AI’s biggest climate problem may not be data centers

AI is boosting fossil fuel production with “enabled emissions” that could be up to 13 times greater than emissions from data centers.

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AI’s carbon footprint is even worse than it seems.

It’s not just that new data centers are leading to new fossil-fueled power plants—like an Amazon-backed gas plant in Texas that could be the largest single source of CO2 pollution in the U.S. AI also is making the fossil fuel industry more productive, and a new study finds that those productivity gains could generate as much as 13 times more emissions than data centers do today.

The study, published in the Nature........

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