GenAI's dirty secret: It's set to create a mountainous increase in e-waste

Computational boffins' research claims GenAI is set to create nearly 1,000 times more e-waste than exists currently by 2030, unless the tech industry employs mitigating strategies.

The study, which looks at the rate AI servers are being introduced to datacenters, claims that a realistic scenario indicates potential for rapid growth of e-waste from 2.6 kilotons each year in 2023 to between 400 kilotons and 2.5 million tons each year in 2030, when no waste reduction measures are considered.

The team writes:

The multi-national research team led by Peng Wang, professor in material circularity at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, considered four scenarios with varying degrees of generative AI production and application, ranging from an aggressive scenario with widespread applications to a conservative scenario with more specific applications. Under the scenario with the most AI growth the world could create as much as 2.5 million tons of e-waste each year.

"Our study aims not to precisely forecast the quantity of AI servers and their associated e-waste, but rather to provide initial gross estimates that highlight the potential scales of the forthcoming challenge and to explore potential circular economy solutions," the researchers say in a paper published in Nature Computational Science today.

The research analysis focuses on AI servers that include GPUs, CPUs, storage, memory units, internet communication modules and power systems. Ancillary machinery such as cooling and communication units was excluded from this study.

The researchers point out that the weight of Nvidia's latest Blackwell platform in a rack system - designed for intensive LLM inference, training and data processing tasks - tips the scales at 1.36 tons, demonstrating how material-intensive GenAI can be. Other predictions suggest AI's installed computational capacity could increase approximately 500-fold from 2020 to 2030.

Meanwhile, e-waste resulting from the introduction of GenAI could increase because of geopolitical restrictions on semiconductor imports. Not all is lost, though. The study shows that if the tech industry introduces circular economy strategies along the GenAI value chain, it could result in reducing e-waste generation by between 16 and 86 percent.

"This underscores the importance of proactive e-waste management in the face of advancing GAI technologies," the researchers said. ®

Search
About Us
Website HardCracked provides softwares, patches, cracks and keygens. If you have software or keygens to share, feel free to submit it to us here. Also you may contact us if you have software that needs to be removed from our website. Thanks for use our service!
IT News
Nov 9
Judge tosses publishers' copyright suit against OpenAI

Raw Story and AltNet allowed to amend complaint

Nov 8
The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Opinion Does anyone want to tell Linus Torvalds? No? I didn't think so

Nov 8
Microsoft still not said anything about unexpected Windows Server 2025 installs

Affected business calls situation 'mindbogglingly dangerous' as sysadmins reminded to check backup and restore strategies

Nov 8
Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

Government-appointed commissioners say Birmingham severely lacked Oracle skills during disastrous implementation

Nov 8
Watchdog finds AI tools can be used unlawfully to filter candidates by race, gender

UK data regulator says some devs and providers are operating without a 'lawful basis'

Nov 8
Flanked by Palantir and AWS, Anthropic's Claude marches into US defense intelligence

An emotionally-manipulable AI in the hands of the Pentagon and CIA? This'll surely end well