Tech companies should be required by law to report the energy and water consumption for their data centres, as the boom in AI risks causing irreparable damage to the environment, experts have said. AI is growing at a rate unparalleled by other energy systems, bringing heightened environmental risk, a report by the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC) said. The report calls for the UK government to make tech companies submit mandatory reports on their energy and water consumption and carbon emissions in order to set conditions in which data centres are designed to use fewer vital resources. "In recent years advances in AI systems and services have largely been driven by a race for size and scale, demanding increasing amounts of computational power," said Prof Tom Rodden, the pro-vice-chancellor of research and knowledge exchange at the University of Nottingham, who was a member of the NEPC working group that delivered the study. "As a result, AI systems and services are growing at a rate unparalleled by other high-energy systems – and generally without much regard for resource efficiency. This is a dangerous trend, and we face a real risk that our development, deployment and use of AI could do irreparable damage to the environment."