Environmental Impact of AI Datacenters vs. Animal Agriculture

13 days ago by inari to c/vegan

From https://www.reddit.com/...

Sources:

Water use:

https://www.foodfacts.org/...

Land use:

https://ourworldindata.org/...

https://unu.edu/...

Greenhouse gas emissions:

https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167658 https://www.fao.org/...

To the many comments along the lines of: „But we need food“ – This is actually another great point against Animal Agriculture, as every calory of food produced by Animal Agriculture wastes several calories of feed. https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/
For people pointing out energy consumption, AI uses 500 TWH per year, Animal Agriculture uses 13000 TWH per year, so it is 25x worse on energy need.

(This is a quick estimate based on:

https://www.iea.org/... https://www.fao.org/.... )

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Mikina 1 point 13 days ago

I would like to see this graph with non-animal agriculture added, especially if scaled to meet the demands of missing animal agriculture.

I'm not defending animal agriculture, I'm honestly curious. Especially about water usage and land use, I can imagine pollution will be a lot lower.

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umbra 4 points 13 days ago

Here you go, I'm interested in your thoughts. The charts can also be adjusted to be per 100g of protein or 1 kcal

Greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food product

Land use per kilogram of food product

Freshwater withdrawals per kilogram of food product

Eutrophying emissions per kilogram of food product : Eutrophying emissions represent runoff of excess nutrients into the surrounding environment and waterways, which affect andpollute ecosystems. They are measured in grams of phosphate equivalents (PO₄eq).

Source (more interactive selections)

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Mikina 3 points 12 days ago

Oh, that's cool! To be honest, I've kind of expected some of the values to be a lot higher. I'd expect that with the inhumane conditions the animals are being stacked, at least the land use per kg would be more efficient than i.e carrots.

I learned a new (not so cool) fact, thanks for the data!

I'm not sure I understand what "meters squared (m²) for one year to produce one kilogram of a given food product." means, though. I'm not doubting the data, World in Data is my favorite newsletter/source, but I'm having a hard time imagining why do you need almost 400m3 per kg of beef. Or rather, I understand that for actually free-range animals, but as far as I know they are not kept in those conditions. It kind of intuitively feels like larger animals should be more space-efficient than vegetables. Again, not trying to argue or doubt it, just trying to understand why.

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Cyanova 1 point 12 days ago

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