Great article. The AI bubble seems to have so many huge potential consequences - wiping out people's retirement savings when the bubble bursts, delaying the transition to clean energy and actually doing something about the climate crisis, accelerating the 'water wars', ending affordable ownership of a personal computer - that it's hard to predict which will screw us over the most!

Already, in Ireland, the data centre industry now consumes 22 per cent of that island’s electricity. That’s more than all of that country’s urban households. The AI juggernaut seems able to manufacture silence by public servants. A recent Irish government report on the importance of data centres just happened to omit any reference to the AI surge and how it pushes up everyone’s electricity bills, the highest in Europe.

Now consider the energy appetite of Kevin O’Leary’s Wonder Valley project in Alberta. O’Leary proposes to spend $70 billion of other people’s money on the planet’s “largest” data centre. It would consume more electricity than is used by eight million households or 15 cities the size of Calgary. Its ravenous energy appetite will tie the robotic entity directly to Western Canada’s Montney formation, its fracked methane used to fire turbines powering the colossus.

If history is a guide, those turbines will foul the air by pumping out lung-clogging fine particulate matter and hazardous chemicals that lower the lifespans of rural people. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government has already waived any pretence of an environmental review.

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Using remote sensing data from satellites, the researchers located 6,000 data centres built in the last decade in rural regions and measured temperature changes before and after construction [of data centres]. Everywhere they found that land surface temperatures had increased by an average of 2 C. In one extreme case temperatures soared by 9 C.

The researchers discovered that the hotter temperatures extended up to 10 kilometres’ distance from the AI hyperscaled facilities. Many of the places they tracked are already plenty warm. In the northeast region of Brazil, for example, where during the hottest months daily highs hover in the high 30s, data centres have bumped local temperatures another nearly 3 C.

Pulling back their lens, the scientists considered how many global inhabitants live within a 10-kilometre radius of a big AI data centre. Their calculation: about 343 million people. Their conclusion: “Especially in the context of global warming and climate transformation,” the data heat island effect may lead “to dramatic impact on welfare, health care and energy systems.”

Worry not. The federal government wants to provide “AI literacy training” to those of us not already completely sucked in.