AI Adoption in Us Adds ~900k Tons of Co₂ Annually, Study Finds

Your personal CO2 emissions are more like a proportional fraction of global CO2 emissions. All of those factories and cargo ships and airplanes aren’t emitting CO2 just because. They’re doing it for individuals who buy those products and services, and therefore your household’s CO2 footprint is primarily external to the house itself.

900,000 / 5 = 180,000

As of 2023, there are approximately 285 million registered motor vehicles in the United States, with around 96.9 million of those being cars.[1]

180,000 additional cars is something like less than one tenth of the decrease in registered cars between 2022 and 2023. There were five million fewer registered cars in 2023 than 2022.

900,000 / 50 = 18,000

Which is … random statistic comparison, about the same number of households in Bakersfield CA that are female householder with no husband present (2010 census) [2].

If there’s an argument to be made that AI is putting a significant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it certainly isn’t either of these.

1. https://www.consumershield.com/articles/how-many-cars-us

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield,_California

What's important is the cost of the total electricity production apparatus, seasonal storage and transport included. (and environmental cost and availability, meaning fossil fuels should be avoided)

And, a similar argument could be made that "just a tiny bit of uranium can provide so much power, why are we not using it?" completely disregarding the infrastructure cost of nuclear. So this argument does not make much sense IMO.

(to be clear, I'm not saying we should not do anything, just that it's not as easy as it sounds)

I think they will point to the growth rate of capability and squabble over alternative histories.

Eg. If China was a friendly nation to its neighbors, the world would be more comfortable subsidizing their manufacturing and building out solar faster. https://share.google/images/fR5VmXmlygHn6yL2g

So 450 large planes flying that route.

I run searches that otherwise would take 15 min in google. The energy to power the monitor for that much time itself is higher than one prompt that solved my search query.

Since my manager does not read any of that and wouldn't understand it even if he tried I can write down pretty much anything, making outrageous claims about my work and be happy about the highest salary increase in my team.

1. Exploiting local laws to basically pollute in essentially residential areas. This is what's happening with Grok's Memphis DC [1]. The gas turbines count as "mobile" so don't need the same pollution controls;

2. Domestic electricity production is heavily natural gas dependent. This is significantly better than coal but obviously not as good as renewables. But we are creating all this new demand for natural gas that is going to do nothing but drive up the price for everybody. This isn't just data centers. It's the policy of massively increasing LNG exports; and

3. For those DCs connected to the local grid, dthey are essentially getting residential customers to pay for the infrastructure and to subsidize the energy usage. Thing is, we've been here before [2].

So we have people with less income because company spend is moving to AI and the money those people have is being further eaten away by higher electricity prices. This is going to be a problem long before the CO2 emissions will be.

[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

[2]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-crypt...

Thank you for putting it in perspective. All of these headlines that quote isolated emissions numbers without anything to compare it to are deliberately useless. It’s meant to ride the wave of anti-data center and anti-AI outrage, not to be actually useful for forming an opinion.

It’s also unhelpful when data center emissions is compared to personal household use or cars. The real comparison should be to other industrial and commercial operations. If we started putting datacenter emissions in context with other processes like global shipping, aluminum production, or other industrial scale activities people would realize it’s not a problem. Journalists aren’t doing that, though, because they want to tap into the anti-data center outrage in the zeitgeist right now.

That’s assuming the numbers are accurate and in the ballpark, and I’m having a really hard time getting the numbers in the paper to add up. Do you believe them, or better yet, do you have other sources that support or confirm these numbers?

Just googling, what I get back is estimates that AI in 2024 already consumed over 200PJ, nearly 10x the number in the article, and is projected to double in the next few years. US electricity production is already ~25-30% of US CO2 emissions, and data centers are at least a quarter of that, and AI is now a huge driver of data center energy use. Data centers are using more than 4% of US electricity.

How is it possible that projected AI emissions are 0.019% from this one paper, while multiple other sources are estimating AI is already responsible for on the order of 2% of US emissions in 2024? I’m seeing a 100x discrepancy…

I don’t suspect the authors have intentionally downplayed either estimates, but a bunch of the paper’s data is old enough that it’s not useful for examining AI trends today. The energy use data is from 2016 and 2019. The energy use of inference is from GPT3 and usage numbers in 2023. The estimates of NVIDIA servers sold is from 2023. AI has exploded since then, and I suspect their estimates are off by orders of magnitude because AI usage has exploded in the last 2 years.

The author’s estimate of 28PJ of future AI energy use is based on a whole stack of assumptions in which small errors at every step can lead to very large errors in the estimate. That number is based on guesses of how automatable jobs are, and not on observations of the actual change in AI energy use today.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/24/what-we-k...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

I have the same objection with the scaremongering titles "electric cars emit a ton of CO2! (If you assume they get all their energy from coal, anyway)".

Yes, cars use energy, AI uses energy, so do lots of other things. We should cut down on frivolous uses of energy, but we should definitely, immediately transition away from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy. Then the title would be "AI adds no CO2 because how would it?".

Then there are the pause AI sorts that try to cash in on regulatory politics.

   22.2% Nuclear
   19.5% Renewable
   31.7% Natural gas
   26.0% Coal
   0.6% Petroleum

——

Edit to add: in response to your reply and because I’ve hit my rate limit for replies (this being one of my few favourite things to rant about)…:

It’s actually a much better mix than how I thought I remembered it.

If that’s the US’s plan, it’s a good one.

I just wish the Australian government would get onboard with nuclear, and ditch the renewables for gas. We export as much LNG by volume as Qatar!