Phoenix Mayor Exposes Coal Plants, Broken Promises as Climate Leaders Confront AI's Surging Footprint

Climate Group's first-ever AI Forum at Climate Week NYC brought city leaders, tech executives, and UN officials face to face with the environmental costs of the artificial intelligence boom — and the gap between industry promises and community realities. From London's new data center planning policy to Phoenix's coal plants kept running for tech companies to a UN warning that 118 countries are locked out of AI governance entirely, the forum revealed an industry at an inflection point between speed and sustainability.

• Phoenix mayor reveals coal plants staying online to power data centers while one facility's heat output equals 180,000 homes
• London drafts its first-ever data center planning policy to protect housing, water, and air quality from AI growth
• Schneider Electric research shows closed-loop liquid cooling cuts data center water use by over 50%, a critical finding for water-stressed cities
• Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft back a climate tech innovation fund that drew 400 applications for clean construction and energy storage solutions
• Ember predicts "physical AI" will demand 6–10 times more electricity than data centers, upending current grid planning assumptions
• UNOPS warns 118 nations are excluded from AI governance as the UN Secretary-General launches a transparency initiative demanding renewable-powered data centers by 2030

Why it matters: Phoenix is one of the world's largest data center concentrations — 320 sunny days, low natural disaster risk, a semiconductor ecosystem. But Mayor Kate Gallego delivered the forum's most unflinching account of what that growth actually looks like on the ground.