Salt Lake City hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit on July 12. It was its hottest temperature since records began in 1874, according to Wired. Nine days earlier, Washington, DC, tied its all-time warmest overnight low of 84 degrees. This means the thermometer in the nation’s capital never dropped below that number all night.

Weather stations across the US have logged nearly 44,000 record daytime highs. And more than 53,000 record-high overnight lows this year, Wired reported. Meanwhile, only about 21,500 cold records fell, roughly one for every four heat records. And although the calendar insists it is autumn, forecasters at the US Climate Prediction Center still see increased odds of hotter-than-normal temperatures across much of the country through at least the end of September.

Somewhere between the third heat advisory of the week and the electricity bill that followed, many of us started pointing at a new suspect. We all blame the data centers, the chatbots, and the AI tools we now use to summarize the simplest email.

According to a poll released on September 16 by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 53% of Americans are extremely or very concerned about the environmental impacts of AI, up from 41% in 2025. And among adults under 30, that concern jumped from 38% to 60%.

Cristina Costa, UChicago’s managing director of policy and strategic engagement, told Fox 32 Chicago that more Americans now worry about the environmental impacts of data centers than those of meat production or air travel, calling the results “a huge shift in just a very short period of time.” She described it as “a transpartisan concern” shared by Democrats, Republicans and independents alike.

So, are the chatbots really cooking the planet?

What’s Really Behind This Year’s Record Heat

“Climate change is far and away the primary driver of the extreme heat baking the US,” weather reporter Dennis Mersereau wrote in Wired on September 18. According to Mersereau, rising average temperatures raise the baseline for extreme heat. So very hot days now run steamier than they would have a few decades ago, while a warmer climate also favors the strong high-pressure ridges known as heat domes.

El Niño, the warm phase of a Pacific Ocean cycle, also contributed to this summer’s heat. And as we explained earlier this month, forecasters expect this one to become the strongest on record. Its greatest effects on US weather typically arrive in the colder months, according to Mersereau. He warned that “we’re likely not done breaking heat records yet this year.”

Coal- and gas-fired power plants release greenhouse gases when they burn fuel. And those gases raise the Earth’s temperature and lead to more extreme weather events, Mike Weinstein, director of sustainability at Southern New Hampshire University, said in an interview published by the university in January. The planet has warmed roughly 1.44°C since the early 1800s, according to the Associated Press, a trend that began generations before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, which means pinning this summer solely on a chatbot is not quite accurate.

AI’s Climate Footprint Runs on Coal and Gas

Scientists estimate that data centers’ power needs in North America nearly doubled in a single year, from 2,688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatts at the end of 2023, driven partly by generative AI, according to MIT News. Globally, data centers consumed 460 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, making them the world’s 11th-largest electricity consumer, after Saudi Arabia and France, according to OECD figures cited by MIT News. By 2030, data centers could consume 945 terawatt-hours a year, nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria, three countries home to more than 650 million people, UN News reported in June.

“The demand for new data centers cannot be met in a sustainable way. The pace at which companies are building new data centers means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants,” Noman Bashir, a Computing and Climate Impact Fellow at MIT, told MIT News in January 2025. Weinstein, citing MIT Technology Review, said AI data centers “are currently located in areas with grids predominantly powered by fossil fuels, meaning coal- and gas-fired power plants.” And on Fox 32, Costa said rising demand on the grid is keeping some coal plants online longer than planned while driving a huge increase in new natural gas plants being proposed and built.

On Reddit, one user questioned why people blame AI companies at all, arguing that “AI companies aren’t power companies. They don’t decide how the power they need to use gets made.” Another user replied: “If I make a company whose whole thing is burning plastic, you should be mad at me for burning the plastic.” When the first user countered that all of us burn carbon every time we drive or fly, the second wrote that “the scale here is so profoundly different.” The first user is right that the grid produces the emissions. Yet AI companies decide how fast to build, and according to Bashir, that pace is precisely what ties new data centers to fossil fuel plants.

Every AI Prompt, Image and Video Has a Price

Public debate has largely centered on the energy it takes to train advanced AI models, according to UN News, but the UN University study it reported on found that day-to-day use accounts for roughly 80 to 90% of total energy demand. The study estimates that one widely used AI service processes around 2.5 billion prompts per day, consuming hundreds of gigawatt-hours of electricity each year, and that generating a single AI image can require more than a thousand times the energy of simple text classification, with video demanding even more. Researchers have also estimated that one ChatGPT query uses about five times more electricity than a simple web search, according to MIT News.

“The ease-of-use of generative AI interfaces and the lack of information about the environmental impacts of my actions means that, as a user, I don’t have much incentive to cut back on my use of generative AI,” Bashir told MIT News. The UN study adds that efficiency improvements alone are unlikely to offset rising demand because of the so-called rebound effect, in which lower costs and better performance drive higher usage and, ultimately, higher total resource consumption.

Data centers also need an estimated two liters of water for cooling for every kilowatt-hour of energy they consume, according to Bashir, and by the end of the decade, AI-related water consumption could equal the basic annual domestic needs of 1.3 billion people, according to the UN University study. About two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 sit “in places already gripped by high levels of water stress,” according to a 2025 Bloomberg analysis.

The idea that “energy-hungry generative AI can be excused by vague future climate benefits” is “one of the sector’s favorite talking points,” Greenpeace says. A February 2026 report backed by Beyond Fossil Fuels found that 74% of industry claims about AI’s climate benefits were unproven, Greenpeace reported, and it could not identify a single case where consumer generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot were delivering material, verifiable and substantial emissions cuts.

Why the Anger at AI Data Centers Suddenly Became Personal

Costa told Fox 32 that “a real and growing sense of unfairness” drives much of the frustration. The companies building these facilities “are the richest companies in the history of the country,” she said, and “communities just aren’t seeing the benefits.” What residents do get, according to Costa, are higher costs for electricity and water, more noise, and more conventional air pollution, both from older power plants running harder and from the fossil-fuel backup generators data centers install, which she linked to asthma and other respiratory conditions.

In Virginia, 25 emergency backup generators at a Microsoft data center in Leesburg ran for seven days during the summer of 2025 after a power substation failed, exceeding permitted emissions limits for nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and volatile organic compounds, according to the Loudoun Times-Mirror. This month, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality secured a $2.5 million penalty from the company, the largest civil penalty the agency has ever secured from a data center, according to a DEQ spokesperson quoted by the paper. The consent order, signed September 3, remains open for public comment through October 14.

Illinois is home to around 140 data centers, according to Fox 32 Chicago, and Costa said voters across the Great Lakes region are now asking the same questions about water as communities in the Southwest, where water resources are already strained. “Well, but we need the drinking water, too,” she said, describing how those voters are responding. In San Marcos, Texas, the city council voted 5-2 to block a proposed data center after an hours-long meeting and more than 100 public comments, Greenpeace reported.

Around the world, more than 90% of AI-specialized computing capacity sits in the United States and China, while over 150 nations lack significant domestic AI infrastructure, according to the UN University study. However, the costs still travel, since AI infrastructure could generate up to 2.5 million tonnes of electronic waste a year by 2030, a burden the study says is likely to fall on lower-income countries with limited capacity for safe disposal.

AI Is Also Faking the Forecast

In July 2025, after flash floods in the Texas Hill Country claimed multiple lives, including several young girls attending a Christian summer camp, columnist Joe Finkelstein warned in The Macon Melody about fake weather alerts and deepfake videos of storms that never happened, including AI-generated tornado warnings and hurricane paths. Posts claiming the government controls the weather often include “proof” from AI-generated images or made-up reports, according to Finkelstein. “There’s no evidence to back these claims,” he wrote, adding that in some cases, fake AI-generated weather reports have caused panic buying or led people to ignore real warnings.

Finkelstein also noted that the National Weather Service had started testing AI-assisted tools that issue warnings faster, and that some researchers are using AI to predict local flooding, giving cities a few extra critical hours to prepare. Those extra hours only save lives if people believe the warning, and every fake storm video circulating online makes that harder.

So, Should We Blame AI for the Weather?

The heat that kept Washington at 84 degrees through the night comes mostly from what scientists have been warning for decades: generations of burning coal, oil, and gas, amplified this year by El Niño. “If all of our electricity supply was clean and renewable, like that provided by solar or wind power, we could look at the other impacts of AI in a different context,” Weinstein said. “But unfortunately, we as a planet are tremendously behind in transitioning to a clean, non-carbon energy grid.”

In short, AI did not create this heat, but its data centers are keeping some coal plants running, pulling water from places that cannot spare it and filling our feeds with storms that never happened, all on behalf of what Costa called “the richest companies in the history of the country.” And we are all tired of footing the bill.

Tags: AI