As an AI researcher studying the environmental impacts of this technology, every time I tell someone what I do for a living, I wince a little, expecting to hear a strong opinion about AI’s rapid expansion. Increasingly, the crux of the debate around AI’s sustainability has been focused on data centers, which make the nebulous concept of AI very concrete with their massive, humming warehouses full of servers and huge energy requirements. 

In the public discourse, data centers have largely been cast as the villains of the AI boom—voracious consumers of natural resources that power our chatbots but threaten our climate progress. But in fact, there are clear, actionable ways we can design, build, and operate data centers that align with both our climate goals and societal values.

The benefits of data centers are global. Once a data center comes online, anyone with an Internet connection and enough money to burn can connect to it. But their impacts are very local, since the energy and water that is consumed and the emissions generated all take place in the municipality where the data center is located.

Currently, data centers are highly concentrated in a handful of regions: Virginia, Ireland, Texas, Singapore. This geographic clustering puts severe strain on already fragile energy grids and aquifers. 

The current build out of data centers needs so much energy on such a short time scale (think 100,000 houses popping up in the span of a year) that the solution that many developers are turning to........

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