The tech industry has done a poor job of hiding the environmental footprint of AI data centers, which hoover up electrons like nobody’s business. With America’s crumbling energy grid struggling to keep up, billionaire tech industrialists are increasingly financing their own energy solutions.
This has had predictable consequences Elon Musk’s xAI data center in south Memphis, for example, is choking residents with its slapdash fleet of portable methane generators, courting a clean air lawsuit from the NAACP.
Now Oracle, the AI company helmed by tech billionaire Larry Ellison, announced it’s cancelling a major natural gas plant meant to power its “Project Jupiter” facility in New Mexico. According to Business Insider, the cancellation comes after both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the New Mexico State Land Office denied Oracle’s requests to build a new natural gas pipeline to deliver fuel to the facility.
Instead, the company is partnering with Bloom Energy, a company which produces solid oxide fuel cells, which convert chemical energy directly into electricity without combustion.
Estimates previously pegged Project Jupiter’s on-site greenhouse gas emissions at over 14 million tons per year, more than the cities of Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined. Though the pivot to fuel cells will theoretically be better than straight natural gas, it only reduces the damage — with new estimates suggesting a 30 percent reduction to around 10 million tons of pollution emitted per year instead.
“I don’t know that this is the clean energy solution that they’re saying it’s going to be,” Kacey Hovden, a staff attorney with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center told News From the States.
Ultimately, it might be best to think of these data centers like cigarettes. Sure, there are ways to cut down on the damage they cause to your lungs with filters and such, but no cigarette is ever going to be good for you — and no data center is ever going to come without some kind of consequence to the environment it inhabits.
More on data centers: Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed
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