In 2018, Sasha Lucioni started a new job, AI researcher for Morgan Stanley.

She was excited to learn something new in the field of AI, but she couldn't shake this worry.

I essentially was getting more and more climate anxiety.

I was really feeling this profound disconnect between my job and my values and the things that I cared about.

And so essentially I was like,

oh, I should quit my job and go plant trees. I should, you know, I should do something that's really making a difference in the world. And then my partner was like, well, you have a PhD and AI. Maybe

you can use that to make a difference in the world. So Luchioni quit her job and joined a growing movement to make AI more sustainable.

Since 2022, AI has boomed and it's caused a surge in energy consumption.

Tech companies are racing to build data centers to keep up,

these huge buildings filled with hundreds of thousands of computers that require a lot of energy.

By 2028, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory forecast the data centers could consume as much as

12% of the nation's electricity. And AI is also leading a surge in water consumption. It's a concern

echoed all over social media. The amount of water that AI uses is astonishing.

AI needs water.

People are saying that every time you use chat GPT.

ChatGPT uses this much water for a hundred word emails.

And where will that water come from?

And the four big data center operators with a growing water and carbon footprint are Google,

Microsoft, Amazon, and meta.

And to be clear, all four of those are among NPR's financial supporters and pay to distribute

some of our content.

Before generative AI came along in late 2022, there was hope among these data center operators

...