How many cars’ worth of CO2 will US data centres really emit?
A new study out of Cornell has handed the AI industry’s climate critics a fresh statistic to wield, and the internet has duly rounded it up.
Planned US data centres, one widely shared headline announced, are set to produce as much carbon dioxide as 24 million cars.
The figure is arresting. It is also a misreading of the research it claims to summarise, and the gap between the two is a neat lesson in how the environmental toll of the AI boom gets reported.
The paper, published in Nature Sustainability on 10 November 2025, comes from Fengqi You’s Process-Energy-Environmental Systems Engineering lab, with lead author Tianqi Xiao and co-authors at KTH in Stockholm, Concordia in Montreal, and the RFF-CMCC institute in Milan.
Its central projection is that US AI servers could emit between 24 and 44 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year by 2030. The researchers themselves translate that into...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to thenextweb.com. To see the full text click HERE
