AI Climate Impact: Enabled Emissions Are Even Worse than Data Centers

Artificial intelligence's (AI) carbon footprint is even worse than it seems.

It's not just that new data centers are leading to new fossil-fueled power plants—like an Amazon-backed gas plant in Texas that could be the largest single source of CO2 pollution in the U.S. AI also is making the fossil fuel industry more productive, and a new study finds that those productivitygains could generate as much as 13 times more emissions than data centers do today.

The study, published in the Nature Portfolio journal npj Climate Action, focuses on “enabled emissions”: emissions created when oil and gas companies use AI to extract and refine fossil fuels more quickly and cheaply, and to generate more power.

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