CLIMATE HERO OR VILLIAN?

AI COULD REVOLUTIONIZE CLEAN ENERGY, BUT ITS POWER DEMANDS ARE DRIVING UP EMISSIONS

- JEFF YOUNG

THE VACANT BUILDINGS AND ABANDONED works of the old steel mill in Midland, Pennsylvania, speak to the Ohio Valley town's industrial past. Crucible Steel employed thousands here for nearly a century, driving the local economy before it shuttered in the industry's downturn decades ago, leaving yet another rust belt artifact behind. But Mawson Infrastructure Group CEO Rahul Mewawalla sees something else in the industrial waste: energy for a data center to make this small town just east of the Ohio state line part of the AI revolution.

"The underlying bones of the power infrastructure are there," Mewawalla told Newsweek. Old industrial sites like the Midland steelworks used massive amounts of electricity, and the high-power connections were still in place when the mill closed.

Mawson now has some 60 modular tractor-trailer-sized data center units humming away on 8 acres of the former Crucible Steel site, crunching zeroes and ones for digital customers. The gleaming metal of the data units are a sharp contrast to the grimy remnant structures and railroad tracks.

But the graphic processing units, or GPUs, inside the data centers that make much of generative AI possible are energy hogs-gulping down electricity and belching out high heat-which, in turn, require even more power for cooling to keep the servers at operational temperature. Mewawalla said the recent addition of an AI customer spurred Mawson to expand to 120 megawatts of computing power in Midland.

With billions of dollars currently flowing into AI and the technical infrastructure it requires, how we decide to both power and then apply the technology could determine if AI proves to be a climate hero or a climate villain.