Artificial intelligence systems may have produced between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2025 and consumed hundreds of billions of liters of water, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam reported on December 17th. Researcher Alex de Vries-Gao estimated that the upper ranges could resemble New York City’s annual emissions and global bottled-water consumption. The figures carry wide uncertainty because technology companies rarely separate AI workloads from the rest of their data-center operations. The study therefore measured a footprint and the secrecy surrounding it at the same time.

Every prompt reaches a physical chain of chips, cooling systems, electrical grids, backup generators, and water supplies. Efficiency improvements can reduce the resources used by one response while growing demand raises total consumption. Without detailed disclosure, cities approving new data centers cannot easily test corporate promises against local costs. Residents may see a new substation, a water permit, or a higher utility bill while the service appears elsewhere as a weightless box for text and images. The uncertainty in the estimate should lead to better measurement, since the missing numbers belong to the companies operating the machines. A public debate about AI’s benefits currently rests on private meters, aggregated reports, and communities asked to supply water before they can see the bill.