this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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AI datacenters are 3-4 orders of magnitude more polluting than agriculture comparatively. There’s just currently more agriculture than datacenters, which is something these AI companies would like to change
I'd love to see any kind of sources on this. From what I can tell animal agriculture emits roughly 20–30× more CO2e than all data centers combined.
Animal agriculture: The FAO's most recent estimate puts livestock supply chains at roughly 6.2 Gt CO2e per year, about 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions Data centers (including AI): The IEA puts all data centers at about 0.5% of global CO2 emissions today (~180 Mt CO2), projected to reach 1–1.4% by 2030
Animal agriculture only causes more pollution than AI data centers today because Agriculture is a mature industry with thousands of years of supply and demand built up over time, whereas the AI datacenter boom has barely begun.
One Acre of land used for livestock farming emits on average 0.5-1 metric ton of CO2 equivalent annually.
One Acre of land used for a datacenter is anywhere from 150-300 metric tons of CO2 annually.
I love you Lemmy math nerds. (Not sarcasm.)
Thank you.
Get rid of both like I said, it’s not like we’re fighting for one to have the right to ruin our world over the other.