250 Eiffel Towers' worth of waste: The AI boom's toxic

What happened

Solomon Njoroge started picking waste at the Dandora dumpsite when he was a child. He's seen other waste pickers, who work long hours in the 40-acre landfill outside Nairobi, Kenya, suffer asthma, miscarriages, cancer, and respiratory diseases.

Even physically, they tend to be bigger, potentially covering millions of square feet and packing in a minimum of 5,000 servers, according to data from IBM. There's some debate around how long hyperscalers will keep hardware like GPUs and servers. CNBC reported that Google, Oracle, and Microsoft have said their servers could last up to six years.

Meanwhile, some industry watchers wonder whether some lifespan numbers have been inflated to make depreciation expenses appear friendlier in earnings reports. Hyperscale data centers, in particular, are filled with spinning media drives for uses like archival storage.

These drives are one of the hardest types of electronics to effectively recycle because massive drives take a long time to erase in order to meet compliance standards, and even then, there's no guarantee any sensitive data has been obliterated, said Tony Harvey, vice president and analyst at research firm Gartner.

"If you want to be 100% secure, the only way to get rid of it is physical destruction, which is not good," he said. The answer to this problem often is shredding, which creates exposure to toxic metals and chemicals if not properly handled.

To better understand the impact of the recent data center boom, the UN passed a resolution in December, originally proposed by Kenya, acknowledging the opportunities of AI and the need to protect the environment. The resolution calls for AI to be developed and deployed sustainably, and for member states and other stakeholders to make environmental data available so that the impact and potential risks can be studied.

Why it matters

A dumpsite like Dandora isn't one person's fault, but rather a literal pileup of choices made by governments, companies, and individuals, going back decades, about how to dispose of the junk and refuse no one wants -- and where to put it. While the Earth has been drowning in garbage for years, the modern era has introduced a new toxic ingredient: electronic waste, or e-waste.

E-waste sounds much cleaner than it is. This category of waste is made up of all the TVs, computers, cellphones, and more that people pitch when those devices finally give out, or lose their appeal compared to the newest models. Discarded electronics are the fastest-growing category of waste, and humans are on track to produce 82 million metric tons annually by 2030.

5 metric tons each year, according to a June report from the United Nations University. That's the equivalent of 250 Eiffel Towers. "Inasmuch as we are working for development or greatness to change the world… [hyperscalers] should also consider that there are people somewhere, suffering from what they are calling greatness," Njoroge told ZDNET.

The former waste picker is the founder of the Dandora Recyclable Waste CBO, which advocates for waste pickers at the dumpsite. While an old server might never end up in your backyard, the toxic metals and chemicals like arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury found in scrapped electronics contaminate the environment, polluting water systems, ecosystems, and food chains. As one report said, the contamination doesn't stay local.

It spreads through the air and seeps into the soil. Without intervention, the hazard wrought by decaying devices might not stay the problem of Njoroge and his community, but become yours, too. In the US alone, more than 1,500 data centers are in different stages of development, according to the Pew Research Center.

While there's no guarantee all those chips and servers will end up in a landfill, they will have to go somewhere, and how fast that happens depends on the demands of the AI industry. "The basic issue is that the way current AI systems, especially generative AI models, are developed, reward scale, acceleration, and rapid turnover," said Golestan (Sally) Radwan, chief digital officer of the UN Environmental Programme.

The US is already home to thousands of data centers, but not all of them are hyperscale data centers. Enterprise data centers, for example, tend to be smaller and more focused on running internal systems for institutions like banks and healthcare companies. A hyperscale data center is a different beast.

What to watch

Radwan said the UN wants to survey the whole value chain and quantify what happens at every stage. "We need to put in place incentives that really encourage that innovation on the technology itself, instead of just hammering on 'it's bad for the environment, and therefore, we need to stop it," she said. "Because in many cases, that comes across as we want to stop doing AI.

" Some hyperscalers are already trying to bake sustainability into their new data centers in the form of a concept that has existed for decades: circularity. Circularity encompasses the idea that parts can be reused and recycled to keep them out of landfills for as long as possible. Microsoft, in its pledge to produce zero waste by 2030, built six Circular Centers around the world.