BAN report says AI e-waste could hit 617 million tons by 2050

The nonprofit Basel Action Network (BAN) published a report arguing that electronic waste from the AI buildout has been badly underestimated. By 2050, it says, the accumulated trash could fill 23 million shipping containers, enough 40-foot containers to circle the world about six times if lined up end to end.

The difference is scope. Earlier studies counted servers and accelerators, which BAN says misses roughly 87 percent of a data center's electro-mechanical infrastructure. The new count adds power supply and distribution, cooling systems, backup power and networking gear.

The numbers

BAN estimates 70,000 metric tons of e-waste per gigawatt of data center capacity, citing a McKinsey projection that total capacity could reach 219GW by 2030. Equipment retired between 2025 and 2050 adds up to 395 to 617 million metric tons, or roughly 8.6 million to 13.1 million tons a year.

Global e-waste will triple to as much as 211 million tons a year by 2050, the group says, with AI responsible for 15 to 20 percent of it. That figure includes what BAN calls "AI Waste Contagion": telecom infrastructure and personal devices that get replaced earlier because of AI advances.

Where the waste goes

Less than a quarter of the 68.3 million tons of e-waste produced worldwide each year is formally collected and recycled. The rest largely ends up in informal collection, where burning or burying equipment exposes workers and local environments to lead and chromium.

"AI may feel weightless, but every model depends on an enormous amount of highly specialized, cutting edge hardware," BAN founder Jim Puckett said in a press release.

Previous projections were smaller. A 2024 study forecast 1.2 million to 5 million tons by 2030, while another published in February put AI servers at 131,000 to 225,000 tons a year by the end of the decade. Full coverage at The Verge.