From https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1vh6391/environmental_impact_of_ai_datacenters_vs_animal/
Sources:
Water use:
https://www.foodfacts.org/articles/how-much-water-does-ai-use-vs-livestock
Land use:
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Greenhouse gas emissions:
https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167658 https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights-detail/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agrifood-systems.-global–regional-and-country-trends–2000-2022/en
- To the many comments along the lines of: „But we need food“ – This is actually another great point against Animal Agriculture, as every calory of food produced by Animal Agriculture wastes several calories of feed. https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/
- For people pointing out energy consumption, AI uses ~500 TWH per year, Animal Agriculture uses~ 13000 TWH per year, so it is 25x worse on energy need.
(This is a quick estimate based on:
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-ai https://www.fao.org/energy/resources/facts-and-figures/en#%3A%7E%3Atext=%28+World+Bank%2C+2025%29+*+30+percent%2Cor+wasted+due+to+lack+of+refrigeration. )
I don’t disagree entirely… But this feels silly omitting the land use and pollution of AI accounting for all the rare earth metals and resources used to create the hardware and the datacenters that AI runs on and in - which would be far more substantial than their real-estate footprint.
not a vegan, but cows need a lot of corn, and datacenters don’t (unless they are solar powered)
Solar power data centers need corn? The more I know
how else do you get the ethanol?
Sugarcane