Reacción a "A UN report details the increasingly serious consequences of AI as it relates to water, land, and carbon emissions"

The report by the United Nations University – Institute for Water, Environment and Health provides new data on the water, land, carbon, and waste footprints associated with the rise of AI. While these are not new issues, analyzing and quantifying them brings clarity and confronts us with what is undoubtedly a massive problem.

The document presents scenarios in which resource consumption increases through 2030, including water and land resources, alongside rising CO2 emissions. It is important to note that the report uses actual figures to make projections through models; therefore, these projections depend on critical assumptions regarding AI’s share of data center consumption, advances in energy efficiency, the composition of regional electricity bills, and the cooling techniques employed, among other factors; and may vary depending on potential efficiency improvements, the adoption of models in devices (rather than data centers), or regulatory or political changes. Therefore, the figures should be interpreted within this context and not considered absolute truths. In any case, projections place electricity consumption at between hundreds and nearly a thousand TWh by 2030, equivalent to the consumption of 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa over five years.

Some perhaps lesser-known data points are relevant to users. For example, inference—the day-to-day responses to users—appears to consume as much or more energy than model training. Simply keeping prompts to the minimum necessary information and requesting short, concise responses would save an enormous amount of resources.

Although the information provided by the report is interesting, I find myself missing a more detailed analysis of the impact of different uses—for example, large-scale models versus on-device models, or scientific applications versus recreational use—comparing high-value social uses (research, medical applications) with uses such as the mass creation of entertainment content.

Given its technical nature, the report speaks in general terms about how data centers should be integrated into energy, water, and land-use planning, applying cumulative impact assessments that take other local demands into account. In this regard, the report seems to fall short in its assessment of the geopolitical situation and the real problem posed by the concentration of decision-making power in a few companies; personally, I find that the recent encyclical [by Pope Leo XIV] offers a much more comprehensive and interesting perspective.