The skies are getting hazier each day in Memphis, Tennessee, as the world’s largest supercomputer, Elon Musk’s Colossus, drinks up water and spits out pollutants.
Large data centers use lots of energy and can consume 5 million gallons of water per day to cool down their computers. More big data centers are being built to keep up with the growth of artificial intelligence, which increases the risk of data centers tapping into freshwater supplies.
These supercomputers are often placed next to residential neighborhoods, sometimes in marginalized communities already facing environmental disparities.
Colossus, for example, was built in the historically Black neighborhood Boxtown, and the area’s cancer risk was already four times higher than the national average, according to a 2013 study by ScienceDirect. On behalf of the NAACP, the Southern Environmental Law Center threatened to sue xAI, the company behind Colossus, for building methane gas turbines at the data center without the required permits.
“All too often, big corporations like xAI treat our communities and families like obstacles to be pushed aside,” NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a press release.
The Critical AI Literacies Collective held a town hall meeting on March 2 in Fraser Hall to talk about the environmental impacts of AI and Western’s stance toward AI. Dozens of students and faculty showed up.
Western geology professor Robyn Dahl started the meeting with a presentation about climate change and the human impact. She said that data centers are continuously claiming larger amounts of energy use. In Washington, the main environmental concern associated with data centers is water usage, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, she said.
Western aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035, according to the Sustainability Action Plan. There isn’t a university-wide AI policy. Instead, it’s left to the departments and individual professors to decide whether students should be allowed to use AI.
During the meeting, one student said they thought there should be an all-encompassing AI policy for clarity. Faculty members pointed out that such a policy wouldn’t be practical because different departments have different uses for AI, and there wouldn’t be a way to incorporate every need without contradictions.
Virginia Dawson, vice president of the United Faculty of Western Washington, said the faculty union has three main concerns with AI: they don’t want corporate money involved in a public university’s funding, they don’t want their intellectual property used to train AI and they don’t want their jobs to become automated.
“I’m a better teacher because I read student work,” Dawson said.
Individually, professors may have several other concerns, such as environmental impacts and cognitive effects, especially in children.
Other ideas discussed during the meeting were a student bill of rights regarding AI, a general university requirement class educating students on the ethics and impact of AI use and building an AI tool specific to Western, so that energy and data usage can be monitored.
Noelle Reger (she/her) is a second-year journalism student and city life reporter for The Front this quarter. When she's not reading or writing, she can usually be found gambling at the claw machines in Sharetea. You can reach her at noellereger.thefront@gmail.com.
