Greenwatch: Is natural gas becoming AI's dirty secret?

With backlash against AI gathering steam in some places—including university campuses—plenty of attention is being paid to its negative impacts, with even the pope weighing in on the subject. And there's plenty to be concerned about, not least how big tech's mushrooming fleet of data centers will impact the environment. Greenwatch has previously looked at US big tech and its warming up to natural gas as a power source. In a depressing update, the Guardian now reports that over 100 UK data centers have requested a connection to the gas grid in the last two years. This comes after the country's government quietly upped its forecast for AI-based emissions 100 times, to 123 million metric tonnes of CO2, in a revised calculation. BloombergNEF has also come out with some sobering figures about data center electricity requirements. It expects their power demand to double by 2050, at which point it would constitute 10% of global electricity consumption. The paywalled report also reportedly said that half of the incremental power consumption will likely be met with coal and gas but it's possible other technologies, including large-scale storage, geothermal, or nuclear power, will come into play.