For 2025 the grid carbon intensity in Texas was 363gCO2eq/kWh, while it was 22gCO2eq/kWh in Sweden, so 16,5x more in Texas. Right now it's 427 in Texas vs. 50 in Finland ie. 8,54x more, like in the article (yes I looked the wrong country at first).
The reason is half of Texas electricity production is still fossil fuels (gas & coal) while mostly hydro, nuclear and wind in Sweden. So it's not really about ai, the models or the hardware. Fossil fuels make CO2, that's it.
I'll take it with the whole shaker, because Texas has over 30 million residents to Sweden's 10, which means at least one of the above numbers is completely wrong.
... and shows why you still need to know things in order to safely use LLMs. If I hadn't known the approximate populations of both Texas and Sweden, I would have been more likely to believe the parent comment without question.
When the state is a full 30 degrees of latitude southern than Sweden, with consistent sun throughout the year, yeah, it will generate more energy through solar.
Parent had a sarcastic reaction to Texas burning fossil fuels - which they have a lot of. They also have sunshine. Sweden seems to have neither but has hydro.
Point is each geographic entity is maximizing their resources. And they have every right to without outside interference.
Well yes, it’s not like GPUs belch CO2 from their bellies.
The point is that they use a lot of electricity, and this is an active concern to many Americans who see electricity prices go up and polluting energy sources being used more as data centers roll into their state.
I agree, but AI seems like one of the things that could easily follow the sun/best source of green (and therefore cheap) energy. I (a European, unfortunately born in the UK) wouldn't mind a bit of latency on my Claude Code sessions if I knew it was so that everything was being run from solar in north Africa.
Great writeup! I've done some work on Codecarbon [1] in the past, it's a pretty standard tool for measuring ML/AI workload emissions, it would be awesome to have your findings contributed to that project as well.
The reasoning effort knob is becoming a really important variable regarding how much impact AI models will have on energy consumption. Medium and max can differ by as much as two orders of magnitude in their token consumption. We also have to consider the amplification of compute demand that occurs by way of the tool calls themselves. Tokens are mostly a constant cost thing, but how they are interpreted can mean the difference between a 5 minute cpu bound operation and a 50uS cached database lookup. At some point, the CPU is going to become the bottleneck again.
And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.
Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
> And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.
And China is building 6-8 new mega-scale lignite coal power plants *per month.* Each one of those power plants emits more CO2 than 8.3 million people consuming medium amounts of animal products *for life.*
For the record I'm not denigrating your point. I'm taking it a step further. We're not focusing on the major contributors of CO2 emissions. It's not data centers and it's not meat consumption.
> China emits half the emissions per capita of the US.
China emits more CO2 than any other country by a wide margin. It's not less damaging to the environment just because they have more people. Even if we pretended that that were the case, [China emits more CO2 per capita than 32 of 38 OECD countries.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...) They are an egregious and unrepentant polluter, in every way imaginable, and in many ways you cannot even imagine.
Any discussion of reducing CO2 emissions which doesn't include a large section on China is not taking the subject seriously. But to be clear, we should also discuss emissions by the other large polluters like the U.S. and Canada.
AFIACT, if I make a single request, the part that uses the most power is my monitors while they display the result and I read/use it.
Which makes me suspect that if I do something complex involving 2,000 requests, the power used is less than I'd use to achieve the same goal using my monitors and other office equipment. That depends on the goal of the complex action, of course.
It might not help the cause, but ultimately it's an uncomfortable truth. It's easy to dismiss a fact as 'moralising'.
It's simply a fact that animals suffer when they are factory farmed and then killed. It's a fact that they are living sentient beings. You can be totally okay with that, but the reality is that most people are only okay with it because it doesn't happen right in front of them.
I used to eat meat, btw. And I also used to attack people for 'moralising'. I now realise this was my brain trying to defend itself; to try to make sense of why I would pet a dog but eat a pig (everyone else is doing it, this person is just different and wrong, go away bad vegan person!)
I also had this sudden realization a year ago about the cruelty of animal usage in society and went vegan and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.
One other angle is there are the beginnings of consideration of cruelty to AI's. That's great that people are starting to consider it, to try to be compassionate out of the abundance of caution that it might matter.
But to then just straight up pay to have tens to hundreds of obviously sentient animal killed for you per year (and yes egg laying hens and dairy cows are killed in their youth, when they don't want to die) seems like a blind spot a lot of people have. I had it myself until recently, so I don't cast any judgment, but I also wish it was easier to make people just see the truth on this
Good for you for accepting an uncomfortable truth and making a change. I'm not sure where you are based, in some places it's easier to eat out as a vegan than in others. That said, the more people the better, and the easier it gets for everyone.
I do live in a big city, and I've found the eating part to be a non issue after like a one month learning curve. I now miss absolutely nothing, and am healthier and spend less on food. The hard part is dealing with social situations, but it's not that bad.
That's actually kind of a scary statistic... I probably eat a burgur at most every month (beef maybe once a week at most) but probably make more than 2000 requests a day.
Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.
0.5 Pwh/yr - worldwide data center energy
4-5 PWh/yr - meat total farm to table
166 PWh/yr - worldwide total energy production
the true bottleneck and cost we have is energy, carbon is a polite proxy
if you can meaningfully cut down the energetic cost, that's very valuable either way
maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:
DC #1: EU Efficient, but has ~100ms additional latency
DC #2: TX Runs on jet engine turbines, neighbors complain of noise and air pollution
env impact is something worth considering regardless of industry
I've seen people who hate AI instantly become defensive as soon as someone brings up the water usage for a kg of beef. It's selective outrage.
I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.
Because some causes are significantly worse than others. If you want to have a big impact, you start with the big levers.
I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.
How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?
Have a look at a graph of meat consumption in the US. We are also adding to that. That's my point, we don't need to add to meat consumption, we can make reductions.
blaze33 1 day ago
The reason is half of Texas electricity production is still fossil fuels (gas & coal) while mostly hydro, nuclear and wind in Sweden. So it's not really about ai, the models or the hardware. Fossil fuels make CO2, that's it.
ZeroGravitas 1 day ago
Like 2/3rds or 4/5ths of it on a fossil heavy grid.
solyin 1 day ago
prasadjoglekar 1 day ago
TX generated 4x the absolute solar electricity as Sweden and 5x per person in the last 12 months.
Symbiote 1 day ago
MandieD 1 day ago
... and shows why you still need to know things in order to safely use LLMs. If I hadn't known the approximate populations of both Texas and Sweden, I would have been more likely to believe the parent comment without question.
piva00 1 day ago
What's the point you're making?
prasadjoglekar 1 day ago
Point is each geographic entity is maximizing their resources. And they have every right to without outside interference.
piva00 1 day ago
Not really when they create a global problem. Tragedy of the commons, huh...
AlecSchueler 1 day ago
The C02 output is interfering with life outside their borders.
nicce 1 day ago
cyanydeez 1 day ago
mepiethree 2 days ago
pavlov 1 day ago
The point is that they use a lot of electricity, and this is an active concern to many Americans who see electricity prices go up and polluting energy sources being used more as data centers roll into their state.
expedition32 1 day ago
ruperthair 1 day ago
thegreatpeter 1 day ago
armcat 2 days ago
[1] https://github.com/mlco2/codecarbon
bob1029 2 days ago
maelito 1 day ago
alpineman 2 days ago
Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
Gareth321 1 day ago
And China is building 6-8 new mega-scale lignite coal power plants *per month.* Each one of those power plants emits more CO2 than 8.3 million people consuming medium amounts of animal products *for life.*
For the record I'm not denigrating your point. I'm taking it a step further. We're not focusing on the major contributors of CO2 emissions. It's not data centers and it's not meat consumption.
alpineman 1 day ago
Gareth321 1 day ago
China emits more CO2 than any other country by a wide margin. It's not less damaging to the environment just because they have more people. Even if we pretended that that were the case, [China emits more CO2 per capita than 32 of 38 OECD countries.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...) They are an egregious and unrepentant polluter, in every way imaginable, and in many ways you cannot even imagine.
Any discussion of reducing CO2 emissions which doesn't include a large section on China is not taking the subject seriously. But to be clear, we should also discuss emissions by the other large polluters like the U.S. and Canada.
CalRobert 2 days ago
Arnt 1 day ago
Which makes me suspect that if I do something complex involving 2,000 requests, the power used is less than I'd use to achieve the same goal using my monitors and other office equipment. That depends on the goal of the complex action, of course.
lawn 2 days ago
The "only the biggest thing matters" is a faulty logic. If you truly care about the environment then we need to improve things across the board.
And moralizing about living beings doesn't help your cause here.
alpineman 2 days ago
It's simply a fact that animals suffer when they are factory farmed and then killed. It's a fact that they are living sentient beings. You can be totally okay with that, but the reality is that most people are only okay with it because it doesn't happen right in front of them.
I used to eat meat, btw. And I also used to attack people for 'moralising'. I now realise this was my brain trying to defend itself; to try to make sense of why I would pet a dog but eat a pig (everyone else is doing it, this person is just different and wrong, go away bad vegan person!)
CurrentB 1 day ago
One other angle is there are the beginnings of consideration of cruelty to AI's. That's great that people are starting to consider it, to try to be compassionate out of the abundance of caution that it might matter.
But to then just straight up pay to have tens to hundreds of obviously sentient animal killed for you per year (and yes egg laying hens and dairy cows are killed in their youth, when they don't want to die) seems like a blind spot a lot of people have. I had it myself until recently, so I don't cast any judgment, but I also wish it was easier to make people just see the truth on this
alpineman 1 day ago
CurrentB 1 day ago
uludag 2 days ago
Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.
achille 2 days ago
maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:
env impact is something worth considering regardless of industrypseudony 2 days ago
That will put some sweat on some brows :)
schleck8 2 days ago
I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.
consp 2 days ago
schleck8 2 days ago
I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.
How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?
stuaxo 2 days ago
What benefit is the AI summary on search giving me Vs the actual search for a start.
alpineman 2 days ago
busssard 2 days ago
if you dont leave the page they get more ad-money