Tag Archives: carbon footprint cryptocurrencies

AI Eats Up Crazy Amounts of Electricity

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Global demand for AI is ramping up rapidly. Electricity demand from data centers worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to about 945 terawatt-hours, which is more than Japan’s total electricity consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. “A single AI-focused data center can use as much electricity as a small city and as much water as a large neighborhood,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists….A data center that fuels AI can consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, but the largest ones that haven’t been completed yet could consume 20 times as much. It’s a particular problem in the U.S., with data centers making up nearly half of its electricity demand growth over the next five years, according to the IEA.

There’s also been heightened concern recently about the amount of water that is required to cool electrical equipment in data centers. Just a few weeks ago, French company Mistral AI released a report detailing the environmental footprint of training its language model Mistral Large 2, including the amount of water it consumes. The water consumption from generating one page of text is 0.05 liter, enough to grow a small radish, the report says…

Excerpt from Clara Hudson, Google Wants You to Know the Environmental Cost of Quizzing Its AI. WSJ, Aug. 21, 2025

The Trump-China Hidden Romance: the companies behind USD1

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The Trump family’s crypto venture has generated more wealth since the election—some $4.5 billion—than any other part of the president’s business empire.

A major reason for the success is a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, whose founder is seeking a pardon from President Trump…The online trading platform, PancakeSwap, serves as an incubator of sorts, drumming up interest among traders to use coins issued by the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial.  The more World Liberty’s flagship coin, USD1, is used, the greater demand to increase its circulation, and the greater the profit for World Liberty and its owners, including the Trump family. 

Crypto trading platforms, like PancakeSwap, often offer rewards or prizes to drum up interest in new coins, similar to the way brokerages offer free trades or casinos give first-time customers free chips…

Binance’s majority owner and founder, Changpeng Zhao, spent four months in jail in the U.S. last year after Binance agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine for becoming a global money-laundering hub for criminals, terrorists and sanctions evaders. His company has deepened its relationship with World Liberty at the same time Zhao has ramped up efforts to secure a pardon from Trump…Zhao—considered the richest person in the crypto industry and worth over $70 billion.

USD1 got its first big break when Binance accepted a $2 billion investment from an outside investor paid in the World Liberty coin. The deal caused the amount of the cryptocurrency in circulation to erupt 15-fold and overnight become one of the world’s largest.  USD1 is what is known as a stablecoin, a privately invented digital currency that is backed 1:1 with U.S. dollars. World Liberty invests the money backing the coin in government bonds and money-market funds, without paying interest to users of the coin. With more than $2 billion of USD1 in circulation, it can earn around $80 million a year based on current interest rates. Binance has been holding the $2 billion in USD1 on its platform…By not cashing in the stablecoin, this ensures that World Liberty continues to earn money from investing the dollars that back them.

World Liberty’s relationship with PancakeSwap, whose website was registered in Shanghai, and Binance is one of several in which entities and individuals with strong ties to China have supported the Trump family crypto business. One of World Liberty’s largest investors is Justin Sun, the Hong Kong-based billionaire…This comes even as the White House pushes a trade war against China and seeks to curtail U.S. corporations’ ties to the country over national-security fears…

China is Binance’s largest market by trading volume. It has been a main base for its software developers, with hundreds of coders…Binance has long maintained that it isn’t a Chinese company, saying it left Shanghai shortly after its 2017 launch. Zhao… has said he is no longer a Chinese citizen, and holds Canadian and United Arab Emirates citizenship. The company, which has employees around the world, doesn’t have an official headquarters…

PancakeSwap doesn’t disclose its ownership…According to former Binance employees, Binance staff created PancakeSwap in-house in 2020 because the exchange wanted to establish a foothold in crypto’s so-called decentralized finance craze. The platform has remained under Binance’s supervision…

Excerpt from Angus Berwick et al., The Recipe Behind the Trump Family’s Crypto Riches: PancakeSwap, WSJ, Aug. 12, 2025

The Coin Curse: Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Carbon

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Environmentalists…fret about how much energy bitcoin uses. In a paper in Nature Communications, a group of academics…examine bitcoin’s energy use in China. They conclude that, in the absence of legal curbs, bitcoin could by 2024 become a “non-negligible” barrier to China’s efforts to decarbonize its economy.

Bitcoin’s hunger for energy stems from its design. It forgoes centralised record-keeping in favour of a “blockchain”, a transaction database that is distributed among users. The blockchain is maintained by “miners”, who validate transactions by competing to crack mathematical puzzles with solutions that are hard to find but easy to check. Each successfully mined block of transactions generates a reward, currently 6.25 bitcoins ($357,000).

The system varies the difficulty of the puzzles to ensure that one new block is created, on average, every ten minutes. High bitcoin prices make it worthwhile to spend more computing power—and therefore electricity—chasing mining rewards…

Despite the currency’s democratic ambitions, mining is concentrated among a handful of professional operators. About 70% takes place in China. Scientists have concluded that, without regulation, Chinese bitcoin mining could consume around as much energy as Italy or Saudi Arabia by 2024. Annual carbon emissions, at 130m tonnes, would approach those of Nigeria. Such numbers should be taken with a good deal of salt. Bitcoin’s energy use depends crucially on its price, which swings wildly…

But the general picture—that bitcoin is a dirty business—fits with other research. One oft-cited model, which uses publicly available blockchain data, reckons its global energy consumption is already equal to that of Kazakhstan, and that its carbon footprint matches Hong Kong’s.

Excerpts from The dirty truth: Totting up bitcoin’s environmental costs, Economist, Apr. 10, 2021