The Turkish presidency of COP31 launched the Antalya Artificial Intelligence Pledge on October 28, adding AI and data centres to a UN climate summit's formal Action Agenda for the first time and presenting the technology as a tool for climate action. Within hours, Beyond Fossil Fuels and a European coalition of more than 30 energy and climate groups rejected that framing, arguing the pledge offers no evidence AI benefits the climate while committing governments to weave energy-hungry data centres into strained electricity grids.
The pledge seeks what it calls the "effective integration" of AI and data centres into power systems. Jill McArdle, a corporate campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, said that goal risks becoming "a green label for business as usual," and that grid capacity is "urgently needed to provide electricity to homes, transport and industry" rather than to new server halls. The group wants governments to rule out new fossil generation for AI, require data centres to run on additional renewable supply, and compel disclosure of each site's energy and water use. Protests are planned across several European countries on November 6 and 7 demanding a moratorium on large data centres.
The dispute sharpens a debate that researchers say the public has partly misread. The viral claim that each chatbot query "drinks a bottle of water" traces to a single 2024 estimate whose own author now calls it far too high; Google reported in 2024 that a median Gemini text prompt used about 0.26 millilitres of on-site water, roughly five drops. In Arizona, water-policy researchers at Arizona State University's Kyl Center found data centres use relatively modest on-site water and that cities will not connect a facility they believe would drain residential taps.
The firmer concern is electricity. Wei Peng, a Princeton energy-policy researcher, argues the larger footprint comes not from cooling water but from the power a data centre draws and the fuel behind it. By 2030, US data-centre electricity use could double, or quadruple in high-growth scenarios, adding demand equal to 5 to 15 percent of today's total national consumption after two decades of nearly flat growth. Where that power comes from decides the impact: a site on new wind and solar has a small footprint, while one leaning on gas or a fossil-heavy grid does not. Carbon, Peng notes, is the hardest piece to fix, with little incentive to deploy capture absent strong climate policy.
Land and habitat are becoming flashpoints too. Conservationists have challenged a data centre on public land near Boulder City, Nevada, and in Pennsylvania the Dauphin Highlands golf course closed on October 12 to make way for a reported $10 billion campus. A Gallup poll this year found 7 in 10 Americans oppose data-centre construction where they live, and Bloomberg has described the backlash as a defining issue in the US midterms.
What the Antalya pledge does not resolve is the core tradeoff its critics name: whether grid access and clean power should be prioritised for electrifying transport and industry or for AI. The summit has put the question on the agenda; it has not answered it, and the coalition warns that a pledge without disclosure rules or limits on new fossil fuels leaves the sector to expand on its own terms.