Every time you type a request into ChatGPT, the servers processing it guzzle water and electricity. Engineers are trying to fix this by building data centers underwater and are even trying to shoot them into space. But does that work?

#Planet A #AI #DataCenters

Credits:
Reporter: Alexandria Williams
Co-author: Daniel Plafker
Video Editor: David Jacobi
Supervising Editor: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann
Fact Check: Jeanette Cwienk
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon

Thank you for background interviews to:
Nidhal Jegham

Read more:

How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09598

How Hungry is AI? Power BI Dashboard: app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZjVmOTI0MmMtY2U2Mi0…

Making AI Less 'Thirsty': dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3724499

Too many satellites? Earth’s orbit is on track for a catastrophe – but we can stop it: theconversation.com/too-many-satellites-earths-orb…

What does DeepSeek mean for AI's environmental impact?: www.dw.com/en/what-does-chinas-deepseek-mean-for-a…

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:26 Traditional cooling methods
04:57 Direct-to-chip cooling
06:26 Sinking data centers
09:26 Data centers in space?
10:59 Beyond cooling

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. We'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

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