Another Benefit From The Bullshit That Is AI: "Just An Unbelievable Amount Of Pollution"

During a golden sunset in Memphis in May, Sharon Wilson pointed a thermal imaging camera at Elon Musk’s flagship datacentre to reveal a planetary threat her eyes could not. Free from pollution controls, the gas-fired turbines that power the world’s biggest AI supercomputer were pumping invisible fumes into the Tennessee sky. “It was jaw-dropping,” said Wilson, a former oil and gas worker from Texas who has documented methane releases for more than a decade and estimates xAI’s Colossus datacentre was spewing more of the planet-heating gas than a large power plant. “Just an unbelievable amount of pollution.”

That same week, the facility’s core product was running riot on news feeds. Musk’s maverick chatbot, Grok, repeated a conspiracy theory that “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa when asked about topics as unrelated as baseball and scaffolding. The posts were quickly deleted but Grok has gone on to praise Hitler, push far-right ideologies and make false claims. “It’s a horrible, horrible waste,” said Wilson, the director of campaign group Oilfield Witness, pointing to Grok-generated images of Nazi Mickey Mouse as an example of what fossil gas was being burned to produce. “What useful purpose does this serve?”

Wilson is not alone in asking this question. Scientists are watching the AI boom with unease as it pollutes the natural world with carbon and the digital world with dangers ranging from dodgy health myths to deepfake pornography targeting children.

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When Holly and Will Alpine decided to quit their jobs at Microsoft last year, they knew they were throwing away a good deal. The married millennial couple enjoyed US tech salaries through their positions in the company’s responsible AI and sustainability teams, with close colleagues and work that gave them a sense of purpose. Will had been among the early voices pushing to tackle the energy cost of datacentres. But Microsoft’s work for oil and gas clients troubled the pair, and they started to grow more concerned about the emissions it enabled than the ones it produced. In 2019, the company announced a partnership with ExxonMobil with the potential to expand production by as much as 50,000 barrels a day. That same year, it began a digital project with Chevron that the oil company says has cut 30 days off its deepwater well planning process. As more deals emerged, the Alpines began to push their employer for answers. “The response from the company was often pointing back to their own operational footprint, which is not relevant,” said Holly Alpine, who left the company with Will to campaign for the tech industry to tackle its enabled emissions. “After a four-year internal advocacy campaign, where we got a lot of promises but most were unfulfilled, we realised that internal pressure was not enough.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/03/just-an-unbelievable-amount-of-pollution-how-big-a-threat-is-ai-to-the-climate