DATACENTERS ai boom
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The U.S. Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey measured AI use at 3–9% of businesses in March 2025, using language that asked whether firms used AI "to produce goods and services." After revising the question to cover "any business function," the Bureau's measured adoption rate increased to 18% in March 2026.
According to Bell & Korinek (2023), economic effect of AI could worsen economic inequality, which could potentially threaten democracy in ways which are separate from threats caused by AI's use in misinformation and propaganda.
== Concerns ==
Inaccuracy, cybersecurity and intellectual property infringement are considered to be the main risks associated with the boom, although not many actively attempt to mitigate the risk. Large language models have been criticized for reproducing biases inherited from their training data, including discriminatory biases related to ethnicity or gender. As a dual-use technology, AI carries risks of misuse by malicious actors. As AI becomes more sophisticated, it may eventually become cheaper and more efficient than human workers, which could cause technological unemployment and a transition period of economic turmoil. Public reaction to the AI boom has been mixed, with some hailing the new possibilities that AI creates, its sophistication and potential for benefiting humanity; while others denounced it for threatening job security and for giving 'uncanny' or flawed responses.
=== Dominance by tech giants ===
Commercial AI is dominated by American Big Tech companies such as Alphabet Inc., Amazon, Apple Inc., Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, whose investments in this area have surpassed those from U.S.-based venture capitalists. These companies own the majority of cloud infrastructure, AI chips, and computing power from data centers.
=== Intellectual property ===
Tech companies such as Meta, OpenAI and Nvidia have been sued by artists, writers, journalists, and software developers for using their work to train AI models. Early generative AI chatbots, such as the GPT-1, used the BookCorpus, and books are still the best source of training data for producing high-quality language models. ChatGPT aroused suspicion that its sources included libraries of pirated content after the chatbot produced detailed summaries of every part of Sarah Silverman's The Bedwetter and verbatim excerpts of paywalled content from The New York Times. In protest of the UK government holding consultations on how copyrighted music can legally be used to train AI models, more than a thousand British musicians released an album with no sounds, entitled Is This What We Want?
=== Likeness and impersonation ===
The ability to generate convincing, personalized messages as well as realistic images may facilitate large-scale misinformation, manipulation, and propaganda.
On 19 April 2024, as part of an ongoing feud with fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar, the artist Drake released the diss track "Taylor Made Freestyle", which featured AI-generated vocals imitating the voices of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. Shakur's estate threatened to sue over the use of Shakur's likeness, saying that it constituted a violation of Shakur's personality rights.
On 20 May 2024, following the release of a demo of updates to OpenAI's ChatGPT Voice Mode feature a week earlier, actor Scarlett Johansson issued a statement in relation to the "Sky" voice shown in the demo, accusing OpenAI of producing it to be very similar to her own, and her portrayal of the artificial intelligence voice assistant Samantha in the film Her (2013), despite Johansson refusing an earlier offer from the company to provide her voice for the system. The agent of the unnamed voice actress who voiced Sky stated that she had recorded her lines in her natural speaking voice and that OpenAI had not mentioned the movie Her nor Johansson.
Several incidents involving sharing of non-consensual deepfake pornography have occurred. In late January 2024, deepfake images of American musician Taylor Swift proliferated. Several experts have warned that deepfake pornography is more quickly created and disseminated, due to the relative ease of using the technology. Canada introduced federal legislation targeting sharing of non-consensual sexually explicit AI-generated photos; most provinces already had such laws. In the United States, the DEFIANCE Act was introduced in March 2024.
=== Environment ===
A large amount of electricity is needed to power generative AI products, making it more difficult for companies to achieve net zero emissions. From 2019 to 2024, Google's greenhouse gas emissions increased by nearly 50%, partly as a result of increased energy consumption by AI data centres.
=== Biosecurity and cybersecurity ===
AI is expected by researchers of the Center for AI Safety to improve the "accessibility, success rate, scale, speed, stealth and potency of cyberattacks", potentially causing "significant geopolitical turbulence" if it reinforces attack more than defense. Concerns have been raised about the potential capability of future AI systems to engineer particularly lethal and contagious pathogens.