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The Register · September 19, 2026 · On the brief until October 3, 2026

AI boom could leave an e-waste trail that wraps 6 times around Earth

Environmental SciencePublic PolicyMaterials Science
THE AI ANGLE
Driving rapid infrastructure obsolescence and massive e-waste generation through datacenter expansion

A report from the Basel Action Network projects that rapid AI infrastructure expansion will generate between 395 million and 617 million tonnes of electronic waste between 2025 and 2050. Unlike earlier estimates focused primarily on servers and GPUs—which represent just 13 percent of datacenter equipment by weight—this model accounts for frequent turnover in power distribution, cooling, and networking hardware. This creates an unprecedented waste footprint that neither tech companies nor governments have regulatory plans or processing capacity to manage safely.

Summary written by AI Business Lens with an AI model from the article at theregister.com. It is not the article, and the publisher has not reviewed it. For publishers.

THE TEACHING ANGLE
Students can examine the policy and material lifecycle challenges of AI deployments, specifically how accelerated hardware upgrade cycles and high power requirements force the premature obsolescence and disposal of massive non-computing infrastructure like copper-heavy power systems and cooling gear

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