AI data centers must be stopped, green groups tell Congress
Local pro-environment groups in all 50 states delivered a blunt message to the U.S. Congress: Put a moratorium on new power-hungry AI data centers, or face the wrath of voters everywhere.
"The harms of data center growth are increasingly well-established, and they are massive," read the letter, signed by more than 350 nonprofit groups, from Alabama Climate Reality to West Virginia Citizen Action Group. That includes the swing state of Michigan, where the OpenAI-led Stargate project is already running into local opposition on a $7 billion data center built on farmland.
Focusing on kitchen-table issues as much as the use of fossil fuels (which power an estimated 56 percent of U.S. data center electricity), the letter noted that electricity bills have shot up by more than 21 percent since 2021 — "driven largely by the rapid build-out of data centers."
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If nothing is done to stop a proposed tripling of data centers in the next five years, these vast server farms will end up requiring as much electricity as 30 million households, and as much water as 18.5 million households, the group estimates. (For context, the entire U.S. has just over 130 million households.)
The letter, convened by Food & Water Watch, calls for "a national moratorium on new data centers until adequate regulations can be enacted to fully protect our communities, our families, our environment and our health from the runaway damage this industry is already inflicting."
The estimates are speculative, of course — in part because tech companies still aren't providing the data needed to understand just how much energy and water data centers use. Or more importantly, how hungry the AI model training process has become.
U.S. representatives should be aware how little is known about AI's environmental harms, given that the legislature's own nonpartisan General Accounting Office released a report this summer on this very topic.
"Training and using generative AI can result in substantial energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water usage," the GAO report stated.
Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.
