AI Linked to Growing Cancer Risk

Yahoo

25-02-2025

As the artificial intelligence boom spirals to epic proportions, big tech companies are throwing heaps of cash into massive data centers throughout the world.
Packed full of hardware to process AI queries, these data centers put out forest-melting levels of heat as they suck the life out of local energy grids and water tables to meet demand. They're incredibly noisy as well — pumping incessant mechanical sounds into quiet neighborhoods and driving away wildlife.
And unfortunately, the public cost of AI doesn't end there. New research by academics at UC Riverside and Caltech is warning that AI data centers are also taking a massive toll on human health, in the form of diseases like cancer and asthma.
The study, which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, looked at the production output of AI hardware over the past five years, found that air pollution resulting from AI development could cause as many as 1,300 premature cancer and asthma deaths per year by 2030.
That's on top of a cost approaching nearly $20 billion a year from the collective burden of health treatment, missing wages, and lower school attendance as a result of diseases caused by AI runoff. In 2023 alone, the total cost of AI-connected illness was $1.5 billion, the paper found, in an eye-watering 20 percent increase from 2022.
The issue of air pollution is easy to overlook, because in most cases, the data centers are powered by local coal burning plants, which tend to be disproportionately located near low-income and working-class communities. It also seems wherever they go, AI data centers drive up the local cost of electricity, saddling their host communities with a burden not shared by the rest of the country, let alone by Silicon Valley or big tech's Wall Street investors.
And though households living closest to AI centers and power plants face the most immediate health issues, there's no telling how far the consequences of big tech's sky-high power use will spread.
"Unlike carbon emissions, the health impacts caused by a data center in one region cannot be offset by cleaner air elsewhere," UC Riverside researcher Shaolei Ren told Ars Technica of the findings.
AI's air pollution impacts can be best summarized like the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl — the deadly toxins spread far and wide with no respect for distance, affecting those in, around, and far away from the actual data center itself.
"The data centers pay local property taxes to the county where they operate," Ren said in a press blurb about the study. "But this health impact is not just limited to a small community. Actually, it travels across the whole country, so those other places are not compensated at all."
The authors of the study recommend tech companies adopt standard reporting procedures for air pollution and public health resulting from AI runoff — something the immensely profitable ventures are unlikely to do willingly.
A range of big tech companies investing heavily in AI, including Meta and Microsoft, pushed back against the research in statements to Ars. A Google spokesperson said that the paper "promotes an inaccurate emissions estimate generated under false pretenses, undermining the progress of clean energy resource growth and creating a false narrative of health harms."
In other words, this line of inquiry is getting under their skin. With the AI market set to inflate to $900 billion by 2026, communities are beginning to ask who's really paying the cost for big tech's lucrative gambit — and how much computer power we truly need to build a better world.
More on AI data centers: Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value