Data centers don’t just undergird the avalanche of AI slop polluting our social media feeds — they’re spewing an awful lot of physical slop as well.

On top of the noxious air pollution, as well as the occasionally bacteria-laden wastewater discharge, data centers are responsible for a rising tide of forever chemicals, artificial substances which never degrade naturally.

According to new reporting by The Guardian, nearly all of the top ten global producers of forever chemicals, otherwise known as polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, plan to ramp up production quotas on the back of the data center boom.

There’s a clear market demand for this: PFAS play a huge role in data center construction, where they’re used in cooling systems, AI chips, circuit boards, and fire suppression systems — not to mention the coating on thousands of miles of cables used to connect these components together.

Though components laden with PFAS are found throughout the industrial world, their use in data centers is particularly troubling. Because these facilities run almost non-stop save for the rare pause for maintenance, their components break down remarkably quickly, which means data center owners are constantly scrapping old parts in favor of new ones.

When those old components are tossed to the curb, the PFAS will almost inevitably wind up in the environment, increasing the likelihood that they wind up in the food chain. When we eat contaminated plant and animal products, these forever chemicals accumulate in our body, where they may contribute to a laundry list of debilitating health problems.

“These companies’ expansion plans show that unless governments and regulators insist on a rapid phaseout, we will face a new tidal wave of forever chemicals,” Anne-Sofie Bäckar, executive director of Swedish chemical watchdog ChemSec, told The Guardian.

Of course, PFAS are far from the only toxic discharge attributable to the AI data center boom. On Monday, the Gothamist reported that nearly 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel had somehow spilled out of the Equinix Data Center in Secaucus, New Jersey, flowing directly into a tributary creek in the New Jersey Meadowlands.

As Climate Revolution Action Network executive director Ben Dziobek told the Gothamist, it’s proof that data centers harms extend far beyond their property lines.

“Leaving this [data centers] to individual towns doesn’t make any sense,” Dziobek said. “Data centers create problems that don’t stop at municipal boundaries, whether it’s pollution or straining the grid and driving up everyone’s electric bills.”

More on data centers: The Economics of Data Centers Creating Jobs Are So Bad That They Sound Like a Joke

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Climate change? What climate change?

Choosing to bury their heads in the sand on behalf of the citizens of this country and perhaps the planet at large, the Trump administration has announced that the Environmental Protection Agency will eliminate limits on greenhouse gas pollution produced by coal and natural gas power plants, the Associated Press reports.

Needless to say, it would be a staggering setback in the federal government’s ability to tackle climate change, and the effects could be long-lasting in both an environmental and legal sense. The administration is also proposing a separate rule that could prevent future administrations from imposing restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, all but ensuring a future of ecological catastrophe.

“Tearing down our national protections against climate pollution from power plants will have enormous costs for the health, safety and well-being of families across the country,” Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the AP. “Americans everywhere are already suffering from record-breaking heat, more dangerous floods and storms, and skyrocketing insurance costs.”

Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the New York Times that the EPA “is ending its legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”

These changes, which involve repealing regulations passed under the preceding Biden and Obama administrations and passing new ones, have been a long time coming. 

Led by EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency first proposed them last year, arguing that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from power plants are neither a significant contributor to “dangerous pollution” that harms human health, nor to climate change. It follows, Trump’s EPA argues, that the agency doesn’t have the authority to regulate the emissions under the Clean Air Act, the US’s landmark air quality control law passed in 1963.

The action will almost certainly face fierce legal challenges from environmental groups.

“The Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country,” Holly Bender, the group’s chief program officer, said in a statement.

Trump has long been a climate change skeptic, calling it not only a “hoax,” but the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” Upon taking office in 2025, he immediately withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement for the second time (the first happened during his first term, and was overturned by president Biden). The international treaty is an agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, past which scientists say the worst effects of climate change will be irreversible.

A clear beneficiary of the changes is the coal industry, which Trump has gone to great lengths to appease. He has proposed relaxing regulations around how it disposes of its toxic waste, and directed the federal government to pour $700 million into supporting the industry. But “clean, beautiful coal,” as Trump calls it, is pound for pound the most carbon-emitting fuel and the largest source of global CO2 emissions.

More on the environment: United Nations Concedes That Efforts to Arrest Climate Change Have Failed, and the Planet Is Now Spiraling Into Environmental Catastrophe

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In the age of AI agents, it’s no longer enough to ask how much electricity a single chatbot prompt uses. Today’s AI models are even more complicated systems, often designed to complete complex tasks autonomously, and are made up not only of large language models, but a host of other tools and application layers which demand much more power than the humble standalone chatbot.

That makes calculating their total electricity usage a much bigger can of worms. Yet with virtual radio silence from the top private AI labs on internal energy use, it’s nearly impossible to say definitively what kind of impact our AI assistants are having on the electrical grid.

In a blog post flagged by Wired‘s Molly Taft, the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather took it upon himself to calculate the likely energy demand behind his typical sessions with Claude Code, an AI-coding assistant developed by Anthropic.

Measuring the number of tokens his AI assistant consumed, Hausfather estimated that his average daily use fell in the range of 1.2 to 5.9 kWh — an alarming amount for a single consumer, consuming more electricity than two refrigerators running all day long.

Most of this token consumption, 3.2 billion over an eight-week period, came from the agent “re-reading its own working memory,” Hausfather wrote, which happens every time the tool takes a new step.

“Every time an agent takes a step (eg, runs a command, reads a file, or calls a tool), the model re-processes its entire accumulated context,” the climate scientist wrote.

“The text I actually see (eg, the model’s output) is only around 0.4 percent of total tokens processed,” Hausfather continued. “Some 96 percent of the tokens are cache reads where the agent re-reads its own context at each of those 14,000 steps. This matters enormously for the energy estimate, because a cached token is much cheaper to re-read than a fresh one is to process.”

Extrapolating those results out over a year, Hausfather contends that he would emit “a bit more per year than running an electric clothes dryer, and about half as much as driving an electric car 11,500 miles in California.”

That might not sound like much, but over an entire population of AI users, it adds up quickly. Likewise, it “represents a net new source of emissions, at a time when global temperatures are skyrocketing and our emissions reduction goals are increasingly off track,” the climate scientist explains.

The exact climate toll, though, remains hazy. As Wired notes, AI sustainability researcher Boris Gamazaychikov called the calculation a “good effort,” but one based on old data. Gamazaychikov’s own research on agentic AI energy consumption should be due out later in September — and when it drops, it could drastically change our understanding of the true cost of AI agents.

More on AI: Sam Altman Now Trying to Gain Control of Electric Grid

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