Musk’s fossil data centres are undoing Tesla’s climate benefit
I know you already know the data centres built to power the generative AI software running on X are intensely harmful and wildly polluting, often in breach of rules and regulations. You may not know the full extent of it.
The communities around them have been fighting like hell just to get the air quality regulations enforced. Other activists have taken to using specialised imaging cameras to visualise the air pollution pumping out of the fossil fuelled power station built to run Elon Musk’s racist, child abuse material generating chatbot.
What I suspect is not entirely clear is the sheer eye-watering magnitude of greenhouse gas emissions directly attributable to these fossil fuelled data centres. The local impacts are bad enough, but these are global impacts that affect everybody.
The first estimate I saw of this was a number shared on Bluesky, sourced from permitting documentation: 6.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2-e) annually for a proposed fleet of 51 gas turbines (only a fraction of those on site).
To give you an idea of scale of that number:
Just dwell on the fact that all of this is for one stage of the data centres running one piece of software generating inaccurate information, abusive imagery and videos for one shrinking 4Chan-style far-right social media site. I think that gives you an idea of just how stunningly inefficient and bloated this class of software is.
I worked with an analyst (who’d prefer to remain anonymous) to pull together an estimate of what all stages of these data centres will look like when they’re operational: 11.3 MTCO2-e of annual emissions across 86 fossil gas turbines. Just the operational ones are currently at 5.1 MTCO2-e.
Compare that to what Tesla claims its fleet of products (cars, solar, batteries) avoids every year: 32 MTCO2-e in 2024, and 20 MTCO2-e in 2023 (the 2023 numbers have been challenged as significantly overstated due to biased assumptions. Analytics firm Greenly looked at them and found it was probably more like 10.2 to 13.4 MTCO2-e).
The most generous way to put it: once completed, the climate damage caused by Musk’s chatbot will undo the climate benefits of 35% of the entire global fleet of Tesla products for the year 2024. The less-generous presentation is that the fossil fuelled data centres will more than undo more than all the climate benefits from all of Tesla’s products for 2023 (the only year we have independent estimates).
To put that in vehicular terms: two out of every three Tesla’s sold in the US in 2025 will have their avoided emissions undone by the operation of these fossil fuelled data centres. Considering Tesla’s growth has ground to a halt as the data centres keep growing, the ratio between these two numbers is only going to get worse.
To put it yet another way: going only by the gas turbines operational today, manufacturing chatbot replies currently currently has 5x the emissions of manufacturing Tesla products (going by scope 1 and 2 emissions for 2024, for Tesla1). If you go by the full site once operational, it’s about 11x.
I’m sharing this comparison because I think there isn’t great awareness of what is going on here.
This is what green software analyst Chris Adams termed ‘petrotech’ – fossil fuelled technological growth exploding across communities. The EIA is musing about 40 gigawatts of gas turbines ripped off retired military planes. US analyst Michael Thomas reports jet engines are being brought in on trucks. Global Energy Monitor’s analysis of on-site fossil plants for data centres contains obscene numbers – one estimate puts the US economy-wide emissions increase at 27%, if they’re all realised. That’s 100 gigawatts of planned fossil gas capacity just for on-site use (not including new grid-connected gas), more than 700 times the capacity of Musk’s fossil power plant.
The inexplicable instinct for even some in the climate movement to minimise this problem was bad two years ago, but today it is actively aiding the fossil fuel industry’s latest demand fabrication scheme.
This isn’t about projections or possibilities. This is happening now. The fact that one of the world’s most recognisable EV brands is literally torching somewhere between nearly half and more than all of its climate benefits I hope helps shove the clean tech world out of its complacency on this issue.
Appendix – Avoided emissions can be somewhat useful or very terrible
When a wind turbine company builds a wind turbine, they’re probably going to use at least some fossil fuels in that process. But that wind turbine will displace a very significant amount of fossil fuels during its lifetime: comfortably far more than was used to build it. In the parallel universe where we didn’t build that wind turbine, emissions are higher by some amount. That amount is the “avoided” emissions.
Most clean technology manufacturers try their hand at calculating this. Danish wind manufacturer Vestas says “Already, our more than 164 GW of installed sustainable energy have avoided more than 1.9 billion tonnes of CO2”. It’s impossible to ‘verify’ a number like this, because it’s referencing a parallel universe we can never really observe, but a good method probably gets it somewhere in the ballpark. In the case of wind and solar, the IPCC itself cites estimates of total global avoided emissions thanks to their deployment.
Consider Crusoe, a company that operates data centres by burning large volumes of fossil gas. They previously did this for Bitcoin mining, and now specialise in doing the same for specialised data centres that run generative AI. Crusoe claims that because they’re burning methane gas that would’ve otherwise been burned off directly into the atmosphere by fossil fuel companies (which they claim results in worse methane leakage, therefore they’re reducing emissions), their “avoided emissions” are so large that they end up having a “negative” net emissions impact:
I mention this because I suspect this is going to become more of a thing. Recently, I put together a report on AI greenwashing and I think as the climate impacts get worse and more undeniable, there’s going to be a resurgence of tactics and techniques to mask many of these very severe problems. It’s tangential to Musk’s climate self destruction, but still worth noting.
- Tesla’s Scope 3 emissions are higher (about 50 mtco2-e in 2024), but to compare this you’d need the scope 3 emissions for the data centres too, including the concrete, construction and fuel source supply chain emissions, which is just too tough to put together. ↩︎