We can already see the effects of AI’s growing dominance – not only across the US, but worldwide.

Teachers are reporting students using AI instead of learning key concepts themselves; jobs are being lost thanks to the high capacities and low needs of AI; misinformation and defamatory AI-generated content is being used to harass, bully, and even frame people on the internet.

But recently, perhaps the most serious and widely damaging effect of AI has come into sharp focus, thanks to a recent announcement by OpenAI regarding their plans for new data centers.

That’s because, if they come to fruition, these data centers could be responsible for an alarming – and environmentally devastating – proportion of the US’s energy consumption, much of which is fossil-fuel based.

Every time you query ChatGPT, that prompt uses 0.34 watt-hours (Wh) of energy, which is equivalent to a couple of minutes of lightbulb use.

Doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that the service received 2.5 billion prompts every day at last count, that amount of energy really adds up. And that’s just the energy cost for the prompt itself.

And that’s why environmentalists and everyday consumers around the world were shocked to hear about the massive amount of energy that OpenAI’s proposed data centers will use.

In fact, these datacenters will use up to 10 gigawatts of power – with some projects using up to 17 gigawatts – every day. For context, as Fortune explain in a recent report, this is more energy use than the entirety of New York City and San Diego, in peak heatwave season, combined.

Why so high? Well the scale of the computing required to power AI is enormous, and all of that computing takes a lot of electricity – not to mention the cooling that pumps high volumes of water out of ecosystems too.

Though tech leaders are banking on nuclear power as the future of clean energy generation, as University of Chicago Professor Andrew Chien explained to Fortune, this is unrealistic, as well as detrimental to our planet and its ecosystems:

“A typical nuclear plant takes years to permit and build. In the short term, they’ll have to rely on renewables, natural gas, and maybe retrofitting older plants. Nuclear won’t arrive fast enough. We have to face the reality that companies promised they’d be clean and net zero, and in the face of AI growth, they probably can’t be. We’re coming to some seminal moments for how we think about AI and its impact on society.”

And with water sources being drained, waste water contaminated, and the US’s shameful fossil fuel use being pumped into these innovations, it’s time to question the effects of our addiction to technology on the planet around us.

Just how high a price is too high?

If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.