Are AI Data Centers killing the bees?

Are AI Data Centers killing the bees?

I recently came across videos with that claim, and I started researching because it’s concerning, you know…since bees help us survive by pollinating the plants that give us food.

Sidenote, it’s fascinating how everything on Earth really is connected.

Other sidenote, I think at this point, we’re moving faster than we know how to fix any of the problems we’re creating.

I found an article from EHN. They cover environmental health news. In their article, they cited a study from Science Advances that talks about how electromagnetic field radiation from high-voltage transmission towers caused a lot of stress for honeybees and it really hurt their ability to pollinate, so that’s a problem.

In the grand scheme of things, why does this matter? You have to remember that insect populations are collapsing. If they go, we go.

We’ve known this for years now, but if you didn’t, there are plenty of articles and studies on why this is happening. EMFs have been mentioned as part of the problem here too.

Now to the subject of AI Data Centers. More and more of these centers are getting built. These are not small properties. These are campuses that are thousands of acres…sometimes tens of thousands of acres.

Artificial intelligence is hungry and it needs to eat. The amount of energy that these hyperscale AI data center servers need to consume is equal to the entire energy use of multiple large cities put together, or as much energy use as some of the rural states in America.

Our electric grid, as it stands, won’t be able to handle these large loads. Many new power plants (mostly pollution causing gas plants) are going to be built.

So, are AI data centers hurting the bees? The argument can be made that if you’re building all this new infrastructure to produce way more EMFs, then yes.

All the extra energy production, around the country, buzzing into the AI Data Centers, will probably cause many more issues for the insects we actually need to keep buzzing, like the honeybees.

EHN wrote in their article, “the United States has no federal safety standards for exposure to power line EMF for either humans or wildlife, and federal agencies have not evaluated the science on impacts on pollinators.”

Why are we playing with fire here? It’s a good idea to slow down on a technology that would increase our electricity consumption until we’ve figured out the safest way to deal with this.