From https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1vh6391/environmental_impact_of_ai_datacenters_vs_animal/
Sources:
Water use:
https://www.foodfacts.org/articles/how-much-water-does-ai-use-vs-livestock
Land use:
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Greenhouse gas emissions:
https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167658 https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights-detail/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agrifood-systems.-global–regional-and-country-trends–2000-2022/en
- To the many comments along the lines of: „But we need food“ – This is actually another great point against Animal Agriculture, as every calory of food produced by Animal Agriculture wastes several calories of feed. https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/
- For people pointing out energy consumption, AI uses ~500 TWH per year, Animal Agriculture uses~ 13000 TWH per year, so it is 25x worse on energy need.
(This is a quick estimate based on:
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-ai https://www.fao.org/energy/resources/facts-and-figures/en#%3A%7E%3Atext=%28+World+Bank%2C+2025%29+*+30+percent%2Cor+wasted+due+to+lack+of+refrigeration. )
Oh, that’s cool! To be honest, I’ve kind of expected some of the values to be a lot higher. I’d expect that with the inhumane conditions the animals are being stacked, at least the land use per kg would be more efficient than i.e carrots.
I learned a new (not so cool) fact, thanks for the data!
I’m not sure I understand what “meters squared (m²) for one year to produce one kilogram of a given food product.” means, though. I’m not doubting the data, World in Data is my favorite newsletter/source, but I’m having a hard time imagining why do you need almost 400m3 per kg of beef. Or rather, I understand that for actually free-range animals, but as far as I know they are not kept in those conditions. It kind of intuitively feels like larger animals should be more space-efficient than vegetables. Again, not trying to argue or doubt it, just trying to understand why.
I think what you’re missing here is the concept of the trophic pyramid or ecological pyramid which explains how energy is transferred from one level to the next. In general only about 10% of energy is transferred from one level of the pyramid to the next.
Right now you’re just thinking of the cattle themselves, but to support the cattle there is the additional land space of all the food they eat (and also the lagoons for their shit). If we were to plot them in the food chain, then plants/grains would be the primary pruducer on the bottom tier of the pyramid, with cattle at the next tier. To gain 1 lbs the cattle would need to eat 10lbs of grains. Obviously cattle weigh much more than just 1 lbs so the land to support their 1100 lbs weight ends up being massive and not something a lot of people think about when they end up eating a burger. And above the cattle in this trophic pyramid we could place humans as a secondary consumer where there is another loss of energy as you go from one trophic level to the next. Not to mention 1 lbs of cattle is not 1 lbs of take home beef. A quick search on this number is ~35-45% of live animal weight ends up as take-home beef.
You had asked about what the plots would look like with replacement foods grown instead of animal agriculture. The trophic pyramid answers that and we could forecast if we were to remove an animal based product then we would require only 10% (on average) to replace it with primary source non-animal food
This is why I believe that if anyone seriously cares about the environment then the single, biggest thing they can do at an individual level is to reduce or eliminate their animal consumption. This doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t care about AI data centers and other major elements of environmental impact, it just means that for me personally my diet I have direct control over. I can and should still care about other environmental impacts but I don’t need to ask a city board to stop feeding me animal products–I can make that choice on my own.
I would expect that a lot of it comes down to accounting for the land used through the whole process (to grow the food used to feed them, for example), rather than just what the animals themselves occupy alone.