MIT Technology Review Releases In-Depth Reporting Package: Power Hungry: AI and our energy future

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May 20, 2025, 18:11 ET

New reporting that reveals the growing demands of AI's energy use and its climate impact.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- MIT Technology Review launched today Power Hungry: AI and our energy future, a first-of-its-kind content package that tells a story you haven't yet heard. It's well documented that AI is a power-hungry technology. But there has been far less reporting on the extent of that hunger, how much its appetite is set to grow in the coming years, where that power will come from, and who will pay for it.

The data center boom in the desert. The AI race is transforming northwestern Nevada into one of the world's largest data-center markets—and sparking fears of water strains in the nation’s driest state. Photo credit: Emily Najera

Here’s how MIT Technology Review waded through a mess of data and hidden variables to calculate the individual and collective energy demand from AI. Photo credit: Nick Little

AI data centers are driving a surge in new natural-gas power plants around the country. What does that mean for our clean-energy aspirations? Photo credit: Ricardo Santos

Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI? Tech giants are looking for more energy, but building new reactors takes time. Photo credit: Ricardo Santos

For the past six months, MIT Technology Review's team of expert reporters and editors have worked to answer those questions. The result is an unprecedented look at the state of AI's energy and resource usage, where it is now, where it is headed in the years to come, and why we have to get it right.

At the centerpiece of this new content package is a groundbreaking line of reporting into the demands of inference—the way human beings interact with AI when we make text queries or ask AI to come up with new images or create videos. Experts say inference is set to eclipse the already massive amount of energy required to train new AI models. We were so startled by what we learned reporting this story that we also put together a brief on everything you need to know about estimating AI's energy and emissions burden.

And then we went out into the world to see the effects of this hunger. Our in-depth reporting takes you into the deserts of Nevada, where data centers in an industrial park the size of Detroit demand ever more water to keep their processors cool and running. In Louisiana, where Meta plans its largest-ever data center, we expose the dirty secret that will fuel its AI ambitions—along with those of many others. Separately, we have a look at why the clean energy promise of powering AI data centers with nuclear energy will long remain elusive.

Finally, we also look at the reasons to be optimistic, and examine why future AI systems could be far less energy intensive than today's.

Power Hungry: AI and our energy future is now available at technologyreview.com/energy-ai.

Readers can subscribe to access the full series, every story on technologyreview.com, as well as MIT Technology Review's exclusive Insider's Panel from our latest EmTechAI conference for a deeper understanding of the future.

Members of the press may obtain additional information and access by emailing [email protected].

About MIT Technology Review

Founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899, MIT Technology Review is the world's leading authority on technology and its influence. Through award-winning journalism and premium events, we break down complex innovations and analyze their commercial, social, and political impact. From AI and biotech to climate tech and computing, we deliver trusted insights and expert analysis, empowering a global audience to navigate the emerging technologies shaping our future.

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SOURCE MIT Technology Review