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.

00:04So the AI that you're using, your social media apps, it doesn't exist in a cloud.

00:09It exists in a data center.

00:10What look like giant warehouses, but they really house all of these servers.

00:14One critical thing is the amount of electricity that these data centers require.

00:19Business Insider calculated as a range.

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

00:26On the high end, it's about as much as Florida used in that same year.

00:30So let's talk about data centers' impact on local economies.

00:33All of these different cities across the country are racing to have data centers build in their areas.

00:38In Ohio, cities are making these deals with large companies like Amazon that are very profitable.

00:45What we found is that for every full-time, long-term job that's employed at a data center,

00:50Amazon might be saving as much as a million dollars in taxes that they don't pay to the state or the cities.

00:56And what jobs do come from data centers are pretty much in their construction and wrap up long before your economic development deal is done.

01:04And data centers are also contributing in major ways to air and water pollution.

01:07Because of data centers' skyrocketing electricity demand, a lot of utilities are starting to say,

01:13we can't meet this demand without relying more and more on fossil fuels.

01:17So this is causing more and more air pollution.

01:20The power generation for these data centers could contribute $5.7 to $9.2 billion of annual public health costs

01:28in numbers of hundreds of thousands of additional asthma cases that can be wheezing, tightness of the chest,

01:34difficulty breathing, and can be hundreds of additional deaths each year.

01:37And what is it like living next to these giant data centers?

01:40So these residents are living right next to these industrial facilities that are running 24-7,

01:45and they're making this really ominous drone noise.

01:52So it's a constant noise of their cooling fans.

01:55Some residents told us that they can actually hear it inside their houses,

01:59and some had to sleep in the basement because they couldn't sleep.

02:02And how are data centers deepening the water crisis?

02:04So to power those data centers, you need a huge amount of electricity,

02:08and those servers get really hot, so you need something to cool them.

02:11Sometimes data centers are using water to cool their servers.

02:14They're finicky drinkers.

02:16They only really want to use drinking water.

02:19Data centers are competing directly with residents who are living in the desert

02:23where there's already not enough water to go around.

02:25Business Insider requested records of how much water every data center is using.

02:29We've got a lot of redacted records, and in two cases, cities actually sued us

02:34to prevent the release of those records.

02:36There's a lot of interest in the promise of AI,

02:39but the costs are already right here, and they're impacting us today.