Energy-hungry AI is already harming health – and it’s getting worse

As data centres consume even more energy to serve the intensive computing needs of artificial intelligence, they could contribute to an estimated 600,000 asthma cases and 1300 premature deaths per year by 2030 – accounting for more than one third of asthma deaths annually in the US.

“Public health impacts are direct and tangible impacts on people, and these impacts are substantial and not limited to a small radius of where data centres operate,” says Shaolei Ren at the University of California, Riverside. “They affect people across the country.”

Ren and his colleagues, including Adam Wierman at the California Institute of Technology, developed those estimates based on data centres’ projected electricity demand, which produces additional emissions and contributes to air pollution. For instance, the electricity usage required for training large AI models could produce air pollutants equivalent to driving a passenger car for more than 10,000 roundtrips between Los Angeles and New York City, according to the researchers.

To model these air pollution and emissions impacts, the researchers used a tool provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency. They calculated that nationally, data centres will have an overall public health cost potentially exceeding $20 billion by 2030. That’s approximately double the public health burden of the US steelmaking industry and possibly rivals the health impact of emissions from tens of millions of vehicles in the largest US states, such as California.

Energy-hungry computing centres are already impacting public health. The researchers estimated that the gas-powered generators used as backup power for facilities in Virginia’s Data Center Alley could already be causing 14,000 asthma symptom cases and imposing public health costs of $220 million to $300 million per year – if generator emissions are only at 10 per cent of the level permitted by state authorities. At the maximum permitted level, the total public health cost could multiply 10-fold to an estimated $2 billion or $3 billion per year. Such problems affect not only local residents, but also people in distant states such as Florida.

“Technology companies [that operate] data centres cannot not be depended on to self-regulate and decide what’s appropriate to report, as they have largely failed to include criteria air pollutants in their sustainability reports, despite their clear impact on public health,” says Julie Bolthouse at the Piedmont Environmental Council, a nonprofit organisation in Virginia.

Some of the tech companies racing to build data centres are also supporting low-emission energy sources, financing construction of renewable energy projects and investing in both conventional nuclear power plants and new nuclear reactor technologies. But for now, many data centres still heavily rely on fossil fuel power such as natural gas – with previous research suggesting that data centres could boost US demand for gas approximately equivalent to another New York State or California by 2030.

“The question around the health impacts of artificial intelligence and data centre computing is an important one,” says Benjamin Lee at the University of Pennsylvania. He described the paper as “the first to estimate these costs and quantify them in dollar terms” but also cautioned that the underlying approximations and assumptions behind the specific numbers need to be validated by additional research.