One method that's been proposed to make data centers more sustainable and reduce emissions is to reuse the heat generated for other purposes, such as providing heat to cities that's not based on fossil fuels, this method can also be used to provide heated water. Other uses of waste heat include heating greenhouses to grow food, growing algae which can be used as a carbon capture, or to warm aquufarms. Data centers are the backbone of the Internet, regulations should be in place to make sure companies are being sustainable and not using too much of a communities resources.

According to the partners, the waste heat process is based on a concept developed by Fabian Fuchs. The process works by taking part of the hot water generated by the data center directly from the return line of the cooling ring, which is then piped to RSIC. According to the company, through the help of a heat pump, Sampson will be able to raise the temperature of the building to the required level and will remove the need for fossil fuels to heat the building. The heating system is expected to achieve savings of more than 80 tons of CO2 annually and displace the need for fossil fuel based heating. In addition, by sourcing hot water locally, Samson says it will avoid unnecessary additional energy consumption. "With sustainable hot water utilization, we are significantly reducing the consumption of fossil fuels and thus our CO2 emissions," says Dr. Dominic Deller, CFO of Samson.

Following the agreement with Samson, Digital Realty now supports more than ten district heating networks worldwide through waste heat from its data centers. For example, in January 2023, it partnered with German energy firm Mainova AG for a waste heat project in Frankfurt, Germany. Germany has become a hotbed of district heating networks tied to data center operations. The growth of the market was spurred by Germany’s Energy Efficiency Act, passed in September 2023, which requires all new data centers over 200kW to reuse 20 percent of heat generated by 2028.

An experimental design in Sweden suggests that a 1-MW data center might be able to recover up to a third of its electricity costs by attaching a greenhouse to the facility. A 2,000-square-meter greenhouse could operate using excess heat from the data center alone while a 10,000-square-meter greenhouse could likely meet two-thirds of its heating demands using excess heat from the data center. In the latter case, that greenhouse would be able to meet nearly 8% of the demand for vegetables in northern Sweden

A lot of people have an automatic reaction to say AI is bad, but I think it's important to think about what your ethical concerns are with AI and to think about how changes in AI affect how you think about it.

The top 2 ethical concerns I see with AI is it's trained on data people did not consent to giving, and it's environmental impact, as well as AI having bias

So is AI still unethical if it was trained only on data people gave explicit informed consent to use for training purposes? Is AI still unethical if it was made in a way that was sustainable, that had no impact on the environment? If AI was trained to not have any bias would is still inherently be unethical?

If there was an ethical AI would it still be unethical to use it to support someone's ability to function independently as a disabled person? Would it still be unethical to use the AI to automate certain processes such as creative a cover letter, resume, or generating emails?

If there is an ethical AI, what purposes can/should it be used for and at what point does the use become unethical and why?

Here's another article on some of the ways AIs can be made more sustainably

Over the past several years, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has quietly built out an expansive surveillance apparatus—one that’s increasingly powered by artificial intelligence. Many of these technology acquisitions have been made under the auspices of Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, an $11 billion program that has supercharged the state’s decades-long border militarization. The powerful and well-funded state police agency has not just expanded its existing surveillance capabilities, which include a fleet of spy planes, unmanned drones, and a network of wildlife game cameras that are deployed all across the borderlands of Texas, but it also is increasingly using AI-powered software to perform intelligence gathering.

As the Observer first reported last year, one of DPS’ key tools is an AI-powered intelligence software called Tangles, which scrapes information from social media platforms and the open, deep, and dark web and includes an add-on that gives police the ability to conduct warrantless cell phone location tracking using commercial data. DPS first acquired Tangles in 2021 through an emergency purchase order issued under the governor’s border security declaration; in total, the agency spent over $900,000 for Tangles licenses in three years.

When used in concert, DPS’ current tech capacity for open-source web intelligence gathering, license plate reading, facial recognition, and phone location tracking gives the agency the ability to look up a person or a car, figure out who they are, what they’re doing, where they’ve been, and who they associate with—all without a warrant, said Savannah Kumar, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas.

We present three suggestions for how to mitigate the risks to data privacy posed by the development and adoption of AI:

With AI needing more energy, many tech companies are looking to use nuclear energy to fuel it, part of the problem is that it will take a while to get nuclear energy facilities running so in the meantime companies are still going to have to rely on a mix of fossil fuels and renewable energy, since renewable energy doesn't provide 24/7 energy. It's exciting to see more companies invest in nuclear energy and to hopefully see nuclear energy take off, however it's important to note that nuclear energy uses a lot more water than other renewable energy sources

The reason I think pushing for more sustainability with regards to AI is i do not think it is going to go away. It exists now, people are using it and relying on it in a variety of ways, whether you agree with them or not. Generative AI is here to stay. So if you can't make it go away, the best thing you can do is to push for more sustainability. Push for AIs to be trained on ethical data, there are already some companies that are making AI models trained only on data people consented to bring included. And with the climate, the whole tech industry needs to change. Meta and google keep building new servers in very warm climates that are already dealing with low water, places like Arizona and Texas. Ai is contributing to more data servers and more electricity use, but data centers only use about 4.4% of the US energy, and is expected to rise to 6.7-12% (department of energy) but data servers only use about 1% of energy globally

"Today, data centres account for around 1% of global electricity consumption, and annual electricity consumption from data centres globally is about half of the electricity consumption from household IT appliances, like computers, phones and TVs. However, as the sector expands, it is important to examine the consequences for the energy sector, which we analysed in the 2024 edition of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook and will continue to explore in the months to come, including through a Special Report focused on energy and AI in the first half of 2025. Additionally, data centres will be a key focus of the IEA’s forthcoming Global Conference on Energy & AI. The event, which will take place at our headquarters in Paris on 4-5 December, will bring together high-level decision makers from governments, the tech sector, the energy industry and civil society to discuss the ways in which AI could transform energy systems in the future. In the near term, data centres are not the dominant driver of global electricity demand growth In part because of expectations for AI, the next few years will see a substantial rise in the number and size of data centres. This growth will be partially mitigated by continued efficiency improvements at both the hardware and software level. Nonetheless, electricity demand from data centres is set to grow strongly to 2030 under today’s policies settings and trends. However, when considered in a broader context of total electricity consumption growth globally, the contribution of data centres is modest. Global aggregate electricity demand grows by 6 750 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030 in our Stated Policies Scenario, equivalent to more than the combined demand from the United States and European Union today. While growing digitalisation, including the rise of AI, is one factor, continued economic growth, electric vehicles, air conditioners and the rising importance of electricity-intensive manufacturing are all bigger drivers. "

Water usage is more complicated to determine since most companies aren't transparent about their water use. Data centers that rely on water evaporation to cool servers are water intensive. NPR reports

"All told, a mid-sized data center consumes around 300,000 gallons of water a day, or about as much as 1,000 U.S. households, says Shehabi of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Their direct, on-site consumption ranks data centers among the top 10 water users in America's industrial and commercial sectors."

But there are ways to make data centers more sustainable and use less water, such as having data centers use renewable energy, optimizing cooling systems and energy efficiency. Some more sustainable data center cooling methods include using a close loop water system, where no water is lost to the environment, using liquid cooling methods, such as direct to chip cooling (cooling thechip directly which allows for the server to operate in higher temps, using less resources to cool servers) or submerging servers in a liquid that is safe for electronics.

These sustainability efforts are needed as digitalization and Internet use is expected to increase over the next few years and with AI use and demand expected to increase as well.

Tldr: AI and data centers aren't going anywhere, so how can we work to make them sustainable and push companies to adopt more ethical practices.