Artificial intelligence-generated deepfake videos have taken over social media, with platforms flooded by hyper-realistic clips created through AI tools. Apps like Sora have become viral sensations for their ability to produce lifelike videos, often depicting deceased celebrities and historical figures in strange or offensive scenarios.
While the emotional and ethical concerns around deepfakes continue to rise, experts are now drawing attention to another overlooked issue — their environmental impact.
Dr Kevin Grecksch, a lecturer at the University of Oxford, has warned that creating deepfake videos comes with “quite a huge hidden impact on the environment.” He explained that these videos are not generated on personal devices but rather in massive data centres spread across the world.
“It happens in a data centre which could be somewhere across the world, or maybe just around the corner, you never know,” Dr Grecksch said. “First of all that uses up a lot of electricity and secondly it uses a lot of water.”
Data centres require vast amounts of energy to run and rely heavily on fresh water to cool down their servers. With the explosion of deepfake apps, the demand for AI video generation has surged, increasing the strain on both electricity and water resources.
Sora, for instance, was downloaded more than a million times in under five days earlier this month and continues to top the Apple App Store charts in the US. This rapid adoption has led to an overwhelming number of AI-generated videos being shared across platforms, further amplifying their unseen environmental costs.
Dr Grecksch urged users to be more aware of this hidden toll. “There’s a lot of water involved and I think we just need to think about what we’re using it for, how we’re using it, and how often we’re using it,” he said.
He added that while AI’s growth is unstoppable, people need to think more holistically about “where we put data centres and how we are cooling them.” He also highlighted concerns about plans to expand AI infrastructure in south Oxfordshire, saying, “The government sees south Oxfordshire as one of the first AI growth areas, but that’s a massive problem because apparently no one has thought where the water is going to come from that’s going to cool down those servers.”
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