“Simply an unbelievable amount of environmental pollution”: How big a threat does AI pose to the climate?

DDuring a golden sunset in Memphis in May, Sharon Wilson pointed a thermal imaging camera at Elon Musk’s flagship data center to uncover a planetary threat her eyes couldn’t see. The gas-powered turbines that power the world’s largest AI supercomputer are pumping invisible fumes into Tennessee skies, free from pollution controls.

“It was mind-blowing,” said Wilson, a former Texas oil and gas worker who has been documenting methane releases for more than a decade and estimates that xAI’s Colossus data center spewed out more planet-heating gas than a large power plant. “Just an incredible amount of pollution.”

That same week, the facility’s core product caused a stir in news feeds. Musk’s idiosyncratic chatbot Grok repeated a conspiracy theory that a “white genocide” had taken place in South Africa when asked about topics as unrelated as…