Environmental impact of AI

Uncommon card · No. 115133

The design, training, deployment and use of artificial intelligence impacts the environment in several ways. This includes the greenhouse gas emissions from generating electricity for data centres and computing hardware, operational and upstream water use, and material impacts from hardware manufacturing, mining and electronic waste. AI also enables increased emissions through its use by the oil and gas industry, which is using AI to find, extract, and refine fuels more quickly and at reduced cost. Estimating AI's environmental effects can be difficult because results depend on how impacts are measured, including whether accounting includes only model computation or also data-centre overhead, idle capacity, hardware manufacture, and local electricity supply. As these issues have received greater attention, governments and regulators have increasingly considered data-centre reporting requirements, energy-efficiency standards, and broader transparency measures for AI-related resource use.

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