Environmental advocacy organizations across all 50 states have made a formal request to the U.S. Congress: Enact a ban on new AI data centers with substantial energy consumption, or face potential voter discontent across the country.
“The harmful effects of data center growth are becoming increasingly evident and profound,” remarked the letter, supported by more than 350 nonprofit entities, from Alabama Climate Reality to West Virginia Citizen Action Group. This includes Michigan, a crucial state, where the OpenAI-led Stargate initiative is already facing local opposition concerning a $7 billion data center located on agricultural land.
Highlighting everyday issues in conjunction with fossil fuel consumption (which provides an estimated 56 percent of U.S. data center electricity), the letter emphasized that electricity prices have risen by over 21 percent since 2021, “mainly due to the swift growth of data centers.”
If measures are not taken to avert a suggested tripling of data centers within the next five years, these large server complexes could demand as much electricity as 30 million homes and as much water as 18.5 million households, the organization predicts. (For context, the U.S. has slightly over 130 million households.)
The letter, coordinated by Food & Water Watch, calls for “a national moratorium on new data centers until adequate regulations can be set in place to thoroughly protect our communities, families, environment, and health from the unregulated harm this industry is already inflicting.”
These forecasts remain conjectural, partly because technology companies have yet to release the critical data necessary to comprehend the energy and water usage of data centers, or more importantly, the requirements of the AI model training process.
U.S. lawmakers should acknowledge the limited understanding of AI’s ecological effects, particularly since the legislature’s own nonpartisan General Accounting Office published a report this summer addressing this matter.
“Training and utilizing generative AI can result in considerable energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water use,” the GAO report indicated.