The United Nations has issued a stark warning, urging countries to confront the escalating environmental costs of artificial intelligence (AI) as its rapid expansion intensifies demands on energy, water, and carbon emissions. AI data centres are notoriously resource-intensive, consuming vast quantities of electricity, water for cooling, and significant land.
A report from the Canada-based UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) also highlighted the technology's footprint from chip production, critical minerals, and electronic waste. Beyond physical infrastructure, the cumulative impact of billions of user interactions – every prompt, generated image, and query – significantly contributes to this burden.
The report implored governments, businesses, and investors to embed environmental considerations at the core of all AI decisions, ensuring its development remains sustainable. It comes as the global AI market is predicted to grow 25-fold to nearly five trillion dollars by 2033.
“When a technology scales this quickly, unintended social, economic, geopolitical and environmental consequences can accumulate quietly, and then become complex and inequitable to correct once systems, investments and dependencies lock in,” the report said. “Public debate has rightly focused on AI risks such as bias, privacy, disinformation, labour disruption and inequity. Yet one of the most consequential dimensions of AI that remains comparatively underexamined is its environmental footprint and the justice implications that follow from where and how AI infrastructure expands.”
The AI boom is already driving soaring energy consumption, with AI-related workloads accounting for roughly 20% of total data centre electricity use in 2025, according to the scientists. This share is expected to rise to 40% by the end of the decade. This means AI-linked electricity consumption is set to increase to such a level by 2030 that it could meet the residential electricity needs of all 1.3 billion people living in sub-Saharan Africa for more than two years.
Current forecast trajectories also suggest total electricity demand from data centres could roughly double by 2030. Producing that much electricity could have a carbon footprint of nearly 400 million tonnes of planet-heating carbon dioxide, requiring 6.7 billion trees grown over a decade to offset – about twice the number of trees in the UK. The estimated 9.3 trillion litres of water used by data centres by 2030 would meet the drinking water needs of Earth’s 8.1 billion people for about 1.6 years. AI infrastructure is also predicted to generate up to 2.5 million tonnes of e-waste each year by 2030.
