AI’s Hidden Bill

I recently read about Google quietly moving its net-zero by 2030 pledge out of the spotlight on its sustainability page. This comes at a time when its AI infrastructure is expanding, and its carbon emissions have already surged by 48% in just four years. The visibility of its climate ambition has been pushed to the background.

It made me pause. Because while we were preoccupied with the fear that AI might take our jobs, our creativity, or even our authenticity, we rarely asked the bigger, scarier question: what if AI is taking away the very conditions we need to survive?

The Debate We Keep Having

Everywhere you turn, the conversation about AI sounds the same:

• Will ChatGPT replace me at work?

• Will AI-generated art kill human creativity?

• Will machines think better than us?

These are valid worries. But they are also familiar ones; technological disruption has always raised questions of work and identity. The printing press threatened penmanship. The steam engine threatened manual labour. The computer threatened clerical jobs. We’ve been here before.

What’s different this time is not just the scale of disruption. It’s the ecological cost that shadows AI’s growth, a cost that doesn’t just reshape industries but undermines life itself.

The Hidden Bill of “Free” AI

AI feels cheap, sometimes even free. A few prompts, a few clicks, and you have answers, poems, images, or animations. It feels magical. But behind this magic is machinery, and machinery always has a cost.

Training and running large AI models demand enormous computing power. That power comes from data centres, which are essentially warehouses of servers running 24/7.

To keep them from overheating, they are cooled by water, millions of litres of it. To keep them running, they require staggering amounts of electricity, much of which still comes from fossil fuels.

The numbers are sobering:

• Microsoft’s data centres in Arizona consumed nearly 5 billion litres of water in a single year, enough to supply entire communities in a drought-prone state.

• Training ChatGPT alone consumes as much electricity as 120 U.S. households use in a year.

• Google has reported that its water usage for data centres rose by 20% in just one year.

These aren’t abstract costs. They translate directly into depleted groundwater, increased emissions, and worsening climate stress. In other words, while we enjoy the fun of AI filters or the productivity of AI tools, nature foots the bill.

Growth Over Survival

Corporations know the risks of climate change. Many of them now proudly display ESG commitments and net-zero roadmaps. In India, companies are rethinking sustainability strategies, partly because climate extremes floods, heatwaves, and landslides, now directly affect their operations.

But then you see moves like Google’s retreat. A pioneer once seen as leading the sustainability charge quietly pushes its climate pledge out of sight, even as it expands AI infrastructure. That contradiction tells a bigger story: growth still trumps survival.

And when leaders step back, they give silent permission for others to do the same.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So where does this leave us? I’m not saying we should abandon AI or stop innovating. Technology can and should be part of the solution to climate change. But the way we are using AI today as an unchecked novelty, as a limitless convenience, as an endless appetite is unsustainable.

Three shifts are needed:

1. Transparency - Companies must disclose the ecological cost of AI clearly, not bury it in reports.

2. Accountability - Net-zero cannot be a moving target. Growth in one area cannot justify regression in another.

3. Conscious Choices - As users, we must ask ourselves whether every click, every trend, every frivolous use of AI is worth the invisible cost it carries.

A Conscious Pause

The future of AI should not just be measured in productivity gains or job losses. It should be measured in survival. If unchecked, AI might not just reconfigure economies, it could destabilise ecosystems to the point where neither jobs nor creativity matter anymore.

The question we should be asking is not simply: Will AI take my job? The question is: Will AI take away my right to live in a world that can still sustain me?

Because the bill for our choices is already here. We’ve just left nature to pay for us and nature’s credit is running out.