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Comment by qgin | Hacker News Reader

All data centers in aggregate (AI and all other uses) use about 1.5% of electricity production, which itself is about 20% of total energy use.

So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.

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You can split up every single industries/topics/&c. into "yeah but it only use 1.5% of energy", "yeah but it only produces 1.5% of the co2"

Guess what happens when you add them up...

This kind of logic only works if the percentages for each industry are all equally that small, so you can treat them as all equally bad, but they are absolutely not.

They're all that small if you split them as OP did. Just look at "transportation", it's like 25% of co2 emitted globally, but once you break it down:

Aviation is 2.5%: https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions

Shipping industry is 3%: https://www.transportenvironment.org/topics/ships

Large truck freight is 3%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1414750/carbon-dioxide-e...

Medium truck freight is 1%

The single biggest non divisible sector you can realistically come up with is "personal transportation", but even that is only 10% of global co2. You can look at other sectors like "industry" and "energy" and I can guarantee you will be able to easily split things down into sub categories which have <5% impact on global co2 emissions.

But they didn't split it up like that. They said all data center emissions irrespective of what those data centers are used for — which can be an extremely wide variety of things since data centers basically run our entire network information internet economy. That's much more like saying all transportation emissions instead of splitting it up by type of transportation. Yes, that doesn't include the full life cycle emissions of creating the data centers. But I'm pretty sure that transportation, as a proportion of emissions, doesn't also include the full life cycle emissions of producing the cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes in the first place.

Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the sectors you list are like 1.5 to 2x larger than the one he gave and the largest nondivisble sector, you listed is literally 10x, which I think does more to prove his point than yours.

Also, by your logic, literally any new sector of the economy that uses any amount of energy, basically at all, should be banned, because it "all contributes." that's a consistent position to take and there are certainly people that hold that position, but that at that point seems like a fundamental axiological difference that I and probably OP are simply not going to agree with you on.

>Guess what happens when you add them up...

I'll guess, they add up to 100%?

I don't see what's the insight here.

Thats OP's point - you need to reduce usage everywhere and pointing out that AI is only 1.5% doesn't take away from the fact that usage needs to be reduced there as well.

I've heard many different groups tell me their small fraction is not the small fraction that matters.

It's not really about which one matters. They all matter. But here is a rough breakdown of global fossil fuel energy usage:

* Electricity: 27%

* Industry: 24%

* Transportation: 15%

* Agriculture & land use: 11%

* Buildings: 7%

Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.

So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.

It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.

Wasn't crypto a significant percentage as well? And that was before the AI buildout started.

Not even close. Crypto has always been able to cut their own emissions before needing lots of compute.

AI on the other hand cannot, and still needs thousands of wasteful data centers.

It will normalize though once everyone is out of a job

What otheer industries are hyping the need for tens of gigawatts, maybe hundreds? On top of that they are hyping the idea of building utterly unrealistic space stations that would cost 10 times what the ISS cost. So maybe people are focusing on the dishonesty instead of the energy use. One or the other I suppose.

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