In May, MIT Technology Review published an unprecedented and comprehensive look at how much energy the AI industry uses—down to a single query. Our reporters and editors traced where AI’s carbon footprint stands now, and where it’s headed, as AI barrels towards billions of daily users.
We’ve just produced a short video to accompany that investigation. You can read the original full story here, and check out—and share— the full video on YouTube here.
AI is changing the grid. Could it help more than it harms?
The rising popularity of AI is driving an increase in electricity demand so significant it has the potential to reshape the grid. Energy consumption by data centers has gone up by 80% from 2020 to 2025 and is likely to keep growing. Electricity prices are already rising, especially in places where data centers are most concentrated.
Yet many people, especially in Big Tech, argue that AI will be, on balance, a positive force for the grid. They claim that the technology could help get more clean power online faster, run our power system more efficiently, and predict and prevent failures that cause blackouts. How much merit is there to that argument?
—Casey Crownhart