AI is already damaging human life. We gave it a head start

The AI-industrial complex is in turmoil after several of its executives and engineers warned the technology could kill some or all humans, possibly before the 2036 election. This could be real cause for alarm or just brilliant marketing. Whatever the case, artificial intelligence is already harming humans through environmental devastation encouraged by the U.S. government. We won’t need a decade to see the impact.

The now-hilariously named Environmental Protection Agency on Monday killed requirements set under the Biden administration that fossil-fuel power plants cut their future carbon emissions. It also proposed adopting climate-change denialism as the government’s new environmental norm by pretending that power-plant emissions don’t endanger the public.  

The Trump administration called these moves a way to "unleash" U.S. energy, which has been straining to keep up with robust demand created by the government and Silicon Valley’s fever to build AI data centers on every empty acre of land. Also soon to be unleashed in the process: millions of tons of greenhouse gases.

The 60 biggest U.S. data centers under construction in August could produce 101.5 million tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent per year, according to a Financial Times analysis. That’s like putting an additional 24 million gas-burning cars on the road. 

This isn’t a human-friendly stance to take when the world is already on track to soon be 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than preindustrial averages because of planet-warming emissions. The associated droughts, heat waves, wildfires, floods and other disasters will cost Americans trillions of dollars more in deaths, illnesses and property destruction than the paltry $310 billion the EPA claims its carbon-friendly new rule will save. 

The EPA isn’t just boosting carbon pollution in the name of robot welfare. It’s also encouraging more old-school pollution, warned a recent report by the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit group of former EPA scientists and experts. They identified more than 30 agency actions that loosened regulations to let data centers produce more soot, mercury, smog, toxic waste, coal ash and other human poisons, all in the name of  "positioning America as the global leader in AI," as EPA chief Lee Zeldin has written. This pollution contributes to cancer, heart and lung diseases and other ailments that could cost Americans $21 billion a year, the report estimated.

Even Iowa, long a renewable-energy paragon, has cranked up its coal consumption to keep pace with the data-center boom, Inside Climate News reported. The Hawkeye State generated 58.5% of its electricity from wind last year, the highest in the nation. But coal’s share ticked up to 26% from 20.5% in 2024, according to Energy Information Administration data.

Just that little bit of extra burning coal had an immediate impact on air quality, according to a report by the Iowa Environmental Council, a nonprofit watchdog group. Emissions of fine particles known as PM2.5 increased by more than 50% at each of the state’s two biggest electric utilities. These sink deep into the lungs, can enter the bloodstream and generally wreak havoc on human bodies. 

And that’s just air. Data centers are also poisoning our water, perhaps as fast as they’re drinking it. Just this week, an Equinix Inc. data center in New Jersey spilled diesel fuel into a creek feeding the Hackensack River. Earlier this year, construction of a Meta Platforms Inc. data center was found to be the source of a rare, antibiotic-resistant bacteria turning up in sewers in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Mother Jones reported.  

Data centers are also prolific users of PFAS, or "forever" chemicals, in cooling and fire suppression, noted a recent report from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a nonprofit research group. These toxins also come from discarded microchips, part of a coming "tsunami" of AI-driven electronic waste, according to a new study by the nonprofit group Basel Action Network. We have barely begun to study, much less control, this new and fast-growing source of these chemicals, which attack the liver, kidneys and blood and cause cancer, birth defects and other serious health problems.   

In fact, President Donald Trump’s EPA is doing everything it can to let data centers pump more of this stuff into the environment. While talking big about attacking PFAS to Make America Healthy Again, it has slow-walked oversight, canceled Biden-era regulations and delayed a first-of-its-kind survey to identify PFAS polluters. It’s almost as if the administration doesn’t want to know the answer, sort of like how not testing for Covid means it’s not there.

If the U.S. government won’t guard humans against these clear and present dangers, then state and local officials must, with real oversight that has teeth. Fortunately, data-center opposition has large, growing and bipartisan support, so it shouldn’t be hard to get support for environmental protections. Some politicians are calling for developers to guarantee they won’t raise local electric bills or drain local water sources. Those are good starts. But data centers should also be subject to a do-no-harm requirement, proving they won’t desecrate the environment.

In The Matrix, humans are exploited as batteries for robots, trapped in cocoons in a sunless, ruined hellscape. In reality, our robot overlords’ backers are exploiting humanity and denuding nature, only more slowly and without a fun simulation to console us. AI may or may not destroy humanity in a decade, but there’s no need to give it a head start. 

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal.