A team of urban environmentalists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Urban Environment, working with a colleague from Reichman University in Israel, has attempted to estimate the amount of e-waste that will be generated over the next several years due to the implementation of generative AI applications.

In their study, published in Nature Computational Science, the group attempted to add up all the circuit boards, batteries and other pieces of electronic hardware used to drive generative AI applications as they outlive their usefulness.

As generative AI applications like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm, one overlooked aspect of their rise is the hardware used to run them. Such applications are typically run on specialized GPUs plugged into specialized computers. They are typically housed together in data centers and server farms and there are a lot of them.

Generative AI apps are resource and energy intensive, and because they have become critical for some users, large stores of batteries ensure operation in the event of outages.

Unfortunately, all such equipment has a shelf life. As it ages or becomes obsolete, it is replaced. The old hardware then becomes e-waste. In this new effort, the research team attempted to estimate the total amount of such e-waste that will be generated between now and the end of this decade.

To make their estimates, the research team estimated the amount of hardware typically used to run a given application at a standard data center/server farm and the average shelf life for each of its components. They then identified the number of such data centers. They made educated guesses about the expected demand for such applications and their services in the years ahead. Finally, they integrated all their data into a computer model programmed to make such types of estimates.

The model showed that if things remain on their current trajectory, the AI industry could produce somewhere between 1.2 to 5.0 million metric tons of e-waste by the end of the decade. It also showed annual production of e-waste increasing from 2.6 thousand metric tons in 2023 and potentially reaching up to 2.5 million metric tons per year by the end of the decade.

The researchers note that such huge amounts of waste production could be avoided if the industry adopts a circular economy approach in which hardware is recycled.

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