The servers fill a data center in Texas
Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
As data centers consume even more energy to meet the intensive computing needs of artificial intelligence, by 2030 they could cause 600,000 asthma cases and 1,300 premature deaths per year, accounting for more than a third of all asthma deaths in the US each year.
“Public health impacts are direct and tangible impacts on people, and those impacts are large and not limited to a small radius of where data centers operate,” he says. Shaolei Ren at the University of California, Riverside. “They affect people all over the country.”
Ren and his colleagues, among others Adam Wierman At the California Institute of Technology, he developed those calculations based on the projected electricity demand of data centers, which creates additional emissions and contributes to air pollution. For example, the electricity use required to train large AI models can produce air pollutants equivalent to driving a passenger car over 10,000 trips, according to the researchers.
To model these impacts of air pollution and emissions, researchers a tool Provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Nationally, data centers were estimated to have an overall healthcare cost of over $20 billion by 2030. That’s roughly twice the public health burden of the US steel industry, and probably rivals the health impact of emissions from ten million vehicles at its largest. US states, such as California.
Energy-hungry IT centers already have an impact on public health. The researchers estimated that gas-fired generators were used as backup power for the Virginia facility Data Center Alley It could already cause 14,000 cases of asthma symptoms and impose public health costs of $220 million to $300 million a year if generator emissions are only 10 percent of the level allowed by state authorities. At the maximum authorized level, the total cost of public health could multiply 10 times to $2 billion or $3 billion per year. These problems not only affect local residents, but also people from states as far away as Florida.
“We can’t rely on the tech companies (operating) data centers to self-regulate and decide what’s appropriate to report, because they’ve largely not included air pollutant criteria in their sustainability reports, despite the clear impact on public health,” he says. Julie Bolthouse at the Piedmont Environmental Council, a nonprofit organization in Virginia.
Some of the tech companies racing to build data centers also support low-emission energy sources, finance renewable energy projects, and routinely invest in both. nuclear energy new nuclear power plants and reactor technologies. But for now, many data centers still rely heavily on fossil fuel energy, such as natural gas, as previous research suggests data centers may have. Boost US gas demand By 2030 roughly the equivalent of New York or another state, California.
“The question of the health impacts of artificial intelligence and data center computing is an important one,” he says Benjamin Lee at the University of Pennsylvania. He described the paper as “the first to estimate these costs and quantify them in dollars,” but cautioned that the approximations and assumptions underlying the exact numbers need to be validated by additional research.
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