AI's search for more energy is growing more urgent

Since 2018, carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled, according to new research led by a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That puts data centers slightly below domestic commercial airlines as a source of this pollution. That leaves a big problem for the world's leading AI companies, which are caught between pressure to meet their own sustainability goals and the relentless competition in AI that's leading them to build bigger models requiring tons of energy. The trend toward ever more energy-intensive new AI models, including video generators like OpenAI's Sora, will only send those numbers higher. A growing coalition of companies is looking toward nuclear energy as a way to power artificial intelligence.