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.
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
and life of subsistence farming in the countryside costs two orders of magnitude less of carbon sin that life in the city, where everything the enlightened cosmopolitan consumes is delivered by carbon-chugging trucks, freighters, and planes from hundreds and thousands miles away.
but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.
Livestock is 14.5% of global emissions. Food is about 1/3rd of each individual's emissions. A plant based diet can cut that by 50-75%. How is that not substantial?
stopping or reversing climate change would require sacrificing far more than 50% of 1/3rd. it would require sacrificing every comfort and convenience you don't bat an eye about. forget heating and cooling. forget taking warm showers every day. forget having things delivered to you from 5000 miles away, or even 500, so forget about most things. forget those plants you consume being affordable and available year-round, and prepare to spend the bulk of your income on simply surviving.
basically, imagine returning to per-industrial times, because that's what required to achieve the goals you believe to help achieve by abstaining from burgers.
It's not about stopping or even reversing climate change, it's about slowing it down and tapering it off so living on this planet doesn't become so unbearable
Who's the one moralizing others on the internet now? Telling others the only solution is to either sacrifice everything or do nothing? Simply not fact based.
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.
The meat industry helps keep humans alive however, whereas the AI industry does not. I think the argument between the two needs to factor in the actual reason for the emissions.
Eating meat is ecologically unsustainable but it has an actual reason for it to exist.
Eating meat is not necessary by any means to 'be alive' in fact many studies show that a plant based diet is better for longevity. So, in the same way that AI is not 'necessary' to do a job, it's not necessary to eat meat. It's a matter of taste and societal conformity/norms.
We didn't get to where we are as a species without violently killing each other, or forcing people do to work for us, or killing our young, etc. Doesn't mean we should keep doing it.
Friends have described scenarios where ai has literally saved their life. Like, they were trying to commit suicide, they had no one human to talk to, but they did have AI.
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.
and what benefit does a golf course have to anyone? Unlike golf courses, AI summary is used by pretty much everyone. And if you dont think this is true, then you live in a bubble.
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.
The relative resource consumption of meat vs. plants is well established. Chicken is much more resource efficient than beef if you want to eat meat but consume less resources, and mussels are even more efficient.
That part I'm well aware of, I wanna know how the parent reached the figure 17000. What does count as a request even nowadays? When I tell an agent to make the button blue, how many requests is that? And how about when I tell it to throw together a whole website? Or rewrite the codebase in Rust?
“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”
0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.
Thanks. My next question would be what's a typical request. The article defines it as "production-typical request of 5,000 input and 387 output tokens, weighted by a typical day's traffic" for the Kimi K3 model. Not sure how that translates to my scale of the blue button to RIIR.
Most people in the West eat too much meat. Red meat in particular is a group 2 carcinogen according to the WHO, so the body isn't meant to consume a lot of it. Yet many people eat meat every day, because "It's not a complete meal without it" or "I somehow need 10 times more protein than people a millenium ago while claiming to eat like them".
Tell you what, I'll keep eating beef, walking to work, and not using AI. Closer to how our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years, so it can't be too off the mark.
I trap and kill hare, and make cheese from fresh milk from my friend's dairy farm. But no, I do not kill the cows that I eat.
What do immigrants have to do with this? I shared my opinion that living like our ancestors did is the way I'd like to continue my life. If you have a counter opinion, can you offer it?
The comments section reminds me of The Dead Great-Grandfather Test
[Science fiction writer Bruce] Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.
Sterling's rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it's something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it's a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.
But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there's a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.
Thanks for the ragebait. Reminding myself that the flaw here is obvious, there’s no need to respond, arbitrary „tests” aren’t binding to anyone, protecting the future is perfectly defensible as a moral stance even at cost of present convenience.
This is a fallacy. People 100 years like your great grandfather ago solved problems they had 100 years ago. People today solve problems they have today.
This is about a dead grandfather as he is decomposing in the ground. Not about his life which might have been more energy-intensive than that of many moderns.
Not sure about your great-grandfather, but mine didn't own a car, didn't travel on vacation by airplane, and, while he may have used a stove to heat his house, he probably only used it sparingly, because coal was expensive. So I doubt his life was more energy-intensive than mine.
Now I'm wondering what the CO2 efficiency of a modern airplane per tonnage of cargo/people is compared to coal fuelled ships, obviously ignoring the aspect of _where_ aircraft emit their exhaust in the atmosphere which IIRC makes a difference.
It's nothing relevant to your comment, I thoroughly agree, but just got me curious.
Is getting in touch with nature, appreciating the value in things and protecting complex ecosystems really 'Acting Dead'?
I would say 'Acting Dead' is actually sitting at home ordering on Amazon/Temu, watching brainless TikTok/Instagram/Netflix/YouTube videos, and talking to a transformer model all day.
Both of those are entertainment. What work are either of those accomplishing? People need houses and food, and more people are happening. "Acting dead" is people who are getting in the way of providing for people.
Figuring out how to provide more for people using less resources, isn't that a great achievement?
I think reducing this discussion into only two polar opposites is rather juvenile, the struggle we face is on how can we be more efficient, and less damaging to the our general environment while providing for people.
That's a lot more sci-fi to me than sending rockets to Mars to colonise it.
It's a really dumb test. You can apply it to argue against reducing or stopping literally anything. My dead great grandfather uses no fentanyl and commits no murders. If we're not doing those, we're as good as dead!
I think it’s along the lines of “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. These little micro optimizations take your attention and energy away from places that might be less visible and less enjoyable but more consequential.
Whoever responds "we need to stay within our CO2 budgets, otherwise we'll be in real trouble in 20 years" with "being a hippie and organizing your life around recycling" is really building up some sort of weird straw man and not really usefully engaging in solving the problem.
Basically "Don't live beyond our collective means" = "Die".
Are you buying the latest iPhone every year? If not, you might as well be dead.
I wish people would realize that life is not about stuff. Living within your means, being frugal and focusing on what really matters (time with family, experiencing nature, thinking interesting thoughts) is not at all "permanent existential hibernation".
I resent the "The Dead Great-Grandfather Test" and similar "growth"-at-all-costs ideologies. Its implications are disgusting.
Yeah, the average Swede emitted 3.43 tons of CO2 in 2023, which is less than a quarter of what an average US citizen emitted. Does that mean that a US citizen is four times more "alive" than a Swede?
What's your point? Do you mean "everyone is equally bad", so reducing your resource usage is pointless? Because that's not true, clearly.
Do you mean that owning any electronics at all is morally wrong? That's a more consistent point, but what are you posting from then?
This sort of all-or-nothing mentality is really reductive and pointless. It's like saying you shouldn't go to the gym unless you plan to become the worlds strongest man.
In my opinion, it is the responsibility of each and everyone to live as frugally w.r.t. the environment as possible, while keeping in mind that each of us has a job to manage in order to feed our families.
I own a phone, but it's as old as I can have in order to still have access to banking. I own a car, but it's as old as I could find while still driving well and being reasonably fuel efficient. I drive as little as I can, while still allowing myself to travel to meet family. I eat food but I buy organic and avoid imported food as much as possible. And so on.
Another important factor is that one should strive to improve the laws. Because clearly, reducing your own impact is not enough. And the political work one does, of course needs to be calibrated to what time one has available.
I'd never judge somebody for prioritizing family over political work, or buying a second-hand iPhone in order to save time on setting up a Fairphone or similar.
I will judge somebody who buys the latest car, or latest phone, or something like that. I will not judge but gently inform someone of the facts, if they buy meat that I consider coming from an unethical animal industry. And I will listen to a vegetarian if they'd like to inform me about the realities of the industry that produces the meat I eat, even though I personally consider it "ethical enough", because perhaps they'll change my mind.
Fair comparison. Texas just needs to flood the valleys of its famous mountain chain and collect the melted snow with dams to match Sweden's 40% hydro electricity production.
too many things can happen in the ai provider's backend which won't be observable from the outside. for starters how will you even know what hardware and inference backend is being used by RandomAiProvider3284.com? you can't. i looked at your berget-ai/co2-calculator repo and you're expected to provide this yourself. it also uses "measuredResponseTimeSeconds" as a metric even though it's impossible to know how much of that time was spent rate limiting the user during hours of high activity
> for starters how will you even know what hardware and inference backend is being used by RandomAiProvider3284.com? you can't.
From the article:
A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.
-> So the comparison is based on the assumption that identical hardware is used.
Also from the article:
Emissions estimates are based on the current average emissions intensity of each regional electricity grid, which has been the norm in greenhouse gas accounting.
So it's just an incredibly stupid way to compare the power grids in Texas vs Sweden. It's not even accurate because the marginal watt during the day looks very different than the overall grid average.
One of the reasons to build them near populated areas is that it makes it easier to repurpose waste heat to, for example, heat houses in colder climates.
These are future plans and they lack specificity. I don't think they will come to fruition. The problem is that waste water from data centers isn't hot enough.
Because that is where the existing roads, power and internet connections are. Might not be that significant investment to build those in context of scale. But still it simplifies many steps in building.
Probably so they have no problems getting people who work there and provide technical services. I mean that seriously without any sarcasm or tongue-in-cheek, it seems the most likely explanation to me.
They need to be near a high bandwidth fiber connection, but with relatively cheap land. So the outer edges of major cities are prime locations, with Ashburn VA being the prime example. There is no reason to put them further out because the added costs don't make sense and the data centers actually have minimal impact on the surrounding population outside of hyperventilating conspiracy theorists, Ashburn VA also being the prime example.
This is why people in left wing areas need to oppose datacenters bans. Regulate them. Require green energy investments that more than offset their load. Use some of that flowing AI money for the betterment of society.
You don't need to specifically regulate green investments for datacenter. Just introduce CO2 emission tax and the industry will find efficient ways to reduce CO2 emissions.
I think "people in left wing areas" is weird phrasing. There is nothing inherent about an area that makes it left or right wing. "People who live under governments who are responsive to collective issues such as climate and energy prices" would make more sense.
Some of it is useful, and from an environmental perspective, if it eliminates some other activity (e.g. team of workers driving to/from work and their office heating/cooling) then it can even be a net positive.
I would agree that there should be some tariffed token usage based on CO2, efficient datacentres pay little, polluting ones pay a lot - would help even the field and export good practice.
Except they wouldn't move to Texas but would also build in Texas.
So you don't get a less polluting datacenter but you get one less polluting and one more polluting datacenter.
A Swedish datacenter doesn't simply replace one in Texas, it's an additional one.
Datacenter wouldn't stop, and there would be some country or area which allows it. Unless they regulate the entire world, we should focus on lowering CO2 globally, and that means allowing datacenter in your neighour if your energy is better.
Worry not, AI people! Greenhouse gas exemptions will be made for the future of work, maths and art, the salvation of the humankind, the genie that is out of the bottle, etc, if only at the expense of taxing your and your dog's fart.
We can pretend that international trade and energy price arbitrage doesn't exist to make us feel nice and happy; but the reality is a Watt spent in Sweden increases the marginal cost of energy by the same amount as a Watt spent in Texas. These things are tied together by foreign exchange, imported energy intensive goods, petroleum products and directly imported power. It's time we stop being naive about total energy use.
Sweden is not grid connected to Texas, well, nor is also any other grid in the USA actually. Smelting was placed near cheap hydro resources (and why Boeing built planes in Seattle) for good reasons. Just replace cheap watts with clean watts.
Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed. Which means a "clean" Watt spent on inference is taking away a "clean" Watt that would have been spent on heating or steel. Which means Sweden needs to buy energy or energy intensive goods on the global market, which raises prices, which means Texas is being paid.
This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?
They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.
There's only so much hydro power to build out, and nuclear takes forever. Solar only works in summer that far north, and without insane batteries wind power just becomes greenwashed natgas.
I'm a bit confused. For one I am not sure why this must hold for something as difficult to transfer as energy, and I am not sure why it matters. Not all energy is the same, hence the title.
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.
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