Can AI fix its own energy problem?

Summary

Click Here – "Can AI Fix Its Own Energy Problem?"

Host: Dina Temple-Raston (Recorded Future News)
Guest: Stuart Clark (IT Professional)
Date: August 29, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the hidden environmental costs of our digital lives—specifically, the immense and often invisible carbon footprint of the Internet and AI. IT veteran Stuart Clark joins host Dina Temple-Raston to demystify how every click, swipe, and stream contributes to emissions, why big tech’s growth is straining global energy use, and crucially, how artificial intelligence—while a big part of the problem—might also offer surprising solutions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Stuart Clark: Unlikely Expert

• Stuart Clark, known for his long beard and soft hands, brings a relatable, everyman’s perspective. He shares his transition from two decades as a hairdresser into self-taught coder and engineer for top companies like Cisco, Amazon, and Spotify.
  • [00:20]
    QT: "I've been growing my beard now for about 17 years... it will touch my sort of like, belt buckle area now." – Stuart Clark

The Hidden Weight of the Internet

• The Internet is the "fourth largest polluter on earth," behind only China, the U.S., and India.
  • [01:00]
    QT: "If the Internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter on earth." – Stuart Clark
• Growth is "unchecked" and ceaseless: Everything from fridges to toasters is online, multiplying energy demand in a way most people never consider.
• [03:24]
  QT: "Now your car is, now your television set is, even your toaster is." – Stuart Clark
• The digital world feels "weightless" but is powered by vast, energy-hungry data centers.
  • [03:47]
    QT: "The digital world, for us, we don't see that... it feels somewhat cleaner, if not weightless." – Stuart Clark

Making the Numbers Concrete

• Each Google search emits up to 0.2 grams of CO2, and every TikTok video streamed burns enough energy to power a light bulb for ten minutes.
  • [04:09]
    QT: "Every TikTok video that you watch would burn enough coal to power a light bulb for 10 minutes." – Stuart Clark
• Social media’s annual average carbon cost:
  • Instagram: 32.52 kg, YouTube: 40.1 kg CO2 per user—comparable to driving a gas car 100 miles.
  • [05:23]
    QT: "If you're a user on Instagram, their average is 32.52 and YouTube is 40.1 kilograms." – Stuart Clark

The "Invisible Toxic Cloud"

• Clark invokes a memorable metaphor for digital pollution.
  • [05:47]
    QT: "What I see behind people... is like a little bit of an invisible toxic cloud just following them around." – Stuart Clark
• Most users are oblivious to this footprint.
  • [06:10]
    QT: "I really, really don't think that they do. When you talk about this to people, they think... dystopian sci fi scene, but it really, really isn't." – Stuart Clark

The AI Arms Race & Opaque Data

• Artificial intelligence data centers are driving record-breaking energy demand, with Google’s emissions up nearly 50% since 2019, thanks in part to AI rollouts.
  • [06:58]
    QT: "The tech giants, all of them want to be... the supreme lead for artificial intelligence... and so they have to keep expanding data centers." – Stuart Clark
• Precise data on energy and emissions is unavailable—tech giants keep numbers secret, with data centers often physically and administratively hidden from scrutiny.
  • [08:33, 09:15]
    QT: "Some of this data is just incredibly hard to actually find." – Stuart Clark
    QT: "The industry isn't as transparent as it needs to be." – Stuart Clark
  • Google’s clandestine data centers were once codenamed "Voldemort."
    • [09:21]
      QT: "One of Google's data centers was called Lord Voldemort because it was like he who shall not be named." – Stuart Clark

Are Tech Giants’ Offsets Genuine?

• Clark questions tech companies’ climate promises, claiming they simply buy up existing green energy rather than reduce actual consumption, leaving the rest of the grid reliant on fossil fuels.
  • [10:14]
    QT: "A lot of people would say that there's a shell game going on... they're buying up a limited supply of green energy and then that leaves the rest of us to still rely on fossil fuels." – Stuart Clark

The Sustainable Software Solution

• Clark recounts discovering a bug (the notorious "N+1 query") making a system 500 times less efficient, inadvertently generating 2.3 tons of CO2 per year.
  • [11:13]
    QT: "It's like going to the library to get a 500 page book. But... you're checking out one page at a time... 500 times." – Stuart Clark
  • [11:52]
    QT: "Just this one line, one single line of code was responsible for generating... 2.3 tons of CO2 emissions per year." – Stuart Clark
• Fixing this bug reduced server load (and emissions) by 99%.
  • [12:25-12:32]
    QT: "The fix was to reduce the server load by 99%." – Stuart Clark

AI: Problem or Solution?

• AI is both the fuel of this energy arms race and, ironically, its best hope for sustainability.
  • AI can write more efficient, less resource-intensive code and optimize data center cooling and operations.
  • [13:07]
    QT: "AI does have its positives. Artificial intelligence has been used to optimize energy levels in data centers." – Stuart Clark
• Example: Companies using AI to cut data center cooling energy by 40%—the equivalent of removing a million cars from the road.
  • [13:46]
    QT: "There's a company who's been able to cool their data centers by 40% by using AI... that's like the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road." – Stuart Clark
• Software must be designed with energy efficiency as a core goal.
  • [12:44]
    QT: "It's about choosing the right programming language... designing a system which uses the absolute minimum energy required to do the job." – Stuart Clark

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "If the Internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter on earth." — Stuart Clark [01:00]
• "Every swipe, every click, all adding up fast... their carbon footprint is actually bigger than Greece." — Dena Temple-Raston [04:18]
• "What I see behind people... is like a little bit of an invisible toxic cloud just following them around." — Stuart Clark [05:47]
• "The tech giants... have to keep expanding data centers." — Stuart Clark [06:58]
• "Artificial intelligence necessarily isn't bad. We just have to choose our path here..." — Stuart Clark [14:12]

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Timeline / Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:20–01:00: Introduction to Stuart Clark—a humorous start about his beard and career path
• 01:00–03:57: The Internet’s explosive energy growth; every device now online
• 04:09–05:23: Quantifying digital pollution—CO2 costs of searches, streams, and social media
• 05:47–06:29: "Invisible toxic clouds"—the unseen but massive carbon impact
• 06:29–07:12: The AI arms race, rising emissions, and demand for data centers
• 08:33–09:38: The industry’s lack of transparency and secrecy—“Voldemort” data centers
• 10:06–10:32: Big tech’s questionable carbon offsets
• 10:49–12:32: Sustainable software—a single bug’s huge footprint, and a simple fix’s dramatic results
• 13:07–13:57: How AI can help itself—using AI for energy optimization
• 14:12–14:25: The digital age paradox—technology as both cause and potential cure

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Conclusion

The episode ends on a hopeful note: While the digital world’s carbon footprint is vast and growing, software engineers and tech companies have levers—especially in software design and AI-driven optimization—that could dramatically reduce emissions. Clark’s message is clear: The energy problems of AI and the Internet are daunting but also solvable if efficiency and sustainability become central priorities, not afterthoughts.

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For more on this topic or related cyber insight, subscribe to Click Here for future episodes.

Transcript

[Dena Temple Rastin]

From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here. So I have a burning question I want to start with.

[Stuart Clark]

Sure.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

How long did it take you to grow your beard?

[Stuart Clark]

So I've been growing my beard now for about 17 years. Okay.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And how long would you say it is? Is it 3ft long?

[Stuart Clark]

It's close onto 3ft. It will touch my sort of like, belt buckle area now. Yeah, it's that long. Yeah.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

From Recorded Future News and prx, I'm Dena Temple Rastin, and this is Click Here's Mic Drop, an extended cut of our favorite interview of the week. Today we're talking to Stuart Clark, an IT professional with a knack for cutting through the noise and a warning about the hidden environmental cost of our digital lives.

[Stuart Clark]

If the Internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter on earth. So that's going to be behind China, behind the US Behind India. And unlike those countries, the Internet, its growth really goes unchecked.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

But there's good news, too. Stewart says there's a way out of this, a fix. And it comes from a place you'd never expect. That's after the break. Stay with us.

[Recorded Future News Announcer]

Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here, then check out our sister publication, the Record. From Recorded Future News, you'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to TheRecord Media.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

I'm Dena Templewest, and this is Click. Here's Mic Drop. For the last decade and a half, Stuart Clark has been helping build the digital world we all live in. His dad worked construction, and Stuart figured he'd follow in his footsteps. But instead of a hammer, he picked up shears. He became a hairdresser.

[Stuart Clark]

My hands were far too soft and gentle to be working on building sites. My wife says my hands are so soft, they're like veal. And so, yeah, that's a compliment. It is a compliment. Yeah, they are very, very soft.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Stuart worked in salons for almost 20 years, but by 2008, they'd kind of lost their shy.

[Stuart Clark]

I thought, what's next on the list? And so I got into it, and I was very fortunate. And my career really took off.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

He taught himself to code, landed jobs with Cisco, Amazon, Spotify. And along the way, he noticed something. As the Internet mushroomed in size, its energy consumption exploded, too. Because of how it was built, or rather, not built, the Internet is really.

[Stuart Clark]

Built on sort of like chicken wire and, and held together in, in such a manner. The Internet was never designed to do what it's doing today.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And the Internet isn't just computers anymore.

[Stuart Clark]

We used to have this thing where it was just computers that were on the Internet. And now your car is, now your television set is, even your toaster is your fridges. You know, I'm, I'm in a house and I'm sort of like trying to think now I probably got 20 devices connect onto, onto my wi fi just in my home.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And with every smart device piling on, more energy demand. All of it invisible to the end user.

[Stuart Clark]

The digital world, for us, we don't see that the digital world feels somewhat cleaner, if not weightless.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

So Stewart started crunching the numbers, trying to make it concrete. He found that every Google search puts out a little bit of carbon dioxide up to 0.2 grams.

[Stuart Clark]

And video streaming, every TikTok video that you watch would burn enough coal to power a light bulb for 10 minutes.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And that's just a single video.

[Stuart Clark]

Their carbon footprint is actually bigger than Greece.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Every swipe, every click, all adding up fast. Then he turned to data centers. These massive buildings filled with computer servers.

[Stuart Clark]

Every data center around the world has very, very sophisticated monitoring in place. And you can watch your energy usage of those servers go up.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

The numbers told the same story everywhere.

[Stuart Clark]

Up, up, up.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

But here's the thing, the companies don't share that data. Not really. What we do know is this. The Internet's appetite for electricity is on track to double by 2026. Just four years ago, it was half that. And all that power, it doesn't just vanish, it morphs into carbon pumping into the atmosphere. So one digital sustainability company, Greenly, tried to do what the tech giants put a number on it just to measure how much damage a single year online can do.

[Stuart Clark]

If you're a user on Instagram, their average is 32.52 and YouTube is 40.1 kilograms.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

That's about the same as driving a gas powered car a hundred miles. And when you multiply that by billions of users, the number becomes staggering.

[Stuart Clark]

The way that I imagine this is that you know, every video that we've watched, you know, every online purchase that you make. For me, you know, what I see behind people as they're kind of walking along is like a little bit of an invisible toxic cloud just following them around.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Do you think most people, they're just tapping away on their phones and their laptops have any sense of the energy that their devices are Chewing through.

[Stuart Clark]

No, I don't. I really, really don't think that they do. When you talk about this to people, they think, you know, that you're talking about sort of maybe a dystopian sci fi scene, but it really, really isn't. This is, this is the dark side of our digital obsession.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And lately that toxic cloud's been getting darker. And the reason the arms race. Well, if your electric bill has gone up lately, you are not alone. And it may not just be the summer heat that's causing things to rise. Artificial intelligence data centers are predicted to drive demand to record highs in the coming years. Google announced its emissions are actually up nearly 50% since. Since 2019. One factor, artificial intelligence.

[Stuart Clark]

The tech giants, all of them want to be, you know, the supreme lead for artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence dominance. And so they have to keep expanding data centers.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

They're scrambling for dominance first and asking climate questions later. And that, Stuart says, is a recipe for disaster. But he thinks there's a way to fix it. And that's when we come back. Stay with us. At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry, but. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab adventures on the edge of what we think we know Wherever you get your podcasts. The AI arms race wasn't just driving Stuart crazy. It, it was keeping him up at night. Everywhere he looked, news, headlines, academic papers, whispers in the industry, the story was the same. More data, more energy, more emissions, and almost no hard numbers.

[Stuart Clark]

I've wanted to look and actually get the data, but some of this data is just incredibly hard to actually find. The GPT data has been the subject of several academic and independent studies, but some of the official figures have not been disclosed.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

So there's this stat that's been floating around that every ChatGPT query uses 10 times the energy of a Google search. You've heard that one, right?

[Stuart Clark]

I have, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Is it true?

[Stuart Clark]

It is true, to a point. But there's also a thing about the timing of when you do that as well.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

The lack of transparency gnawed at him.

[Stuart Clark]

The industry isn't as transparent as it needs to be.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And that secrecy, it's nothing new.

[Stuart Clark]

I've been to many data centers. They're built in the most possible indiscreet way many years ago, Google's data centers weren't even on any maps. One of Google's data centers was called Lord Voldemort because it was like he who shall not be named.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Voldemort.

[Stuart Clark]

Voldemort, Voldemort, Voldemort, Voldemort. We do not speak his name. And you, you could just drive past it, you wouldn't know what goes on in them. I've been to data centers which have got moats in front of them and, and they've actually got armed guards around them. They have better security than most airports do. It's really, really incredible. Data is, data really is the new oil.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And while the tech giants talk about offsetting their emissions, promising to buy clean energy or plant trees, Start doesn't buy it.

[Stuart Clark]

A lot of people would say that there's a shell game going on because a lot of the companies are claiming to offset emissions by purchasing renewable energy. But what they are doing is they're buying up a limited supply of green energy and then that leaves the rest of us to still rely on fossil fuels.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Though he doesn't think that's the right fix, Stewart does have an idea for what might be. He calls it sustainable software. So you talk about something called sustainable software, which I had never really heard of before. What does that actually mean?

[Stuart Clark]

How this started for me was, is that I was reviewing some code that I was working on and then one day I just found this bug, a.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Mistake in his code, what developers call an N plus one query. Instead of asking a database for everything it needed in a single trip, the code was sending hundreds of little requests one after another.

[Stuart Clark]

It's like instead of asking like a database for 500 pieces of information just in one trip, what my code was doing was making 501 separate trips. This is like going to the library to get a 500 page book. But instead of checking out this entire book, the whole book, you're checking out one page at a time. You're walking home, you're, yeah, you're reading it and then you're walking back, you check out page 2500 times.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Most users never notice, but in the data center, that single mistake made servers run hot, forcing cooling systems to work overtime and spiking energy demand.

[Stuart Clark]

So I actually did the math on this as well. Just this one line, one single line of code was responsible for generating what I estimated to be 2.3 tons of CO2 emissions per year. Wow. So that in equivalency is like burning around 450 kg of copper just because of one lazy algorithm.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

That's like burning nearly a thousand pounds of coal for one bug. So Stuart fixed it.

[Stuart Clark]

So the N plus one query, the fix was to reduce the server load by 99%.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

A 99% reduction was with just that simple fix. Suddenly, servers ran cooler, consumed less power, and the carbon footprint shrank dramatically.

[Stuart Clark]

It's about choosing the right programming language, choosing the right data structures, and designing a system which uses the absolute minimum energy required to do the job.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And that's the twist. AI, the very technology driving up emissions might also hold the key to cutting them down.

[Stuart Clark]

I know I've painted AI as this nasty sort of enemy in this, but AI does have its positives. Artificial intelligence has been used to optimize energy levels in data centers. Artificial intelligence is used to build sustainable software.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

With the right instructions, AI can actually write cleaner, more efficient code.

[Stuart Clark]

I'm using AI to write my code. I can actually write within there to say, use the most sustainable way possible to use as less CPUs. We can just put that in there and AI will say, yeah, I can do that for you. I can do that.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Some companies are already putting the idea into practice.

[Stuart Clark]

There's a company who's been able to cool their data centers by 40% by using AI to do that. That's like the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

And that's the paradox of the digital age. The tools that created this crisis could also help solve it. So companies building them are willing to do the hard work of making efficiency as much a priority as innovation.

[Stuart Clark]

Artificial intelligence necessarily isn't bad. We just have to choose our path here and how to do this in a way that's both healthy for us as humans and unhealthy for us as a planet.

[Dena Temple Rastin]

Because, as Stuart likes to say, the Internet isn't weightless. Every search, every stream, every line of code leaves a trace. And if we pay attention, those traces don't just point to the problem. They point to the way out of it. From recorded future news, this has been Click Here's Mic Drop. It was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, Zach Hirsch, Lucas Riley and me, Dina Temple Raster. It was edited by Karen Duffett. We'll be back on Tuesday with an all new episode of Click Here. Have a great weekend.

[Recorded Future News Announcer]

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