AI and its large-scale data centers are quickly and suddenly taking over the world.
AI is the world’s fastest-growing industry, according to LinkedIn. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, data centers are “one of the most energy-intensive building types, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building.” Data centers of all kinds are already responsible for using 3% of all the electricity on Earth, according to Socomec, an electrical equipment engineering and manufacturing company, and 12% of the US’s total energy consumption, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI). With AI needing even more energy, that number is only going to rise.
Larger data centers can each “drink” up to 5 million gallons per day, or about 1.8 billion annually, a usage equivalent to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people, according to a 2025 article published by the EESI. Water is used to feed their cooling systems, which heat up very quickly. Google’s data center in Dalles, Oregon, consumed 29% of the town’s total water supply in 2022, according to Seven Sea Water, which develops and operates decentralized water and wastewater systems globally.
AI is marketed as a fantastic convenience for all of humankind, from writing essays and paragraphs for people of any age to providing business and marketing strategies and ideas, to summarizing research, and even acting as a human-like companion. AI usage has become strikingly popular, with approximately 1 billion monthly users, according to DataReportal. ChatGPT alone has risen to the fifth-most-visited website in the world in just three years since its launch, according to revealdata.com.
Joe Bozeman III, assistant professor of environmental engineering at Georgia Tech, says, “Considering the three pillars of sustainability, one being people, two being planet, and three being profit, it seems like profit tends to be the driver of decision-making.”
The rollout of AI, and in turn the huge data centers it requires, is no different.
One woman in Georgia, Beverly Morris, in the town of Mansfield, has been heavily affected by a Meta (parent company of Facebook) Data Center. According to a BBC News interview, the water in her home is not working at all, and she cannot drink it. She has to use buckets of water in order to flush her toilet.
According to Georgia Power’s website, “In recent years, Georgia has emerged as one of the nation’s leading destinations for data centers.” They say that this is due to the state’s reliable power supply, business-friendly climate, and connectivity. It is also because of the weather: “the sun beating down through thick humidity” appeals to data center developers, making Georgia a hub for these new constructions, according to the BBC.
Georgia Power is requesting 10,000 megawatts of new power generation capacity over the next five years to compensate for the energy these AI-driven data centers will consume, and the costs to power them are falling on Georgia residents and local businesses, according to Courthouse News.
Efforts to halt AI to preserve the environment and the livelihoods that come with it are not rising at the same rate as the construction of AI data centers.
Victoria Nwankwo, a local Atlanta teen attending Emory University, says, “Technology should be about improving lives, not creating hardships for communities.” The top contributors to AI data centers are Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla.
Amazon is prioritizing AI so much in its operations that, as of Oct. 28, 14,000 employees are to be laid off, according to Richmond News, and eventually terminated.
AI is the backbone powering all of Google’s core features, according to Google’s own blog. Features like Gmail, YouTube, spell-check, autocorrect, and search all rely on Google’s AI to function.
With Google holding over 90% of the global search engine market share and processing about 8.5 billion searches a day, according to Global Tech Stack, it’s clear just how much activity flows through Google — and, in turn, AI.
ChatGPT is not the sole cause of these environmental concerns. But according to Earth.org’s estimates, ChatGPT and its supporting elements emit 8.4 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Sophomore student at Spelman College, Sage Mae Lima-Jeffries, believes that to lessen potential catastrophes from these data centers, companies should “take them out of residential areas. If you’re gonna put it somewhere, don’t put it somewhere where it’s negatively impacting people. I would also just do it on a smaller scale. ChatGPT and AI never should’ve been made available to the general public. It should’ve only been utilized for scientific and medical breakthroughs.”
