Should we boycott AI for the climate?

On 18 June 2026, during a European AI summit in Lille, Le Monde published an open letter initiated by the Nord senator Alexandre Basquin and signed by around 150 people, including Annie Ernaux, Hervé Le Tellier, Enki Bilal and Françoise Nyssen. The text reads: "We refuse the inhuman project of an uninterrupted dialogue with machines." It calls for a boycott:

The open letter puts forward human, social and ecological reasons. Here we read only the climate argument, the one on which a firm that counts carbon can say something; our article on the boycott↗ reviews the others. This argument is worded as follows: data centres "capture green electricity at the expense of other sectors, delaying their necessary decarbonisation", including in countries whose electricity is already largely decarbonised. Before the call, the text mentions among the "proposals" that exist "a rationing of the energy resources allocated to generative AI", without making it its demand.

On this point, the figures give weight to the open letter. The world's data centres consumed 485 TWh in 2025, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects 945 in 2030 in its base case, a little more than Japan today. Worldwide, this increase remains smaller than that of air conditioning or electric cars. The pressure shows at country level: in Ireland, data centres consume 23% of the electricity recorded at meters in 2025.

Electricity

Data centres' share of electricity

Share of national electricity consumption, latest published year · 2023 to 2025, depending on the country

Ireland, 202523%

↑15 times the world averageelectricity measured at the meter

Netherlands, 20244.6%

United States, 20234.4%

World, 20241.5%

France, 2024about 1%

Source: CSO; CBS; LBNL; IEA; RTE, Projet Celsius calculation · projetcelsius.com/en/ai · CC BY 4.0

PNGCSV

The open letter's argument is one of conflict of use. A grid whose low-carbon electricity is limited shares it between uses: one more data centre means that much less low-carbon electricity to electrify heating, transport or industry, as long as production has not kept pace. The argument holds where the grid is tight; it therefore depends on the country and the region.

The proposed boycott concerns people's use of generative AI. Yet consumer chat windows account, according to our estimate in "L'IA de surface et l'IA des profondeurs", for less than 5% of the electricity of data centres dedicated to AI. Set against the electricity of all data centres, which is what the open letter's argument concerns, this share is smaller still. The same analysis estimates that the heavy uses at the surface, images and video, do not change this order of magnitude. The rest goes through uses without an interface: recommendation, agents, business software, model training.

At the scale of one person, a year of ordinary personal use weighs about 340 gCO2e for server electricity, according to the AI Impact Database estimate, or 0.004% of the carbon footprint of a French person. A widely followed boycott would therefore mainly reduce a small share of the electricity concerned. It would have no direct effect on the connection of a data centre already decided, or on the electricity that supplies it.

The open letter mentions "rationing" in passing. Several countries already regulate the siting of data centres: their connection to the grid, their location, or the publication of their consumption.

These measures act on what the open letter describes: the electricity that a data centre takes from the grid, the place where it is built and what it must publish. They are decided by a regulator or a legislator, and their effect is measured site by site.

The strongest objection is about the signal. A boycott does not target only the kilowatt-hours of its participants: it tells companies and investors that demand is not guaranteed, and it is this expected demand that gets data centres built. The US campaign QuitGPT, launched in early 2026, asked people to cancel their ChatGPT subscription; its organisers claimed more than 17,000 sign-ups as of 10 February, then more than 1.5 million people on 2 March, counting cancellations, shares and sign-ups, according to Euronews. Its main motive was political: a donation by Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, in support of Donald Trump.

This signal exists, and it stems from a political choice that it is not for us to settle on behalf of everyone. For the climate, it remains indirect: it works through company forecasts, with no guarantee of reaching the electricity of a given grid. Connection decisions can be measured and discussed site by site.