Will artificial intelligence heal the planet, or harm it?

We put a question to our community on LinkedIn: will artificial intelligence heal the planet, or harm it? The case for both sides is strong, and it deserves more room than a single post can give it.

Start with what AI can already do. Weather forecasting is one of the clearest wins. AI models built by organisations including the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts are increasingly matching, and in places beating, forecasts that used to take a supercomputer days to run. In India, an AI-based monsoon forecasting model helped a government programme send accurate onset warnings to 38 million farmers in 2025, at a speed and scale traditional forecasting could never have managed.

Closer to home, Octopus Energy’s Kraken platform uses AI to balance the UK grid in real time, coordinating more than half a million connected batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles into over two gigawatts of flexible power. The UK government has estimated that this kind of AI-driven grid flexibility could save the country at least £10 billion a year in costs by 2050.

But there is another side of the ledger. Training and running AI is not free, thats true in terms of money and in energy. Global electricity use from data centres grew by 17 per cent in 2025 alone, according to the International Energy Agency, and electricity used specifically by AI-focused data centres grew faster still, by around 50 per cent in that same period of time. All of that computing needs somewhere to plug in, and much of it needs a lot of water to keep cool.

This is the tension Jürgen Maier, Chair of Great British Energy, raised on the TOMORROW podcast. He pointed to AI’s potential to optimise how we use energy, but was equally clear that the pace of AI’s growth is outrunning the pace at which renewables can be built to power it. Hear more about this from Maier in the episode.

So which matters more, what AI can help us solve, or what it costs to run it? We’re not sure that’s the right question. The honest answer is that both are true at once, and which one wins out depends on choices being made right now, by the people building the models, the people building the grids, and the people deciding where the money goes.

That’s exactly the kind of question Future Forum exists to sit inside. We’ll be exploring it properly this October at King’s Cross, in a room built for cross-sector arguments like this one. Get your pass if you want to be part of it.