think it can also be effective against other genetic he based to seizes. for other people and her family, the, the treatment has had a big impact, allowing them to enjoy the little things like a bedtime story. i'll be back at the top of the hour with more world news probably by the day. i hope you enjoyed the we are all set and we'll watch seeing close to the team to bring you the story behind the news. we wrote about unbiased information. all 3 months, the votes, people have to say the

that's why we listen to based on the reports. every weekend on d w the, how can i help save the environment? it's a question. someone might ask an artificial intelligence tool like chat g, d p, which has made serious gains in terms of what it's capable of. i know there's, talk that a, i might hold the answers to the climate crisis. it's also part of the problem. one that's only going to get bigger as a technology advances and it's use grows. if you train on twice as much data, it takes twice as much energy, running a consumer real resources, water and electricity. and so do we, when we extract solutions from it? that's why plans for a google data center were recently put on hold look is realize it could mean the end of drinking water for their neighborhood. and so we're asking is

a i going to help solve the climate crisis or make it worse? in this episode of transforming business there's one thing a, i can do that people can't reading and then analyzing huge amounts of data quickly . there's literally hundreds of thousands of data points coming in from a large building like this one into our system. data that can help us make decisions like how to optimize the use of energy in a building so that none of it goes to waste. hendrix, eagle door is a chief technology officer of a did the in a small startup base and cologne. germany. defense products helps facility managers, one large commercial buildings like this one as efficiently as possible. imagine you have a facility manager in the technical building room, and there's an energy system, maybe the heating and cooling, and it's displaying an error code error code 15. that person would have 1st to find the menu for the heating or the cooling and look at what his error code 15 or that

person could just ask of a system. hey this in the technical building room standing in front of a whatever physical and heating. i'm getting displayed error code 15. how do i resolve it? and then all of the system knows the entire history of the building data was that combined with each other, which is a i can actually see that like search towards the history and then just tell that person, okay, for our code 15 in summer, you have to do this and that, and by the way, he is also the manual. it says it can help of building save up to 40 percent of energy and c o 2 emissions in building this large, making a small tweak and have a big impact in that uses a i to do a lot of different things to help its structure and analyze the hundreds of thousands of data points, it gets from our buildings technical system to factoring in variables like outside climate and building materials. each building is individual,

meaning it has different tendons to test different user behaviors. this has also from how it to us both different thermal behavior. so if you have avoiding building as composed as opposed to a concrete building, that's very, that's very different. just seeing this capitalizing on ai is ability to read and analyze data in a sliver of the amount of time it would take the world's best researchers to do the same. this speed is what makes a guy so valuable to researchers and scientists looking for solutions to the climate crisis. scientists are now using ai to map and artic icebergs 10000 times faster than humans, and to attract deforestation and real time to better predict weather patterns. and to suggest more efficient waste management systems. there's no doubt a guy has the potential to do good things for the climate, but not everything about it is a gifted environment. take this home for example,

which residents in chandler arizona here 247. it's the sound of a data center processing, the billions of requested gets throughout the day. think of a i as the brain and data centers as the body that supports the brain to work. there are more than 8000 data centers in the world, according to the international energy agency data center energy consumption is expected to double in 2026 to what it was in 2022. when i started doing a research a decade ago, i could run most of the systems i was using on my laptop. this is jessie dodge. she's in a research scientist, a split. today we're using super computer s, right? some of the large systems that people are familiar with, like the chat box or the image generation systems. those run on really large super computers and consume of potentially very large amount of electricity. and these very large amounts of electricity produced very large amounts of heat. and also

that hum you just heard, to keep the data centers from overheating, they must be cooled down. and this is usually done in one of 2 ways, using air conditioning or water and lots of it. let's say i engaged in a 15 question conversation with chat g b over how i could be more environmentally conscious. experts calculate i would be consuming about a half leader of fresh water. and this is where a i can be a little problem matic. so access to clean water is competing with, let's say local uses for us. this is what the google into a bit of hot water. soon after to announce plans to build a $200000000.00 data center in the working class neighborhood of cities in schiller . we all use a google search and other google tools. so i need to have you been able, as were quite happy that google had chosen these area for building their,

their data centers. this is sebastian where they're an ethics and society lecture at kings college london. i say saw it as you know, it's, you know, most with broad grass development, a new poll to feed notation in the area. but once i took a look at google's environmental impact report for the data center, they were startled by what they learned. they found that found out at some point that these google data center was going to use $168.00 date as of water per 2nd. in an area facing drives, a truck that is now and it's 15 to year and caused the elected officials to ration water in the capital of santiago. but after fierce protest from the community, the permit was put on hold. a local environmental court told google it needs to modify how it plans to put servers and google's plans for data center and ordered. why also face pushback when locals learned how much water it would consume and water isn't the only natural resource that a guy requires. it needs

a lot of electricity to and most of that electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels, which released the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. training a single ai model produces more than 5 times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions generated from a car. and it's lifetime, that's including the emissions to manufacturer of the car, and it's fuel consumption once it leaves the factory. it's an astounding amount training in a model and then ensuring its continued existence through large data centers is a massive brain on natural resources. and also drives up what researchers call embodied carbon. so that's going to be the amount of carbon it took to, let's say, build the hardware just starting by mining the rare minerals that goes into the g p . use shipping that across the world to then be manufactured into a g, p. u, and then tripping that gpu to its final destination at

a data center. that doesn't cur, a really large environmental impact. it's this impact that companies like microsoft are trying to take into account as a set climate goals. microsoft says it's aiming to be carbon negative by 2030, not just neutral, but negative. and one way it's hoping to get there is through bolivia. more than 9000 kilometers from microsoft headquarters in redmond, washington is a bio chart facility, operated by x, so mad green it turns forestry waste interest, something that's called bio char, which is essentially charcoal x. so mad green will produce the bio char containing carbon dioxide and buried under ground where it can enrich the soil and keep c o 2 from getting into the atmosphere. microsoft has box $32000.00 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits, but that's a tiny fraction of its overall annual emissions. we don't know how much of that will grow with

a i. that's one way that microsoft can continue to expand its ai operation and data center as well, saying it's still on path to being carbon negative, but it's not effective enough. or is it just a form of corporate greenwashing? if we do something like by carbon offsets, that doesn't negate the action that we talk, meaning that doesn't undo the carbon emissions that we've produced. these 2 things don't cancel each other out. as a advances, governments and regulatory bodies are trying your best to keep up. this year, new a i rules passed by the european parliament will go into effect impacting businesses like it did in the e. u. a i act does reference the impact of ai on the environment. it asset ai systems are developed and using a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner. so it doesn't really fill out what that means. she lives a i laws which were drafted before the rules, but aren't nearly as comprehensive,

don't address environmental impact either. it's, i think what's concerning is not only that this is not being addressed enough. i said to should, i think, but also the voice of the people affected by it is not considered. right. so even if you look at research the press, quite often they report on the environmental impact, but they don't report on how the situation can affect to the uh, livelihood or their well being of the communities participating somehow, within the body chain of division, intelligence is operating a data center for your a i model is a reason why a community doesn't have access to drinking water. is that still sustainable? we need those voices to participate as well in the governor's office. yeah, so you that you, when for example, is coming up with, you know, new regulation. it will be great to be able to hear those communities as well because those communities, they are nothing against technology or a guy. but that what they will say is that if we one day, yeah, it has to be built in dialogue with local communities. singapore is government was

aware of the strained data centers, what have on its power grid. so it enacted a 4 year moratorium on the construction of new ones that ended in 2022 and they've now accepted billed proposals from these companies, australia's air trunk, chinese data center operator. gd, yes. and tick tock owner by dance and equinox, and microsoft based in the us dublin's power operator placed a moratorium on data centers in 2022. they say the irish capital could face blackouts as new ones are built in europe around a 100 data set or operators signed the climate neutral data center packed, promising to be what the title implies. a climate neutral data center by 2030. but it's not even feasible. tech companies are experimenting with green alternatives, like this google facility in belgium, which partly use of solar energy. and in 2021,

microsoft said it had opened 3 data centers in sweden to that run entirely on wind power. but most data centers still run on fossil fuels and rely on local power grants. this 1st draft of the use a i act does more for the digital environment than the natural one. but as a continues to advance, its climate impact is becoming harder and harder to ignore if you train on twice as much data, it takes twice as much energy. and so that pattern has really spelled over the last 10 years. this dramatic increase in computational cost. hey, i is the new kid on the block and it's hard to predict what the future will look like. there's no doubt it can help us make massive gains when it comes to slowing down climate change. but in its current state and a i model requires an enormous amount of natural resources for us to train and then to run. and not all data centers are dedicated to our use, but we will need to build more of them as

a i advances and become standard use in business. research and public administration. should regulations do more to address the environmental consequences of a i absolutely. well, that's what strategy be. thanks anyway. what about you? let us know in the comments the the preserving piece by slowing climate change with small scientists are studying the wetlands of our planet. because they are gigantic c o 2 reservoir. but how to make the most of that. researchers are encouraging officials to cut down trees and grow and use cross. next, on d, w,

the the you see to you sometimes even menissi. then you got dogs a scene is don't places they off in the setting to med mysteries, it was 50 tails human being destination home, centuries was powerless. consequences absolutely. turn the systems from 6 carbon to sources of carbon. and so that's going to really exacerbate essentially climate change do you need ecosystems.