What are the real-life consequences of AI?

The AI boom's data center expansion is straining power grids, water supplies, and communities across America.

Transcript

00:00Let's talk about the real-life consequences of AI that are happening right now. So the AI that you're

00:05using, your social media apps, it doesn't exist in a cloud. It exists in a data center. What look like

00:11giant warehouses, but they really house all of these servers. One critical thing is the amount

00:15of electricity that these data centers require. Business Insider calculated as a range. On the low

00:21end, that's as much as the state of Ohio used in 2023, their entire electricity use. On the high

00:27end, it's about as much as Florida used in that same year. So let's talk about data centers' impact

00:32on local economies. All of these different cities across the country are racing to have data centers

00:37build in their areas. In Ohio, cities are making these deals with large companies like Amazon that

00:43are very profitable. What we found is that for every full-time long-term job that's employed at a data

00:49center, Amazon might be saving as much as a million dollars in taxes that they don't pay to the state

00:55or the cities. And what jobs do come from data centers are pretty much in their construction

01:00and wrap up long before your economic development deal is done. And data centers are also contributing

01:05in major ways to air and water pollution. Because of data centers' skyrocketing electricity demand,

01:11a lot of utilities are starting to say, we can't meet this demand without relying more and more on

01:16fossil fuels. So this is causing more and more air pollution. The power generation for these data

01:22centers could contribute $5.7 to $9.2 billion of annual public health cost in numbers of hundreds

01:29of thousands of additional asthma cases that can be wheezing, tightness of the chest, difficulty

01:34breathing, and can be hundreds of additional deaths each year. And what is it like living next to these

01:39giant data centers? So these residents are living right next to these industrial facilities that are

01:44running 24-7 and they're making this really ominous drone noise.

01:52So it's a constant noise of their cooling fans. Some residents told us that they can actually hear

01:57inside their houses and some had to sleep in the basement because they couldn't sleep. And how are

02:02data centers deepening the water crisis? So to power those data centers you need a huge amount of

02:07electricity and those servers get really hot so you need something to cool them. Sometimes data centers are

02:12using water to cool their servers. They're finicky drinkers. They only really want to use drinking

02:18water. Data centers are competing directly with residents who are living in the desert where there's

02:23already not enough water to go around. Business Insider requested records of how much water every data

02:28center is using. We've got a lot of redacted records and in two cases cities actually sued us to prevent

02:35the release of those records. There's a lot of interest in the promise of AI but the costs are already right

02:41here and they're impacting us today.