The future of artificial intelligence may depend, in part, on whether providers can reduce their appetite for electricity and water
5 min
Artificial intelligence is poised to transform both work and everyday life. But it has a dark underside: AI computer centres consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, to power their processing chips and cool the heat they emit.
Annual U.S. electricity use by data centres of all types will rise from 3% to 4% of the nation’s total today to between 11% and 12% in 2030, with AI being the main driver, according to projections from consulting firm McKinsey.
Meantime, AI’s demand for water globally in 2027 could account for more than the total annual amount withdrawn for use in Denmark or half of that in the U.K., according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside and University of Texas at Arlington.
All of that heavy use is causing logistical and public-image problems for the industry. Some utilities struggle to supply the needs of AI providers, and communities push back, fearing the added use will boost power prices and deplete water supplies.
The biggest AI providers, including Amazon , Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta and Microsoft , say they are working to be both carbon-neutral and replenish more water than they use—even as they continue to build massive data centres.
“It will be harder to build data centres, especially where energy already is at a premium or water might be scarce,” says Ed Anderson, research vice president at technology advisory firm Gartner. But, he adds, “the economic opportunity is rich enough that the providers will find a way.”
Below are some of the steps tech companies and researchers are hoping will reduce AI’s appetite for power and water.
One way of addressing power consumption is to make chips less power hungry. Nvidia , the largest maker of AI processors, says its newest ones, called Blackwell, will be about 25 times as energy efficient as its previous high-end version. Meanwhile, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are designing their own processing chips, in part to cut costs but also to make them use less power.
“Each generation has been significantly more efficient than the prior one,” says Google’s Partha Ranganathan , a vice president and engineering fellow, speaking of his company’s processing units.
Equipment used to cool data centres creates another issue: where to get the vast amount of water these systems consume. Google says its data centers globally used about 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2023, equivalent to the water used to irrigate and maintain 40 golf courses in the Southwest each year.
OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, meantime, consumes the equivalent of a 16.9-ounce bottle of water for every 10 to 50 responses it provides to users’ queries, according to the researchers at UC Riverside and UT Arlington. OpenAI declined to comment on the finding.
Data-centre water typically comes from municipal water systems. But in an era of water shortages, diverting drinking water for an industrial use has created tensions in some locales. That has sent AI companies searching for other sources, including rainwater, treated wastewater or water left over from factory processes.
Amazon, for example, uses recycled wastewater for cooling at its Santa Clara, Calif., data centers. The water comes from the city’s sewage-treatment system after it undergoes a three-step process that removes 99% of impurities.
Some researchers have experimented with carefully controlling what kind and how much information an AI model takes in during training. Usually, training a so-called large language model AI, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, involves ingesting hundreds of billions of words from the internet and elsewhere, then learning the relationships among them.
And that is energy and water intensive. Training an AI model called BLOOM over a 3½-month period consumed enough electricity to power the average U.S. home for 41 years, according to a Stanford University report.
As for water, training one of Google’s AI models, known as LaMDA, used about two million liters of it, both to produce the electricity used and keep the computers cool—enough to fill about 5,000 bathtubs, according to Shaolei Ren , a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. Google declined to comment on the research, but said it is “committed to climate-conscious cooling of our data centres.”
One possible solution is to have AIs remove redundancy and low-quality data, instead of just vacuuming up the whole internet. The goal is a much smaller set of data that the AI system can more easily sift through when a user asks it a question.
This can lower electricity consumption, according to some researchers.
AI systems that limit the information they take in are also less likely to “hallucinate”—give false or misleading answers—and can respond in ways that are more on-point because of the higher quality of the data they contain, experts say. Microsoft found that one of its pared-down AIs exceeded that of vastly larger ones in measurements of  common sense and logical reasoning .
Researchers at several universities have found that capping the amount of electricity used by AI computers has only a minor effect on the outcome, such as slightly more processing time.
Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University say that reducing the power to one of Meta’s AIs by 22% to 24% slowed the speed at which the AI responded to a query by only 5% to 8%. “These techniques can lead to significant reduction in energy consumption,” the researchers say. They add that the method also caused the processors to run at a lower temperature—which could trim the need for cooling.
Meta declined to comment on the research, but said it has had efforts to boost data-centre energy efficiency “since we started designing our first data center over a decade ago.”
Meantime, a team at the University of Michigan, University of Washington and University of California, San Diego devised an algorithm to modulate the use of power during training. The technique could cut power use by up to 30% , they say.
Some researchers believe companies should give users more context about the environmental impact of AI, to let them make more-informed decisions about the technology. Ren, of UC Riverside, proposes that AI providers disclose the approximate amount of electricity and water each query consumes—akin to how Google tells people searching for flights the amount of carbon emissions each trip would create.
Another proposal is to devise a rating system for the power efficiency of AI systems, akin to the government’s Energy Star ratings for home appliances and other products. Such a system could help people choose AI models for differing tasks based on their energy consumption, according to Sasha Luccioni , an AI researcher at Hugging Face, a company that makes machine-learning tools.
Academics and others have come up with other proposals to minimise AI’s environmental impact by tapping into green energy. For instance, companies might build more data centers in countries with abundant, low-emission power, such as hydropower in Norway or geothermal in Iceland. Or companies might do AI calculations at different locations at different times of the day, such as deploying computer centers with high use of solar power during the daytime or wind-powered ones when wind is more reliable at night.
Data-centre computers put out tremendous amounts of heat, and their temperature must be kept in a certain range, often 64 to 72 degrees, to prevent damaging the electronics. Traditionally, this has been done by high-power air conditioning. But air conditioning uses up to 40% of all the electricity consumed by a typical data centre, while devices called cooling towers that expel the heat to the outside air use a lot of water.
In response, the data-centre industry is moving to liquid cooling, which circulates a special liquid or cold water to “cold plates” that sit on top of the processor chips and keep them at a safe and efficient temperature range. The system, called direct-to-chip liquid cooling, uses less power than the traditional method—about 30% less, Nvidia says—because liquid is vastly better at removing heat from the electronics than blowing cold air over them.
Another method under development, called immersion cooling, involves placing the computers themselves inside big tanks of cooling liquid. While showing early promise, there are environmental concerns about the chemicals often used in the setup, says Mark Russinovich , chief technology officer of Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing unit.
Some companies, meanwhile, are using computing gear that can withstand higher temperatures and doesn’t need as much cooling. Google says its data centres already are 1.8 times as energy efficient as the typical data centre, which it achieved in part by raising the inside temperature to 80 degrees. For every one-degree boost in their temperature, data centres can save 4% to 5% in energy costs, according to the Energy Star program.
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Strong family financial planning can help reduce taxes and support younger generations. From intrafamily loans and asset gifts to inheritance disclaimers, strategic cooperation can create meaningful financial benefits—when families have the trust and structure to make it work.
4 min
Happy is the family whose members—parents, grandparents and grown children—trust each other enough to cooperate on shared goals, especially financial ones. When that is truly the case, Uncle Sam’s tax rules can help as well.
This matters especially now that mortgage rates are above 7%, and many families are looking for ways to help younger members. If the elders have resources and are confident younger ones can cooperate, a family loan could make homeownership possible while providing the elders with a useful income stream.
Other strategies can actually lower taxes, such as when funding 529 plans or Roth IRAs, or when someone inherits a traditional IRA with required withdrawals larger than they will need.
Here are three strategies useful for functional families.
It is perfectly legal for families to lend money to a relative for a down payment or even a private mortgage.
But it is important not to cut corners, says Ryan McKeown, a CPA with Modern Wealth Enhancement in Minnesota. If the loan is for a down payment, be honest with the mortgage provider and have a formal agreement. The lender owes tax on the interest payments received.
If the loan is for a private mortgage, both sides should have legal representation with a formal written agreement, including payment terms. The lender owes tax on the interest, and the borrower often can deduct it if he or she itemizes.
To avoid IRS trouble, the interest rate shouldn’t be lower than the agency’s Applicable Federal Rate at the time of the loan. Currently that is about 5% for loans longer than nine years; about 4.5% for loans three to nine years; and about 4% for loans three years or less. Currently, traditional mortgage rates are generally above 7%.
In addition, the lender could use the $19,000 annual gift-tax exemption (described below) to forgive some or all of the interest or principal annually. If both lenders and borrowers are married, that is up to $76,000 a year. There is no tax for the borrower on such forgiveness, because it is from a gift.
If you’re going this route, McKeown advises against having a fixed plan to forgive the debt. Instead, do it in one-off letters specifying the amount—and keep careful records. Otherwise the IRS might try to treat the loan as a taxable gift.
Powerful tax-saving moves for families often use gift-tax provisions. Under current law, anyone can give anyone else up to $19,000 of assets annually, free of gift tax. That means a married couple with three grandchildren could give them a total of $114,000 in 2026.
The gifts can be cash or other assets, like stock. For noncash gifts, the cost basis—which is the starting point for measuring taxable gain after a sale—“carries over” to the recipient. So if someone buys $1,000 of stock and gives it away when it is worth $5,000, the recipient’s cost basis is $1,000. If the recipient later sells the shares for $8,000, the taxable gain is $7,000.
Here’s an example showing how gifts could save a family taxes. Grandma is a widow of modest means, while her child and spouse have prospered. The couple has two children, and they want to contribute $5,000 to a 529 college-savings plan for each—but they need to sell stock to do it. Their tax rate on the sale would be 18.8%, and they would need to sell about $11,000 of stock.
However, Grandma’s federal tax rate on the stock sale is 0%. If the couple gives $10,000 of shares to Grandma, she could sell them, pay no tax, and fund the grandchildren’s 529 plans. This saves about $1,000 of tax.
These moves are legal, and they could be used in other ways, such as to help a young person fund a Roth IRA.
But trust among family members is essential: Under the law, givers can’t put conditions on a gift. Grandma could use her stock proceeds to take a cruise, but she makes 529 contributions instead.
Mark Sellner, a retired tax attorney and CPA living in Sarasota, Fla., uses this strategy. His children sell stock he gives them and fund 529 plans for his grandchildren.
The family’s tax savings aren’t huge, but he likes other benefits. The sales by his children don’t boost his adjusted gross income, which in turn could raise his Medicare Irmaa premiums or his 3.8% surtax on net investment income.
Sellner doesn’t worry about his children using the funds for another purpose.
“There can’t be any strings attached to gifts. Of course, it is up to us to decide whether to make them in the future,” he says.
Two caveats: The “kiddie tax” applies to most children under age 24, and it is levied at the parents’ rate on investment income above $2,700 in 2026. Consider this before making gifts to a young person.
Investors who give away stock also forgo the step-up, an important provision that exempts assets held at death from capital-gains tax.
Sellner knows he’s losing a step-up, but says, “The children could use a little more now. Why should they wait 20 years to get it?”
A disclaimer is a highly useful strategy in which one heir renounces an inheritance in favor of another heir. Assuming family members cooperate, this can save taxes.
Here’s one example. Dad died and had a large traditional IRA that he left to Mom. She has enough assets and income to cover her expenses, and she lives in a state with a stiff estate tax. The inherited IRA would put her estate over the threshold.
Also surviving are three young-adult children. If Mom disclaims all or part of Dad’s IRA within nine months of his death, that amount could go directly to the children. They will have 10 years to empty the account, and the family as a whole will likely save estate and income taxes.
Disclaimers have many key details, especially regarding beneficiary documents. Although heirs have great freedom in choosing what assets to disclaim, the rules about who gets disclaimed property are rigid. It is best if the original owner names tiers of heirs so that if one disclaims, the next recipient is clear.
