"By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers is expected to approach 1,050 terawatt-hours" says Noman Bashir. [1]

The amount of energy needed to train a single model would be to power about 120 average U.S. homes for a year, and generates approximately 552 tons of carbon dioxide.

“The demand for new data centers cannot be met in a sustainable way. The pace at which companies are building new data centers means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants,” [1]

“Just because this is called "cloud computing" doesn't mean the hardware lives in the cloud. Data centers are present in our physical world, and because of their water usage they have direct and indirect implications for biodiversity,” Bashir says. [1]

Chilled water is used to cool a data center by absorbing heat from computing equipment. It has been estimated that, for each kilowatt hour of energy a data center consumes, it would need two liters of water for cooling, says Bashir. [1]

"While all machine-learning models must be trained, one issue unique to generative AI is the rapid fluctuations in energy use that occur over different phases of the training process, Bashir explains. Power grid operators must have a way to absorb those fluctuations to protect the grid, and they usually employ diesel-based generators for that task." [1]

Market research firm TechInsights estimates that the three major producers (NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel) shipped 3.85 million GPUs to data centers in 2023, up from about 2.67 million in 2022. That number is expected to have increased by an even greater percentage in 2024. [1]

The average query, Altman wrote, uses 0.34 watt-hours of energy. [2]

Annotated data sets are used to train AI models that learn patterns to then generate content, make predictions, or complete classification tasks. Data annotation, processing, and evaluation are also key components of content moderation systems that filter out graphic, harmful, and hateful content from platforms. [3]

The World Bank estimates there are between 150 and 430 million data laborers whose work ultimately drives cutting-edge technological development. [3]

Assessing the cradle-to-gate environmental impact distribution across the GPU components reveals that the GPU chip is the largest contributor across 10 of 16 of impact categories and shows particularly pronounced contributions to climate change (81\%) and resource use, fossils (80\%). [8]

The total number of GPUs sold for the second quarter of 2025 hit 11.6 million units. This is a 27% increase in graphics card shipments. [9]

As for the three major GPU manufacturers, Nvidia still has the lead, taking in 94% of the market [9]

GPT-3 training accounted for 5 people's yearly water consumption (1823 days of an individual's water consumption).

Google's data centers in 2023 accounted for 206,906 people's yearly water consumption (75,520,833 days).

The global AI demand in 2027 is projected to account for 30-47 million people's yearly water consumption (about the population of Canada)