Caveat—this post was written entirely with my own intelligence, so who knows. Maybe it’s wrong.

But the despairing question I get asked most often is: “What’s the use? However much clean energy we produce, AI data centers will simply soak it all up.” It’s too early in the course of this technology to know anything for sure, but there are a few important answers to that.

The first comes from Amory Lovins, the long-time energy guru who wrote a paper some months ago pointing out that energy demand from AI was highly speculative, an idea he based on… history:

As Debra Kahn pointed out in Politico a few weeks ago:

And it’s possible that even if AI expands as its proponents expect, it will grow steadily more efficient, meaning it would need much less energy than predicted. Lovins again:

But that doesn’t mean that the AI industry, and its utility and government partners, won’t try to build ever more generating capacity to supply whatever power needs they project may be coming. In some places they already are: Internet Alley in Virginia has more than 150 large centers, using a quarter of its power. This is becoming an intense political issue in the Old Dominion State. As Dave Weigel reported yesterday, the issue has begun to roil Virginia politics—the GOP candidate for governor sticks with her predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, in somehow blaming solar energy for rising electricity prices (“the sun goes down”), while the Democratic nominee, Abigail Spanberger, is trying to figure out a response:

Indeed, it’s shaping up to be the mother of all political issues as the midterms loom—pretty much everyone pays electric rates, and under President Donald Trump they’re starting to skyrocket. The reason isn’t hard to figure out: He’s simultaneously accelerating demand with his support for data center buildout, and constricting supply by shutting down cheap solar and wind. In fact, one way of looking at AI is that it’s main use is as a vehicle to give the fossil fuel industry one last reason to expand.

If this sounds conspiratorial, consider this story from yesterday: John McCarrick, newly hired by industry colossus OpenAI to find energy sources for ChatGPT is:

Sam Altman himself is an acolyte of Peter Thiel, famous climate denier who recently suggested Greta Thunberg might be the anti-Christ. But it’s all of them. In the rush to keep their valuations high, the big AI players are increasingly relying not just on fracked gas but on the very worst version of it. As Bloomberg reported early in the summer:

In fact, big suppliers are now companies like Caterpillar, not known for cutting edge turbine technology; these are small and comparatively dirty units.

(The ultimate example of this is Elon Musk’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, a superpolluter, which I wrote about for the New Yorker.) Oh, and it’s not just air pollution. A new threat emerged in the last few weeks, according to Tom Perkins in the Guardian:

Look, here’s one bottom line: If we actually had to build enormous networks of AI data centers, the obvious, cheap, and clean way to do it would be with lots of solar energy. It goes up fast. As an industry study found as long ago as December of 2024 (an eon in AI time):

As one of the country’s leading energy executives said in April:

But we can’t do that because the Trump administration has a corrupt ideological bias against clean energy, the latest example of which came last week when a giant Nevada solar project was cancelled. As Jael Holzman was the first to report:

But now it’s dead. One result will be higher prices for consumers. Despite everything the administration does, renewables are so cheap........

© Common Dreams