Officials hugely underestimated impact of AI datacentres on UK carbon emissions

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By Damien Gayle, The Guardian. 

Excerpt: The UK government vastly underestimated the climate impact of artificial intelligence, it has emerged, after officials raised their estimate of carbon emissions from AI by a factor of more than 100. According to new data quietly published this week, energy use by AI datacentres in the UK could cause the emission of up to 123m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) ...over the next 10 years. That latest figure replaces a previous estimate ...that claimed emissions would reach a maximum of 0.142m tonnes of CO₂ in a single year. There is increasing alarm at the carbon impact of AI and with calls to reduce global emissions to mitigate the climate emergency becoming increasingly urgent. ...The latest estimates were revealed in a revision to the UK “compute roadmap”, which sets out the government’s plan “to build a world-class compute ecosystem” for delivering artificial intelligence in the UK.... However, AI datacentres require huge amounts of electricity to operate – much more than the datacentres used to store online data – and most of that continues to be generated by fossil fuels. ...the carbon impact of the planned AI buildout could range from 34m to 123m tonnes of CO₂ – about 0.9% to 3.4% of the UK’s projected total emissions between 2025 and 2035. The lower range of the estimate would depend on greater efficiency in AI models and hardware, and faster decarbonisation of the UK’s energy grid.... 

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