AI’s biggest climate problem may not be data centers

AI’s carbon footprint is even worse than it seems. It’s not just that new data centers are leading to new fossil-fueled power plants—like an Amazon-backed gas plant in Texas that could be the largest single source of CO2 pollution in the U.S. AI also is making the fossil fuel industry more productive, and a new study finds that those productivity gains could generate as much as 13 times more emissions than data centers do today. The study, published in the Nature Portfolio journal npj Clim...