The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It's Almost Incomprehensible

[riversedge]

Also the noise created by AI centers is MASSIVE

Link to tweet

?s=20

[Cirsium]

1. Avoiding X

The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It’s Almost Incomprehensible

excerpt:

The massive surge of fossil fuel-powered data centers cropping up across the country are emitting an enormous amount of pollution, a pulsing indication that we’re headed in the wrong direction in the midst of a climate crisis.

The extent of the this polluting activity is confounding. As climate action group Floodlight found in a recent investigation spotted by Wired, Texas has become the epicenter of the United States’ current obsession with constructing AI data centers. Companies are exploiting regulatory loopholes as they construct new facilities powered by pollutant-spewing onsite gas plants.

The rate of growth of this “shadow grid” of custom power plants, some of which are big enough to fuel entire cities, is so enormous that the only global entity installing more gigawatts of gas plants than Texas is China, according to environmental group Global Energy Monitor.

On a national scale, scientists are still racing to wrap their heads around the environmental footprint of our new AI obsession. Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, the equivalent of adding five to ten million cars to US roadways.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pollution-ai-data-centers-severe

[erronis]

2. Thank you. Almost anything posted on the Xitter is available elsewhere.

[Cirsium]

3. 60 seconds

I took all of 60 seconds to find the source and post a snippet and a link here.

[enigmania]

4. "Old King Coal" returns with a vengeance.

https://victorianweb.org/science/environment/basdeo.html
https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/43390832/Greenlees_J._2021_Unhealthy_environments_in_Victorian_Britain_when_air_quality_began_to_matter.pdf

[erronis]

7. Both great articles. Thanks!

The cycle continues.

[erronis]

5. Bots now account for 57-58 percent of requests for HTML content, compared with 42-43 percent from humans

The content is increasingly produced by bots, as well as consumed by bots. Humans are becoming insignificant.

https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/07/12/its-an-ai-web-and-were-just-rats-in-the-walls/5269760

Cloudflare's public Radar "Bot vs Human" tracker is reporting that bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva's Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at about 53 percent of measured web traffic for the second year in a row, with humans at 47 percent.

Separately, according to Pangram, an AI detection company, on websites such as LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit, "about one in four long-form items were fully AI-generated."

The company went on to report that "LinkedIn was the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40 percent of long-form posts [were] flagged as fully AI-generated. However, if we included mixed AI and human content, X/Twitter was the worst off: almost half of X articles were either fully AI-generated (23.9 percent) or AI-assisted/mixed (22.9 percent), with only 53.2 percent of X articles flagging as fully human-authored."

[flvegan]

6. The irony of posting this on X. n/t

[republianmushroom]

8. And it will get worst.

[Karasu]

9. Fuck the entire GOP regime for allowing this shit and refusing to regulate it.

[lame54]

10. Our full steam pursuit of this...

Is so stupid and self destructive

[hibbing]

11. "regulatory loopholes", wink, wink

I wonder how much was paid to get that intentional "loophole" in there.