"New Form of Imperialism": Renowned U.N. Scientist on AI Boom's Huge Water, Carbon & Land Footprint

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AMY GOODMAN : We are broadcasting from Sheffield Live! community television and radio in Sheffield, England, from the same building as the Sheffield DocFest, where Steal This Story, Please! , the documentary about Democracy Now! , is premiering here. It moves on to Docs Ireland. We’ll be in Belfast next week.

We begin today’s show with how the AI race is impacting the environment as Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, along with other AI players and governments, are racing to build the massive data centers that power artificial intelligence. We hear a lot about what AI technology might mean for society, and much less about what this global infrastructure looks like as a material system with measurable environmental impacts.

A new investigation by U.N. scientists aims to change that. The report warns AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people, while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined — countries with a combined population of 650 million. Already in 2025, global data centers consumed an estimated 488 terawatt-hours of electricity. If treated as a nation, they would have been the world’s 11th largest electricity consumer, behind France and ahead of Saudi Arabia.

The report also frames this as an environmental justice issue. Ninety percent of AI computing is concentrated in the U.S. and China, while the rest of the world, as well as communities within those countries, disproportionately bear the costs — minerals extraction, e-waste, water shortages and more.

The investigation was conducted by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. It’s titled “Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints.”

We’re joined now by Kaveh Madani. He’s the director of the institute and a co-author on the report. He previously served as the deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment and earlier this year was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, often referred to as the Nobel of Water.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! , Kaveh Madani. If you can start off by summarizing what you have found?

KAVEH MADANI : Thanks for having me, and thanks for your interest in this very important topic.

So, what we know is that we are facing the fourth industrial revolution, that is changing our lifestyle, the way we work and we live. And when it comes to AI, most people understand AI as a digital technology, as a virtual thing, as something that is in the clouds and up somewhere out there. What we tried to do in this report was to remind people that there’s some physics to all of this, and there’s a massive infrastructure and material supply chains that back this service or this innovation. And if we want to understand our impact, we have to think about that very long supply chain, that starts with the extraction of critical minerals in the poor areas of the world and leads to the manufacturing of all the technologies and the hardware, then construction of the data centers and other infrastructure, then operations of that infrastructure that requires massive amounts of energy and has major footprints, and then, at the end of the life cycle, we have to deal with the e-waste.

In this particular report, we focus very much on the operations and the massive energy use of the operations, meaning that our day-to-day interactions with AI tools result in a lot of energy use. And producing energy, as we know, not only comes with carbon footprint, but, as we remind in this report, also with water and land footprint and other ecological impacts that often we don’t pay attention to, especially when we keep talking only about the carbon element. We wanted to remind people about those local impacts, what is happening.

And then, when you look at the numbers, you see massive, massive numbers, major numbers, enormous use of energy, and that means that we have to deal with a major challenge. If we continue using AI in the way we are — and it seems that that would be the case — then we would need to satisfy the power hunger of AI. A lot of investments are happening in renewables, but, as we discuss here, if, you know, the increase in power consumption results in the stopping the retirement of fossil fuels, the decarbonization process would be halted and compromised, and that’s not something good for the world.

Yet, we clarify in the report that AI is not bad. AI is a technology on its own. It’s like a knife. You can save a patient’s life in the operating room with it as a doctor, or you can kill people with it as a murderer. The way we use AI would determine if this is going to be a good technology for humanity or not. And we say that we have to proactively manage things and think about those impacts, if we want this revolution to be sustainable and fair.

AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to read you a statement by your colleague, the lead author of the report…