Be less polite: How to cut your AI impact as UN report reveals data centre energy use rivals nations
"That extra ‘please’ you put there can make a huge difference,” says one of the report's authors.
The environmental footprint of data centres already rivals some of the world's largest countries, according to a United Nations University report released on 3 June.
Their water use, energy use and pollution is predicted to double in just four years as use of artificial intelligence grows.
Much of the growth of data centres is being driven by AI. About 20 per cent of data centres’ energy is currently due to AI, but that should grow to 40 per cent by 2030, the report said.
AI users can reduce the climate impact of their queries by less polite and more concise in their queries, one of the report's authors advises.
The majority of people – 70 per cent – are polite to AI when interacting with it, according to a survey carried out by British publisher Future in 2024. Of the respondents, 55 per cent said they do this because "it's just the nice thing to do", while 12 per cent said it was because "when the robot uprising happens, I don't want to come first".
Electricity use equal to that of Argentina
Last year, global data centres used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries of the world, said the report. That electricity use produced about 189 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, about the same amount as Argentina, and producing that much energy consumed about 4.5 trillion litres of water, according to the report on the environmental consequences of AI's energy use.
By 2030, data centres will account for nearly three per cent of the world's projected electricity use, with 935 trillion watt-hours. If data centres were a country, the country would be projected to rank sixth-highest in power use in 2030. That would produce nearly 399 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, the report said. The study focused on energy use and didn’t examine the massive amount of water used to cool data centres.
“If you look at these numbers, we're seeing scales comparable to nations,” says study co-author Kaveh Madani, a water scientist and director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada. “The demand is enormous.”
First global look at ecological impact of data centres
The report is significant because of the credibility and authority of the UN, not just because of any one set of eye-popping numbers, says Fengqi You, a Cornell University energy engineering professor who directs the college’s AI sustainability issues.
“Its value is that a UN institution is putting carbon, water, land, life-cycle impacts and environmental justice into one frame” for an issue that is often shrouded in secrecy and partial disclosures, says You, who was not part of the report.
“The general public should be concerned, but not panicked,” he adds.
Jean Su, director of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the report is important because it is the first UN, or even global, report “that shines a light on the environmental harms of AI”.
National Artificial Intelligence Association President Caleb Max emphasises how his industry is becoming more efficient and how it benefits the public: “AI is rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives and adding benefits that improve safety, [help people] live longer, work more efficiently, enhance food production, and reduce poverty. The evidence is growing daily that the energy return on investment of AI development is transformative for our world and therefore more than worth it.”
Josh Levi, president the Data Center Coalition, says the industry takes its environmental impact seriously.
“We remain committed to working with policymakers, local communities, and industry partners to ensure that as data centres grow, they do so responsibly, transparently, and in ways that reflect the best available practices,” he said in a statement.
The report came just after Californian city Monterey Park became the first in the US to vote for a permanent ban on data centres on Tuesday (2 June).
How much energy your query uses and how to trim it
Madani, also the winner of the most recent of the Stockholm Water Prize, says the numbers show the environmental cost of AI, which may seem cleaner at first glance than other mechanical devices, such as cars and furnaces, that have visible pollution.
"AI is not just a virtual thing. We’re talking about something that has physics, something that has real impacts. There is infrastructure there. There is energy that is being used," Madani says. "A lot of hardware is behind all these operations that to us seem very, very clean because we don’t see smoke out of our devices. On our cellphone, there is no visible smoke or out of our computer or something. But somewhere else someone is suffering."
People can reduce AI’s massive energy appetite by being less polite and more concise in their queries, Madani says. The report found that cutting word use in requests by 30 per cent can reduce energy used by AI by 25 per cent. That would save about the same amount of electricity as what about 700,000 people in Africa use in a year, the report said.
“If you’re too polite, then that extra ‘please’ you put there can make a huge difference,” Madani says. “You’ve got to be very precise and be short.”
A typical ChatGPT-style query is about 200 times more energy-intensive than the type of basic text classification used in an email spam filter, for example. AI-generated images or video require much more energy.
And the more complicated the AI, the more energy it takes to train or learn. The report said GPT-3 used about 1.3 billion watt-hours to train, but the next version used 50 to 70 billion watt-hours.
But it's not training that really feasts on power, says study co-author Miriam Aczel, a United Nations University environmental policy researcher. About 90 per cent of the power use of AI comes from operational requests, she says. GPT alone accounts for 2.5 billion prompts a day, she says.
Efficiency still means more power use
Even though tech advocates can argue that their machines are becoming more efficient, there's a common paradox that finds when things get more efficient, they are used more often and total energy use soars even if individual uses are more efficient, Madani says.
While some companies tout the use of renewable energy for data centres, Madani says that means the supply of clean electricity is depleted and thus dirtier energy is used elsewhere.
One of the problems in conducting this study is that many companies and places are not transparent about what data centres and AI are consuming or even where and how big they are, Aczel and Madani say.
“We cannot manage what companies do not disclose,” Cornell's You says.
File photo of a data center facility near Boardman, Oregon. (Photo by Jordan Gale/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Oregon Capital Chronicle
By Alex Baumhardt
(Oregon Capital Chronicle) — Electric utilities in Washington and Oregon are turning to gas to meet rapid and growing energy demand from data centers, according to recent reports.
Two analyses from the Hood River-based conservation organization Columbia Riverkeeperand the Seattle-based think tank Sightline Institute show that a growing number of Northwest utility companies are spending on new gas-powered energy infrastructure or buying gas-powered energy from other states to power new demand from data centers.
In some counties, public utility districts are permitting gas-powered generators to provide data centers with backup energy, rather than waiting for them to get more power from the grid, and some data center companies are hooking up their own on-site gas generators. For their part, data center companies said they are investing in communities when they show up and working with utilities to find the cleanest energy possible.
The effect is that both Oregon and Washington are at risk of missing established emission reduction targets meant to help curb the impacts of global warming, researchers found. And a growing number of utilities are using booming data center demand to justify skirting climate rules in both states that mostly ban the build-out of new gas infrastructure, citing the need for regional energy reliability.
“In the absence of enough renewable energy supply, we’re seeing utilities turn more to gas in this situation,” said Audrey Leonard, staff attorney at Columbia Riverkeeper and one of the authors of the group’s report. “That is new, because up until the last few years we were making progress towards our clean energy targets in Washington and Oregon. We were really diversifying our clean energy mix, and it was always going to be a challenge — we definitely had work to do — but the way I characterize this is that data centers are turning that challenge into a crisis.”
Representatives for some of the biggest data center owners in the region said they are doing their part to connect to existing clean energy sources and invest in new renewable projects in both states, and that their presence is a boon for communities, not a burden.
“Amazon is committed to being a responsible neighbor in Oregon, where we’ve invested more than $60 billion since 2010 through infrastructure and jobs,” said Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson. Callahan said the company’s data centers in the region are 10% more energy efficient than the industry average and that the company has invested in massive wind and solar projects across Oregon.
Morgan Babinec, a Microsoft spokesperson, emailed the Capital Chronicle a link to a company presentation espousing the company’s data center benefits in Washington. It notes that Microsoft has “committed to achieving 100% renewable energy coverage globally by 2025,” and that “our data centers in Washington are transitioning the backup generators to use a renewable biofuel that reduces net carbon emissions.”
Missing targets
Under a 2020 executive order from former Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, state leaders and agencies have passed laws and policies meant to reduce Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions to 45% below 1990 levels by 2035 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.
Until recently, the state was on track to meet those targets, according to 2023 Oregon Department of Energy modeling. But in October, department officials reported that given the massive rise in energy demand for data centers, along with Trump administration rollbacks of federal clean energy policies and fuel economy standards for cars, the state wouldn’t hit its 2035 goals until 2037.
To meet both Oregon and Washington’s climate goals — which include electrifying almost the entire transportation sector in both states by 2050 — the states also need to replace at least 65 million megawatt hours of existing coal and gas power generation with power generated by renewable sources such as wind and solar, the Columbia Riverkeeper researchers wrote.
Instead, federal energy officials have used data centers as a justification for keeping Washington’s largest coal-burning power plant running late last year, despite state laws requiring it to be shut down. And Puget Sound Energy, Washington’s largest utility, has contracted for six new gas turbines to be built at a new gas power plant at an undisclosed site in Washington, according to Sightline Institute.
Natural gas is almost entirely methane, a potent greenhouse gas that, when burned, emits carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide and methane are the main heat-trapping gases causing global warming.
Gas-powered workarounds to clean energy mandates
Of the more than 100 electric utilities in Oregon and Washington, two private investor-owned utilities — PacifiCorp and Portland General Electric — and four public utility districts and cooperatives have absorbed nearly all the region’s new data center loads in the past decade, according to a 2025 Sightline Institute analysis.
Five of those utilities rely today on buying far more “unspecified power” from wholesale electricity markets to meet customer demand than they did a decade ago. Unspecified power is almost always natural gas or coal, and the Washington State Department of Ecology estimates emissions from unspecified sources are roughly equal to natural gas emissions.
In Oregon, unspecified power purchases have driven up what were relatively low emissions from consumer-owned utilities since 2019, according to Oregon Department of Environmental Quality data. Most of the increase is from the Umatilla Electric Cooperative buying more unspecified power to meet demand from Amazon data centers in recent years, the department found.
Callahan, the Amazon representative, said the company recently made a deal with the Umatilla Cooperative to choose the energy supply used for its data centers rather than leaving it up to the utility to buy the cheapest option on the wholesale market.
Still, the company seeks more backup and reliable power when it urgently needs it, and the Oregon environmental quality department recently fined an Amazon data center in Hermiston for violating its air quality permit by running an emergency diesel generator for 50 hours more than allowed.
Although Oregon and Washington have mostly prohibited building new gas power plantsor importing more gas-powered electricity, both offer some workarounds. In each state, utilities can seek exemptions if they claim overall reliability is in jeopardy or the costs are too high to procure clean energy. And in Oregon, the climate protection rules only apply to investor-owned utilities.
Utility commissioners in central Washington’s Grant County, where a public utility district provides power for at least 27 data centers, recently cited a lack of transmission capacity to approve plans for the company VoltaGrid to build a new 12-megawatt methane gas power plant to supply a hyperscale data center campus owned by the multinational tech company Vantage.
It will include 14 mobile gas engines that are enclosed in a semi-tractor trailer, according to the Columbia Riverkeeper report. To fuel the plant, VoltaGrid plans show the company would truck gas from the city of Moses Lake to Quincy, requiring 16 trips daily between the cities.
Grant County Public Utility District commissioners are also weighing new gas-fired power plants near Moses Lake or Quincy, and possibly investing in a natural gas plant in Idaho, a state without emission reduction targets, according to Columbia Riverkeeper’s account of a January 2026 commission workshop.
At that meeting, commissioners considered multiple proposals, including a new 40- to 120-megawatt gas-fired plant in the county, and 10 to 20 megawatts of natural gas fuel cell generators.
Another way
Sightline Institute researchers noted that much of the rush to build out gas infrastructure for data centers is to ensure enough energy to power peak demand, such as when residential heaters and air conditioners are running during extreme weather, on top of the overall base-load needed to serve customers consistently throughout the year.
Laura Feinstein, author of the Sightline report on new gas power being sought for data centers, recommended lawmakers in Oregon and Washington take a similar approach as officials in Texas, requiring that data centers power down when demand from most other customers is high and the grid is stressed.
A 2025 study from industry consultancy Energy and Environmental Economics, also known as E3, has been used in a growing number of cases to justify allowing more gas onto the grid in the Northwest for data centers, according to Feinstein, because the consultants said 9 gigawatts of energy would be needed by 2030. That would mean in the next four years roughly doubling the total amount of energy currently powering Oregon today.
But a separate study by Sylvan Energy Analytics, a firm founded by former E3 consultants, found that power would be unnecessary if Oregon and Washington required data centers to power down during demand spikes.
Leonard from Columbia Riverkeeper similarly cautioned against building out more fossil-fuel energy to meet data center demand, given unpredictability over how much energy the centers will actually use in the next few decades. She said the data center industry often inflates how much energy it will need.
“Because the energy demand of data centers is something that varies widely, data centers should not be used to justify new gas infrastructure,” she said.
