The computing power needed for artificial intelligence is contributing to air pollution that will kill thousands over the coming years, a new study says.
Air pollution created from powering AI with electricity will cause as many as 1,300 premature deaths a year in the U.S. by 2030, according to researchers at UC Riverside and the California Institute of Technology.
The AI industry requires a growing number of data centers powered by local power plants and backup generators: Commercial energy demand from data centers fueling AI's so-called large language models is expected to reach 12% in 2027, doubling from 6% in 2023, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia.
“The growth of AI is driving an enormous increase in demand for data centers and energy, making it the fastest-growing sector for energy consumption across all industries,” said Shaolei Ren, a UC Riverside associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and an author of the study.
The researchers said they expect the public health burden from AI to be double that of the U.S. steelmaking industry and rival cars, buses and trucks in California.
For example, the researchers said they found the emissions from training a large language model at the scale of a recent model from Facebook-owner Meta would produce air pollution equal to more than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City.
“If you look at those sustainability reports by tech companies, they only focus on carbon emissions, and some of them include water as well, but there's absolutely no mention of unhealthful air pollutants and these pollutants are already creating a public health burden," Ren said.
What is the solution to AI's air pollution problem?
The researchers said tech companies should compensate the communities hit hardest by air pollution from data centers.
Those communities are more likely to be low-income communites, in part because of how they tend to be closer to power plants and backup generators, the researchers said.
"The data centers pay local property taxes to the county where they operate,” Ren said. "But this health impact is not just limited to a small community. Actually, it travels across the whole country, so those other places are not compensated at all."
The researchers said air pollution from backup generators in Northern Virginia can drift into other states, creating public health costs of $190 million to $260 million a year, which can exceed what tech companies pay for electricity.
“If you have family members with asthma or other health conditions, the air pollution from these data centers could be affecting them right now. It’s a public health issue we need to address urgently,” Ren said.