this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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The environmental impact of AI would be a tenth of what it is now if people just ran whatever models they want on their own local machines. We're mortgaging the next fifty years worth of compute power and meanwhile mfs who talk to virtual girlfriends on their $2,000 gaming PC have trillions of FLOPS of compute power sitting right next to them.
That doesn't check out unless ignoring model size. Just from an operations perspective a data center had economies of scale and the ability to batch up multiple independent user's requests which should reduce the per token kWh along with the fact that your utilization will be higher vs somebody's GPU at home would be idling.
That said I do believe there are negative environmental impacts from AI like always using giant frontier models for everything instead of smaller fine tuned models.
Why is that? The electricity burned is about the same, no? Of course, the impact is more distributed.
I think the difference would be that local machines aren't subsidized, so you'd see people get a lot more skittish after that first electric bill. Data centers are like railroad tracks from the railroad boom (if they'd made the rails out of licorice twizzlers.)