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Hello and welcome to The Excerpt.

I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Thursday, November 21st, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

As I'm a new. and this is a special episode of The Excert. As artificial intelligence technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, its environmental footprint is becoming an increasing concern for policymakers and environmentalists.

In the U.S., demand for power from AI data centers is skyrocketing,

driven by the intensive computational requirements of AI models, which often require vast amounts

of energy for both training and operation. Then there are also AI's carbon emissions. In many cases,

the electricity used to power the AI data centers today rely on non-renewable

energy sources such as coal or gas.

AI also demands significant cooling, which can be provided by air, water, or both, neither of

which comes without downsides.

Can we afford AI's huge environmental costs?

Joining us to discuss all of this is Landon Marston, an associate professor at Virginia Tech's Environmental and Water Resources Engineering Program.

Thanks for joining me, Landon.

Thanks for having me.

Help us understand the quantity of energy needed by AI to do different things.

There's powering these data centers, there's training large AI models,

and then there's asking AI to create a video, for example.

Give us a sense of the scale here.

Sure. And I think it's important to put this in the broader context of not just artificial intelligence, but really computational demands needed for everything that we use, including this very conversation that we're having online, requires data. And that data requires storage, and that also requires compute. And so AI is one piece of that larger puzzle. And so as far as how much energy

...