My understanding is relatively deep, so let me explain.

Don’t you think that if everyone used their own hardware for it, it would use at least as much energy? There is nothing inherent about data centers that make them consume more energy. Processing is processing and it needs some amount of power to run a transistor, which does not majorly change, unless you use very old hardware without certain technological advances, which is much more likely with hardware at home!

In addition, what you’re forgetting as well is that not everyone has even close to the required hardware to run these models. They require a certain amount of RAM, and if you don’t have that, you’re out of luck because it is so slow to run without enough RAM as to be useless, and most people do not have that amount necessary.

So, if everyone switched to running their AI locally, there’d be a lot more graphics cards and other computer parts bought, which guess what, need resources to be produced, resulting in potentially other kinds of environmental damage, along the same way as new data centers, but obviously some kind of different damage.

And then the data centers use their hardware all the time, while if you run your model at home, your hardware is only used occasionally and otherwise just sits there, so you need a lot more hardware in general because of all the unused capacity everywhere.

It’s the same principle as other environmental relief efforts, if everyone needs to buy their own car and drive it, that is much worse than just everyone using public transportation. Once you make something communally used, it requires less resources per person, even though for example a train is much more expensive than a single car. But same as you’re not serving a single traveller per train, a single data center does not serve one person. So theoretically, data centers are the better environmental choice.

What the real problem is, is not these data centers, data centers in general are good. The problem is unnecessary data centers, same as an individual buying unnecessary hardware for themselves. If you use AI, you don’t save any energy by running it yourself. The only argument for running it yourself is the increased privacy and not supporting these big corporations that do actually build unnecessary data centers, because AI should not be used for so many things that it is used for. So running it yourself is probably still better, but only if you already have the hardware anyway, but not because of reduced resources, but other reasons.