So when we think about how we can save energy and you know lower our carbon

footprint we often think okay we need to move to an electric vehicle we

need to ride our bike to work instead of take the car use

public transportation get a heat pump.

Evan Halper is a business reporter at the post covering the energy transition.

He says there is a lot that is's putting stress on the U.S.'s complex and

aging energy grid. Extreme weather is the obvious culprit. But there's another

more surprising way that America's energy grid is being tested, AI.

We don't often think about how we're using our laptops and the fact that if we just do a simple

Google search, it's often powered by AI now and

that's going to take a lot more energy than the way we did a Google search

before. Just consider that has a

daily lives can impact the environment. How we use computers is a part of that too.

Every time you ask chat gpity to write song lyrics for your cousin's bar mitzvah,

that has a real energy cost.

We're often not thinking about, is it actually going to really intensify my carbon footprint?

And there's often, at the moment, not much you can do to mitigate that.

To power AI, tech companies have started building these data centers,

massive warehouses full of computer servers. But these data centers require

huge amounts of electricity. And in the communities where these data centers are being built,

there's a lot of debate about where all this energy

will come from and who should pay for it.

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