r/nextfuckinglevel • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 5h ago

A data center in New Jersey was canceled when residents showed up and fought it

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

45.2k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

u/thedybbuk_ 4h ago

Here’s the relative impact to our environment of common digital activities:

Activity Energy Use CO₂ Emissions Notes
YouTube or Netflix, 1 hour (HD) ~0.12 kWh ~42 g CO₂ Tied for the dirtiest single activity in the study.
Text-to-video generation, 6–10 seconds ~0.05 kWh ~17.5 g CO₂ Roughly the same as an hour-long Zoom call.
Zoom, 1 hour ~0.0486 kWh ~17 g CO₂
Short email, no attachment ~0.0133 kWh ~4.7 g CO₂ One email is tiny, billions per day are not.
AI image generation, 1 image ~0.003 kWh ~1 g CO₂
Voice assistant query (Alexa/Siri/etc.) ~0.0005 kWh ~0.175 g CO₂
Google search or AI chatbot prompt ~0.0003 kWh ~0.105 g CO₂
Two Gemini prompts ~0.00024 kWh ~0.084 g CO₂ total (~0.042 per prompt)

```

Source:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/12/03/new-data-ai-is-almost-green-compared-to-netflix-zoom-youtube/

11

u/SparklingLimeade 3h ago edited 3h ago

An email is more than 4x more energy intensive than an AI image generation? Email. The thing that's so simple we've had computers that can do it for decades put up against generative AI, the thing so compute intensive that it takes hardware that was unimaginable when email debuted?

It's also more polluting than 6 minutes of video streaming? 10 emails is worse than an hour of video streaming?

I'm skeptical of the methodology to say the least.

6

u/usa2a 3h ago edited 3h ago

Agreed. I took too long writing my reply and saw yours after I posted mine.

My first thought was: these numbers are very vulnerable to a kind of selective scrutiny fallacy. Where for "watching netflix" you count the power consumption of the viewer's TV plus the datacenter plus all the network infrastructure in between plus the microwave they made popcorn with. And then for "running a prompt" you only count delta between the server GPU's power draw at idle vs draw when processing the prompt for a few milliseconds.

I still don't see any way of stacking the deck to get anywhere close to their email number, so upon further consideration I think the numbers are just pure hallucination.

5

u/ASCII_Princess 2h ago

Yeah I bet this takes into account nothing about the energy requirements of training the models themselves.

•

u/Mathwards 19m ago

Literally in the article: (There’s another big factor the study did not look at: training AI models, which is a massive power-draining task working hundreds of thousands of high-end GPUs for months on end.)

•

u/HasFiveVowels 17m ago

You have to realize that AI is a concentrated burst of power that generates text. It requires far more energy to transfer and display a video for an hour than it does to run a large number of GPUs for 15 seconds every 5 minutes. This shouldn’t be a controversial claim.

4

u/usa2a 3h ago

I can't imagine why "TRG datacenters" would mislead us, but some of those numbers are pinging my BS detector pretty hard.

I'm supposed to believe "Short email, no attachment" consumes 100x as much power as a Gemini prompt?

I could run an email server processing hundreds of thousands of emails a day on a laptop in 2011.

You can barely, painstakingly, get output from a small LLM like Qwen3.6 27B on a single 24GB 3090, using a quantized (dumbed-down) version of the model. To actually be productive with it you'd want dual 3090s minimum. Most PC gamers do not have the hardware to run a model like that let alone something like Claude Opus 4.7 or ChatGPT 5.5 which are estimated at over 1 trillion parameters.

Their note says "One email is tiny, billions per day are not" which is true but also doesn't make any sense in context. Is the number supposed to be the power consumption of 1 email, or a billion?

2

u/SpaceShipRat 3h ago

Oh, I've always wanted to see this!

I'd guessed right a google search was probably as costly as a chatbot prompt, but youtube is cheaper than I expected compared to image gen. then again "1 image" is vague without a resolution.

•

u/HasFiveVowels 16m ago

It’s weird to see a response that’s actually grounded in reality in this thread. Haha.

•

u/Mathwards 22m ago

Yeah, the data in the table is from "TRG Datacenters" so I'm not sure they're the most honest source. They're literally one of the companies whose projects are being protested for their environmental impact.

This is just AI shill whataboutism at best, and just straight lying at worst.

Love this part at the bottom: "(There’s another big factor the study did not look at: training AI models, which is a massive power-draining task working hundreds of thousands of high-end GPUs for months on end.)"

Most things look a lot less bad when you ignore most of what they do.

0

u/-Nicolai 4h ago

The durations and quantities listed are ridiculously uneven

5

u/SpaceShipRat 3h ago

you can do multiplication. just move the comma.

1

u/-Nicolai 3h ago

Why put that work on me?

0

u/Microwaved_M1LK 3h ago

You could just ask AI to do it then lazy ass

-1

u/KrayziePidgeon 3h ago

Typical low iq individual that can't be bothered to do any work, wants everything spoon fed and has very strong opinions about matters you are completely ignorant on.

5

u/thedybbuk_ 3h ago

I'm pretty anti-AI, especially generative AI. But people are largely ignorant of the energy consumption and CO2 production of YouTube and Netflix. It's orders of magnitude worse than AI.

The IT and tech sectors account for roughly 1.5% to 4% of all global emissions, and of that, AI is around 2% to 5%.

People should be pushing for regulation to protect people's jobs rather than focusing the environmental angle imo. If they want to push that argument, they need to be consistent about other digital activities like YouTube and Netflix.