{"id":235168,"date":"2026-04-24T12:31:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T16:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/24\/officials-hugely-underestimated-impact-of-ai-datacentres-on-uk-carbon-emissions-ai-artificial-intelligence\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T12:35:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T16:35:08","slug":"officials-hugely-underestimated-impact-of-ai-datacentres-on-uk-carbon-emissions-ai-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/24\/officials-hugely-underestimated-impact-of-ai-datacentres-on-uk-carbon-emissions-ai-artificial-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Officials hugely underestimated impact of AI datacentres on UK carbon emissions | AI (artificial intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Officials hugely underestimated impact of AI datacentres on UK carbon emissions | AI (artificial intelligence)<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2026\/apr\/24\/officials-hugely-underestimated-impact-of-ai-datacentres-on-uk-carbon-emissions<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-04-24 12:31:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n

The UK government vastly underestimated the climate impact of artificial intelligence, it has emerged, after officials raised their estimate of carbon emissions from the technology by a factor of more than 100.<\/p>\n

According to new data quietly published this week, energy use by AI datacentres in the UK could cause the emission of up to 123m tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO\u2082) \u2013 about as much as generated by 2.7 million people \u2013 over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n

That latest figure replaces a previous estimate \u2013 since deleted \u2013 that claimed emissions would reach a maximum of 0.142 MtCO\u2082 in a single year.<\/p>\n

The revision comes amid increasing alarm at the carbon impact of AI and when calls for the world to reduce emissions to mitigate the climate emergency are becoming increasingly urgent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a handful of years until our carbon budget is exhausted,\u201d said Patrick Galey, head of investigations for the Global Witness climate campaign. \u201cTo waste what little bandwidth we have left \u2013 when 750 million people worldwide still lack access to electricity \u2013 assisting some of the richest men ever to hone their plagiarism bots would be a historic idiocy that future generations are unlikely to forgive today\u2019s leaders for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latest estimates were revealed in a revision to the UK \u201ccompute roadmap\u201d, which sets out the government\u2019s plan \u201cto build a world-class compute ecosystem\u201d for delivering artificial intelligence in the UK \u2013 a goal on which the government has staked its hopes for economic growth.<\/p>\n

However, AI datacentres require huge amounts of electricity to operate \u2013 much more than the usual datacentres that store online data \u2013 and most of that continues to be generated by fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

According to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology\u2019s latest estimates, the carbon impact of the planned AI buildout could range from 34 to 123 MtCO\u2082 \u2013 about 0.9% to 3.4% of the UK\u2019s projected total emissions between 2025 and 2035. The lower range…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Officials hugely underestimated impact of AI datacentres on UK carbon emissions | AI (artificial intelligence)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":235169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/27eee0f11e117ff8a3a29a566e0c66bafbdec427\/479_0_7042_5632\/master\/7042.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=283c82e1a1c7e08ef39855809d397d38","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235168"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235168"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235170,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235168\/revisions\/235170"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}