consumed by the data center. The more it is used, the more water and electricity are consumed. The companies running the tech aren't even trying to find ways to mitigate the impact because it would have a greater upfront cost and take a bit longer to engineer. So instead, big business is doing what big business always does, they are hurting the people and the environment to keep the profits rolling in.

I, for one, have decided to avoid AI as much as I can because of this.


Here are just a few of the articles that can be found about this.

Water:
AI could deplete drinking water sources around Illinois, Midwest

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/

Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much

Electric:
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5502671/electricity-bill-high-inflation-ai

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/...onment/ai-data-centers-electricity-costs.html

Eye-popping electric bills come due as price of AI revolution