I've been seeing a lot of nonvegans talking about how bad AI data centers are for the environment and being a cause for climate change (which is true) but they never mention animal agriculture. now, idk which is worse, but in your opinion is animal ag still worse then AI or are they relatively both the same? and do you have any sources for it?
Animal agriculture is undeniably worse, but we should keep in mind that we are talking about two industries which are really not comparable in scale. Half of the planet's habitable land is used for agriculture, and of that land, if we combine global grazing land with the amount of cropland used for animal feed, 80% of it is for animal agriculture.
There are no direct comparison studies that I'm aware of, but AI, despite it's explosive expansion and hunger for resources, is still a very young industry. It may be that we'll be having a different conversation in 20 years, but right now, animal agriculture is orders of magnitude worse for the climate. The sheer scale involved is not even comparable.
Water use is the most cited metric with AI, so lets look at that. In 2023, U.S. data centers consumed about 228 billion gallons of water. The contribution of AI to this total is estimated to be between 15 to 20 percent, so about 45 billion gallons. 2023 appears to the be the most recent available data, so it is likely higher than that now. Animal agriculture in the USA alone consumes approximately 34 to 76 trillion gallons of freshwater annually.
GHG emissions is the other one people discuss, again AI is quite young so some of these measurements aren't reliable, but we think that AI contributes about 0.01% of global greenhouse gas emissions, at the moment. It is difficult to measure full end-to-end impact, though, since we've only just started to really track how this technology is using resources.
We have much more robust data sets for food production, which is responsible a full quarter of the world's GHG emissions, and 31% of that comes from animal agriculture, not including and use change or supply chain emissions from the production of crops for animal feed.
Again though, these figures don't mean a lot because AI is very new technology. We don't have a lot of long-term data on it's impact and how it may increase or even decrease if it becomes more efficient over time. It also just serves a totally different function, so it is less comparing apples to oranges and more like comparing apples to air conditioning units.
I think it is good to encourage people who are concerned about the environmental impact of AI to look into the impact of animal agriculture, as another good example of something they can avoid engaging in to lower their own footprint, and push for systematic change to address on a legislative level. However, I do think the way vegans frame this often turns people away. Sometimes I see vegans accuse people of not actually caring about the environment at all because they're not vegan, which I don't think is very helpful.
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