I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday. Let's turn to a topic that's sucking all the air out of the room, and I mean electricity, and water too, actually.

I'm talking, of course, about the huge build-out of data center construction across the country for the AI boom.

Hundreds of billions have been spent already with talks of trillions more. And according to the Times-Picay-U and listen to this,

Meta's new data center under construction in Louisiana requires nearly three times the power

that New Orleans uses in a year. This has not gone unnoticed.

Rising utility rates nationwide have become issues in some recent elections.

Casey Crownheart, a senior climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, has been studying the

costs and impacts, and she's back here to fill us in. Welcome back to

SciFRI, Casey. Thanks so much for having me. All right. Can you give us a sense of the scale

of this buildup? Because the last resource strain like this that comes to my mind was crypto mining,

but this seems even bigger. Absolutely. I think the money and the electricity that we're

seeing talked about, you know, the scale of these numbers is kind of eye-popping. So according to the

International Energy Agency, data centers accounted for about, you know, 1.5% of the world's

electricity consumption in 2024. And that's set to double by 2030. We're seeing so many

data centers get built out. One number that really struck me was in a recent report that there

was $580 billion invested globally in AI in 2025 and data centers. That's more than the $540 billion

spent on developing the global oil supply.

So this year, we spent more on data centers than the oil supply.

Wow. You know, a lot of people may not realize that when they ask a question of chat,

GBT, or Gemini, that it actually contributes to this. It uses up electricity. We had you on in the

summer to talk about some reporting that you did about just how much energy these models used,

and you told us that data was dodgy then. Do we have any more clarity on how much energy

...