Pope Leo's AI encyclical takes on data centers' ecological toll

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May 29, 2026

An aerial view shows an Amazon Web Services Data Center known as US East 1 in Ashburn, Va., Oct. 20, 2025. (OSV News/Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical penned by Pope Leo XIV, made its public debut on Monday.

The expansive treatise on artificial intelligence — counting more than 200 pages and 42,000 words — delves into the technological revolution of our time that poses both immense potential and calamitous dangers to humanity as well as all of creation.

While environmental issues posed by AI make up but a portion of the encyclical (an authoritative papal teaching document), Leo engages some of the main ecological questions the explosion of artificial intelligence raises, including the massive natural resources needed for data centers to train and operate generative AI models and exploitation in the extraction of tech-critical minerals.

He also cites past popes, including Pope Francis and his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si', and builds off the church's expansive teaching on creation and ecology. During a May 25 event at the Vatican unveiling Magnifica Humanitas, Leo said he felt entrusted to examine the "huge transformation" AI presents for the world "with eyes of faith, with lucidity of reason, with openness to mystery, and with cries of the poor and the earth resounding in my heart."

In earlier remarks, Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the Vatican's Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said Magnifica Humanitas "stands in profound continuity" with Laudato Si' and its follow-up apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum "on the climate crisis."

Here are a few of the environmental excerpts from Magnifica Humanitas:

Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. [Paragraph 9]

Care for our common home and our responsibility toward the poor and future generations require that the use of the goods of creation and the new possibilities offered by technology be regulated in such a way as to respect the environment, avoid waste and prevent new forms of exploitation. [Paragraph 67]

To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. … Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible. [Paragraph 110]

Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources. As their complexity increases, especially in the case of large language models, the need for computing power and storage capacity grows too, which requires an extensive network of machines, cables, data centers and energy-intensive infrastructure. For this reason, it is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home. [Paragraph 101]

Today, the concept of integral human development is a benchmark for the evaluation of integral ecology, which has become an indispensable dimension of the Church's Social Doctrine. Indeed, the quality of development is measured by the ability to integrate justice toward people and the care of our common home, and to promote dignified living conditions, access to necessary goods, just social relations, care of creation and consideration for future generations. It follows that true progress is not what increases the wellbeing of some by degrading ecosystems, shifting costs onto the most disadvantaged communities, or compromising the living conditions of those who will follow us. [Paragraph 84]

Added to this invisible labor [of training AI models] is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly. [Paragraph 173]

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Final Beat:

Beyond Magnifica Humanitas' examination of AI's impacts on the physical world, Pope Leo also addressed the digital ecosystem rapidly emerging.

"Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage," he wrote.

That observation struck Paulist Fr. Ricky Manalo, author of the forthcoming book The Catholic Handbook on Artificial Intelligence.

"He doesn't see AI just as a tool of possible ecological harm, but it becomes a habitat. … It becomes the actual environment about how we live," Manalo told me this week.

"Laudato Si' clearly talked about this natural ecology, like what kind of physical world that we're leaving to the future generation, and what responsibilities do nations have, right? [Pope Leo's] talking about digital ecology, more like what kind of informational, relational, emotional world are we building for our future generations, and how is that affecting us today."

Manalo said that Leo is sounding a warning about the blurring of lines between physical and virtual spaces and the power of AI to shape humanity's perception of their environment and reality.

"The question then is, are we becoming more human inside this environment, this new [digital] ecology?" he said.

As always, thanks for reading EarthBeat.

Brian Roewe
Environment Correspondent
National Catholic Reporter
broewe@ncronline.org