Servers fill a Texas data center
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, they increase emissions of air pollutants. This could already have an impact on public health, and by 2030 it could contribute to an estimated 600,000 asthma cases and 1,300 premature deaths per year in the United States, accounting for more than a third of deaths due to asthma per year in the country.
“Public health impacts are direct, tangible impacts on people, and these impacts are substantial and not limited to a small operating radius of data centers,” says Shaolei Ren at the University of California, Riverside. Since air pollution can travel long distances, increasing levels of pollutants can affect the health of populations across the country, he says.
Ren and his colleagues developed these estimates based on projected data center electricity demand. In the United States, part of this demand is met by burning fossil fuels, which produce air pollutants. known to cause health problemslike fine particles. For example, according to the researchers, the electricity consumption required to train one of today’s large AI models could produce air pollutants equivalent to driving a passenger car for more than 10,000 round trips between Los Angeles and New York.
To model these impacts on air pollution and emissions in the United States, the researchers used a tool provided by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. They calculated that nationally, data centers will have an overall public health cost that could exceed $20 billion by 2030. That’s about double the public health cost of the U.S. steel industry and could rival the health impact of pollutants emitted by tens of millions of people. vehicles in larger U.S. states, such as California, according to researchers.
Energy-intensive data centers are already affecting public health. Researchers estimated that gas-fired generators used as backup at Virginia power plants Data Center Aisle could already cause 14,000 cases of asthma symptoms and impose public health costs of $220 million to $300 million per year. Those are the costs if generators emit only 10 percent of the pollutants state officials allow each year. If used frequently enough to emit the maximum allowable level, the total public health cost could reach $3 billion per year. Such problems affect not only local residents, but also residents of faraway states like Florida.
Some of the technology companies moving into data center construction support low-emission energy sources, finance the construction of renewable energy projects and invest in conventional energy. nuclear energy nuclear power plants and new nuclear reactor technologies. But for now, many data centers still rely heavily on fossil energy like natural gas – with previous research suggesting data centers could boost US gas demand roughly equivalent to another state of New York or California by 2030.
“The question of the health impacts of artificial intelligence and data center computing is important,” 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 approximations and assumptions underlying these specific numbers need to be validated with additional research.
Topics: