However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts. Goldman Sachs's projection in https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-cente... is that by the end of next year US data center power demand will have increased from 31GW to 66GW, roughly 17GW per year. The EIA says https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 that the US uses about 95 quadrillion Btu per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units). That's 3200 gigawatts. So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%. 99% of the US's energy use is due to non-data-center causes.
And direct energy use is a way in which data centers have an especially large environmental impact. Their other potential impacts, such as cement production, sewage, parking lots, commuters driving to them, and freshwater consumption, are much less than that 1%.
Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does. All of China's net new energy production is coming from renewable energy — they're shutting down coal plants faster than they're building new ones, and they're decommissioning gasoline-powered vehicles faster than they're selling new ones. A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there — a much higher rate than for China overall, but even for the whole country, it's over 50% of new cars.
AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.