The AI gold rush could produce up to 617 million tonnes of electronic waste by 2050 as data centres chew through increasingly specialised hardware.
According to The Verge, a Basel Action Network report reckons between 395 million and 617 million tonnes of AI-related equipment could be retired between 2025 and 2050. That is enough discarded kit to fill as many as 23 million 40-foot shipping containers. Placed end to end, the boxes would circle the planet roughly six times.
Previous estimates concentrated largely on servers and GPUs. BAN argues that approach ignores about 87 per cent of the electro-mechanical infrastructure stuffed into a modern data centre. Its calculation includes power distribution equipment, cooling systems, backup power and networking hardware, all of which eventually joins the silicon on the scrap heap.
BAN founder and chief of strategic direction Jim Puckett said: “AI may feel weightless, but every model depends on an enormous amount of highly specialised, cutting-edge hardware.”
The outfit estimates roughly 70,000 tonnes of electronic waste for every gigawatt of data-centre capacity. It cites forecasts suggesting global data-centre capacity could reach 219GW by 2030.
BAN expects AI to account for between 15 and 20 per cent of global electronic waste by 2050, when total annual e-waste could reach 211 million tonnes.
The figures include what BAN calls “AI Waste Contagion”, covering telecommunications equipment and consumer devices that could be replaced earlier as AI technology changes infrastructure requirements.
Less than a quarter of the 68.3 million tonnes of electronic waste generated worldwide each year is formally collected and recycled. The rest often ends up in landfills or informal recycling operations.
Those operations can expose workers and surrounding communities to lead, chromium and other toxic materials. Building giant warehouses full of rapidly ageing AI kit could therefore leave the industry with something less glamorous than another trillion-dollar valuation.
