Can clean energy handle the AI boom?

I spent some time recently reading through a big spreadsheet of questions submitted by Vox's audience members.

And one of them caught my eye.

It was from Kathy, a retired school teacher in New York City.

What is the question that you wanted us to answer?

So the question is, can green energy even begin to handle the increased demands that AI and crypto and cloud storage are going to put on our energy system?

It's a good question.

I've done some reporting on AI, but I've never thought much of the climate impact of all the AI products we're increasingly using.

And all of our digital belongings, like photos and documents and emails, getting stockpiled in servers around the world.

They need a lot of electricity and then electricity has to come from somewhere.

This is all happening while the climate crisis demands we use less energy, not invent new ways to use more of it.

I think our climate goals already feel pretty impossible to me.

But now it's almost like we haven't changed the goalposts.

We've changed the entire game.

So let's get to the bottom of this.

Within Kathy's big question is a more basic one about how much electricity our digital lives require.

At first, I was thrown off that Kathy mentioned things like cloud storage and AI and cryptocurrency in one category.

But then I realized that their electricity demands happen at the same place, data centers.

Ultimately, you're talking about machines loaded up in large facilities who generate computations.

And they need power, a lot of it.

They need water.