AI Energy and Water Concerns: OpenAI CEO's Defense at India Summit

The OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, has tried to ease concerns about how much power is used by artificial intelligence models by comparing it to the amount of energy required by human development. “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told the Indian Express recently while in India for the AI Impact summit. “It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time – before you become smart.”

Despite that defense, he said that the public assessment of AI’s energy consumption was “fair”, adding: “We need to move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.”

Those remarks come amid growing discussion about the environmental impact of the datacenters required to power AI models – and, more generally, about technology’s possible impact on society. Datacenters accounted for about 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. The organization projects that such consumption will increase about 15% each year from 2024 to 2030, more than four times faster than the growth of electricity consumption from all other sectors.

“The demand for new datacenters cannot be met in a sustainable way,” Noman Bashir, a computing and climate impact fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s climate and sustainability consortium, told MIT’s news outlet. “The pace at which companies are building new datacenters means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants.”

In December, more than 230 environmental groups called for a moratorium on building datacenters in the US. “The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security,” their letter states.

At the AI conference, Altman also downplayed concerns about the water datacenters require. “Water is totally fake. It used to be true. We used to do evaporative cooling in datacenters, but now … we don’t do that,” Altman said. “You see things on the internet, [like]: ‘Don’t use ChatGPT. It’s 17 gallons of water for each query or whatever.’ This is completely untrue – totally insane.” CNBC reported that “some newer data centers no longer rely on water at all”.

A September 2025 report from OpenAI on how people use ChatGPT found that 70% of messages to the bot were not work related. “It didn’t look like the majority of use of that was for figuring out how we solve challenges in food systems and energy systems, so that would be my skepticism of saying this technology is worth it because I have yet to see it demonstrated,” Weinstein said.

Altman’s remarks generated a backlash online, with some people describing them as dystopian. “He’s saying a really big spreadsheet and a baby are morally equivalent,” Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, posted on X. “One reason to believe that life is divine is so that you don’t allow sociopaths like this anywhere near anything important.”

The sports commentator and TV host Jeff Johnson compared Altman’s comments to the Netflix series Black Mirror, which explores potential harms from new technology. “Notice the disturbing techy parlance that he uses to describe the general human experience,” Johnson wrote on X. “Training?!’ Too many people are falling for [it]. Y’all really lettin these geeks destroy the Earth.”