**Los Angeles Wildfires Expose the Ecological Consequences of AI Systems Like ChatGPT**
As wildfires ravage Los Angeles, uprooting nearly 180,000 individuals and obliterating over 9,000 buildings, an unexpected subject has arisen in online dialogues: the ecological implications of AI systems like ChatGPT. While there is no assertion that ChatGPT has caused the fires, its considerable carbon emissions have ignited discussions about the influence of artificial intelligence on climate change.
### The Link Between AI and Climate Change
AI systems, including ChatGPT, necessitate substantial computational resources, which results in elevated energy use and water consumption. This, in turn, leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions, worsening climate change. Climate change fosters the arid, sweltering conditions that elevate the likelihood and severity of wildfires, especially in conjunction with strong winds.
Nevertheless, it’s crucial to clarify that ChatGPT is not directly accountable for the fires or the water shortages that have impeded firefighting operations. Martin Adams, former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, stated that the city’s water infrastructure simply wasn’t constructed to manage the necessary water supply to tackle such extensive wildfires. “The [water] system has never been designed to fight a wildfire that then envelops a community,” Adams discussed in an interview with the *Los Angeles Times*. The water shortages stemmed from system limitations, not from resources being redirected to data centers.
### A Wider Discussion About AI’s Ecological Footprint
The online narrative connecting ChatGPT to the wildfires is not intended to imply that AI systems are literally sparking flames. Rather, it underscores the broader concern regarding AI’s ecological footprint. As makeup artist and activist Matt Bernstein articulated in a popular Instagram post, “We don’t need AI ‘art.’ We don’t need AI grocery lists. We don’t need AI self-driving cars. We don’t need ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or DALL-E or whatever ‘revolutionary’ technology already exists inside our own human brains. We need the earth.” Bernstein’s post has struck a chord with many, amassing nearly 500,000 likes.
### How Much Water Does ChatGPT Use?
Although tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI usually hide their energy metrics, data on water usage can sometimes be scrutinized through public records. A 2023 inquiry by the *Associated Press* unveiled that Microsoft’s data facilities in Des Moines, Iowa, consumed 11.5 million gallons of water to cool servers during OpenAI’s GPT-4 training. This represented 6% of the district’s entire water supply.
A separate analysis by the *Washington Post* and the University of California, Riverside, determined that creating a 100-word email using ChatGPT requires roughly 519 milliliters of water—the equivalent of a regular water bottle. If 16 million individuals utilized ChatGPT weekly for a year, it would consume over 435 million liters of water. Looking forward, a 2023 study from UC Riverside predicts that AI could utilize between 4.2 and 6.6 billion cubic meters of water yearly by 2027—surpassing half of the UK’s annual water withdrawal.
### The Energy Expenditure of AI
Water isn’t the sole resource that AI systems consume in vast amounts. In Bernstein’s Instagram post, he pointed out that “one search on ChatGPT uses 10x the amount of energy as a Google search. Training one AI model generates the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions of 300 round-trip flights between New York and San Francisco and five times the lifetime emissions of a car.” These statistics originate from a 2019 study conducted by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which assessed the environmental repercussions of early AI models like GPT-2. Since then, the usage of AI has surged, with OpenAI reporting 300 million weekly active ChatGPT users as of late 2024.
In terms of energy, Sajjad Moazeni, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, estimates that ChatGPT consumes approximately 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of energy each day. This is akin to the daily energy consumption of about 33,000 U.S. households.
### A Call to Action
While ChatGPT is not directly responsible for the fires in Los Angeles, the ongoing disaster acts as a potent reminder of the ecological costs related to AI. The convenience of employing AI for drafting emails or generating grocery lists bears a hidden toll: significant energy and water usage that exacerbate climate change.
If you’re seeking ways to assist those impacted by the fires, the *Los Angeles Times* has assembled a useful guide, which you can find [here](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-08/how-to-help-victims-of-pacific-palisades-eaton-and-hurst-fires).