Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/environmental-impacts-of-artificial-intelligence

by doener • 1 year ago

84 98 1 year ago

djoldman• 1 year ago

Greenpeace calls for the following measures to minimize the environmental impacts of Artificial Intelligence:
1. An energy-efficient AI infrastructure powered 100% by renewable energy. This green power must be additionally generated.
2. AI companies must disclose: a. How much electricity is used in operating their AI. b. How much power is consumed by users during their use of AI. c. The goals under which their models were trained, and which environmental parameters were considered.
3. AI developers must take responsibility for their supply chains. They must contribute to the expansion of renewable energy in line with their growth and ensure that local communities do not suffer negative consequences (e.g., lack of drinking water, higher electricity prices).

Is there a term for "energy neutrality," the cousin of "net neutrality"?

Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for?

If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks.

doener2• 1 year ago

2. AI companies must disclose: a. How much electricity is used in operating their AI.

Doesn't training the model consume the most energy in most cases?

gruez4• 1 year ago

Depends. For CoT models inference is significantly more costly (compared to regular models).

Also,

Brent Thill of Jefferies, an analyst, estimates that [inference] accounts for 96% of the overall energy consumed in data centres used by the AI industry.

https://archive.is/GJs5n

Zacharias0302• 1 year ago

This is changing rapidly.

Google announced they are serving 500T tokens per month. State of the art models are currently trained with less than 30T tokens. Even if training tokens are more costly to run (eg, a factor of 3x for forward, backward, and weight updates, and take another factor of 2x for missing quantization), you end up in a situation where inference compute dominates training after a very short time of amortization.

Uehreka• 1 year ago

Net Neutrality is a really bad awkward term that constantly confuses laypeople. I get what you’re saying, but don’t lean on the term Net Neutrality in the hopes it will help people understand by building off something else they understand: People don’t understand Net Neutrality.

mbgerring2• 1 year ago

As long as energy production and consumption has severe downstream impacts, yes, we do need to wade into this territory.

All serious, viable plans for decarbonization include a massive increase in electricity consumption, due to electrification of transportation, industrial processes, etc, along with an increase in renewable energy production. This isn't new, but AI datacenters are a very large net new single user of electricity.

If the amount of money already poured into AI had gone into the rollout of clean energy infrastructure, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, but here we are.

It makes perfect sense from a policy perspective, given that there are a small number of players in this space with more resources than most governments, to piggyback on this wave of infrastructure buildout.

It also makes plenty of financial sense. Initial capex for adding clean energy generation is high, but given both the high electricity usage of AI datacenters, and the long-term impact on the grid that someone will eventually have to pay for, companies deploying AI infrastructure would be smart to use the huge amount of capital at their disposal to generate their own electricity.

It's also, from a deployment standpoint, pretty straightforward — we're talking about massive, rectangular, warehouse-like buildings with flat roofs. We should have already mandated that all such buildings be covered in solar panels with on-site storage, at a minimum.

nico_h2• 1 year ago

Sadly we’re already in the long term impact of the previous energy revolution, so we’d better get starting now instead of when we’ll feel the impact of this next compute evolution.

phillipcarter3• 1 year ago

If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks.

I agree that in general, if the goal is to limit CO2 emissions and use renewable sources of energy, we ought not to focus on AI first, because it is dwarfed by many other things that we take for granted today. My canonical example I give folks is that the latte they order every day from Starbucks involves substantially more energy and water use than most uses of ChatGPT on a daily basis.

But as we move to digitize more and more of this world, and now create automated cognitive labor, we should start with the right foundations. I'd rather we not try to disentangle critical AI infrastructure from coal power plants, and I'd rather we try to limit the compute available to workloads in ways that encourage people to use the tech actually befitting of their use case rather than throw it all into the most expensive model every time.

nico_h2• 1 year ago

Oh wow, growing, drying, transporting, roasting, transporting, brewing something takes more energy and physical resources than a single query in a computer? Physical goods are amazing like that. I wonder how margins on software stuff are so high!??!

More seriously, i’m not too sure about the energy cost and IP infringed during the training and the value added to society by providing generic and mostly accurate but sometimes wildly wrong answers. Or from generating text or pretty pictures for a few milli-cents in cooling and electricity vs asking a human to do the same for a few kilo-cents.

It’s a lot of ladder kicking in the software industry these days.

TimPC2• 1 year ago

How about the silly treadmill where we waste billions of compute to compute useless proof of work type behaviours and whenever more compute gets thrown at the problem we just make it harder to ensure there isn't better output. I believe it was called buttcoin or something silly like that.

whiplash4514• 1 year ago

Using a subpar model and having to run multiple requests may not be a better deal for climate than a sota model one-shotting the right answer.

atonse• 1 year ago

Technically, if it's all clean energy, does it matter if it's "energy-efficient"?

So it seems like the better goal is to just aim for more clean energy.

mcv3• 1 year ago

Once we've got abundant clean energy, it might not matter so much anymore, but as long as we're still burning carbon, it matters a lot. And until we get there, we should probably do both.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

We should probably just do a carbon tax and not wade into that morass.

There’s a lot of focus on the carbon cost of various digital goods. I get it. Destroying the environment is a big problem. But like, maybe we also should not make a bunch of plastic crap and ship it around the world a bunch of times.

jnieswl2• 1 year ago

Disclaimer:Foreword Author here. I agree that there are may things one could change, however for many other services or objects you buy, you are able to estimate the env. footprint or you can change your consumer behaviour. However for the top AI-models one has no clue how much energy is used. Therefore the demands are among others for transparency from the ai companies.

bbor• 1 year ago

  Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for?

I mean, yeah, that's just basic civil regulation. Energy generation has massive negative externalities, and preventing waste is a worthy cause. I don't agree that AI must be singled out in that sense, but even it were, I imagine a modest push for efficiency would only help us in the long run.

  If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look.

Well put, but I think it's important to bring the analysis one level up, and look at emissions. In that paradigm, meat eating and non-essential travel (yes, including vacations to Rome, business meetings, scientific conferences, and other perceived-to-be-unalienable rights) are punching way above their weight class.

For anyone who's curious on specifics re:AI emissions, the recent MIT article is the gold standard in terms of specificity, neutrality, and nuance: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ... .

I also did some napkin math here in 2024.12: https://bsky.app/profile/robb.doering.ai/post/3lckwra33vk2t TL;DR: Eating one less burger affords you ~300 chatbot inferences, and avoiding a flight from ATL to SFO affords you ~16,000.

TimPC2• 1 year ago

I think if we do want to do this then banning bitcoin proof of work behaviours seems far more important.

jcynix• 1 year ago

If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks.

Air conditioning for example would be a good place to save energy, as the world wide energy consumption is a multiple of AI's consumption. But climate change will push the need (not luxury) for air conditioning up, which is the Catch-22 in this case.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that 10% of the globally generated energy is used for sir conditioning. But it would nevertheless be a good idea to require AI companies to care for renewable energy before they reach similar consumption levels.

Regarding the "morass" … we tell people how fast they can drive, or companies to limit air pollution (at least in some countries) so no problem here.

masswerk• 1 year ago

Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for?

This really applies to any application which consumes high percentages of the resources available. (Compare, data centers are responsible for almost 80% of the electricity consumption in the Dublin area according to the paper.) The rational of purpose and resource demand and expected effects is secondary to this. The primary question is about (significant) quantities.

lenerdenator• 1 year ago

We didn't care about the environmental impacts of all of the other stuff that made a few people obscenely rich; we're not gonna start now.

I mean, should we? Yeah. But we're not gonna.

FredPret4• 1 year ago

Everything you say is valid, but you left out the part where, in addition to new tech making a few "obscenely" rich, it also makes a layer of very many people under them extremely rich, and almost everyone else a lot better off in the long run.

Here's some stats showing the growth of the millionaire class, now up to 7% of the population: https://www.statista.com/chart/30671/number-of-millionaires-...

At the same time, here's some stats showing extreme poverty falling off a cliff: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-wor...

Such a thing was completely unthinkable before disruptive tech and the associated mega-rich became the new normal 200 years ago.

Having said that, you're correct to point out that negative externalities haven't really entered our minds until about 50-75 years ago, but it seems tech progress has even made clean, green living at scale possible at least in principle.

coliveira4• 1 year ago

poverty falling off a cliff

This is 80% due to the Chinese government, if it was for billionaires they would all be as poor as before.

mulmen3• 1 year ago

We didn't care about the environmental impacts of all of the other stuff

Speak for yourself. Environmentalism has been a thing for longer than I have been alive. Clearly we care.

And before you reply with even more toxic cynicism stand behind an idling 1960, 1980, 2000 and 2020 sedan and tell me you can’t tell the difference.

sergiotapia• 1 year ago

As long as India and China are dumping obscene amounts of plastics into the ocean, I don't really wanna hear it. AI drop in the bucket. The measures imposed on Americans and worse Europeans is an insult.

mbgerring2• 1 year ago

China is going to beat the U.S. to decarbonization. This excuse never made sense, and by the end of this decade it will be unintelligible.

FredPret4• 1 year ago

They pollute because they've turned into the West's industrial zone. They only make a bunch of stuff because we buy it

_0ffh• 1 year ago

Do you know the CO2 footprint of the untold megatons of concrete poured into ghost cities? Germany is still manufacturing stuff, and would easily beat China in CO2/capita if they hadn't shut down the nuclear power plants.

imnotlost• 1 year ago

Just build a bunch of nuclear power plants around the world. If we can spend a trillion or two bombing the taliban back into power we can afford some energy projects.

melling3• 1 year ago

Greenpeace is likely opposed to that.

fragmede• 1 year ago

Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future.

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate/issues/nuclear/

mcv3• 1 year ago

Nuclear power plants are expensive and take time to build, though. At the moment we're still burning way too much oil and coal for our energy, and everything that drives up demand, contributes to that.

melling3• 1 year ago

We’ve had 40 years and we’re still burning all the coal Carl Sagan warned us about.

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=3uhneUSoiZaUKS9M

So, after 40 years I’m a little tired of hearing it takes too long to build nuclear power plants.

On the bright side, we’ve almost reached peak coal:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...

zekrioca• 1 year ago

Why do you think this “easy solution” would work?

elpocko11• 1 year ago

There are many more millions of GPUs in computers and game consoles around the world burning electricity for your entertainment, for decades. The same class of devices. The environmental impact of having pretty pixels on your screens is at least an order of magnitude higher than what it is for AI, for inference and training. I don't see anyone being up in arms about that.

coliveira4• 1 year ago

Your calculations must be severely off, because I never heard anyone advocating for the construction of nuclear reactors to power game consoles around the world. However, we hear everyday that we need to build these reactors right now if we want to have AI.

mulmen3• 1 year ago

Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are geographically distributed and so is their power generation. Data centers are …centralized. Dedicated power plants for large data center installations are not new.

elpocko11• 1 year ago

I hear people advocating for the construction of nuclear reactors every day. They don't mention gaming, just like they don't mention refrigerators or washing machines specifically. A gaming machine consumes the same amount of energy as a machine used for AI, it's the same hardware. AI consumes it for seconds per user, while one gaming machine is used for hours per session. The energy required by one human to play a game for one hour could serve hundreds or thousands of AI users.

gruez4• 1 year ago

That's his point? Greenpace wants AI datacenters to be built with clean energy. elpocko points out that plenty of other pointless electricity consumers also aren't being built with clean energy today. That's not an argument against green energy, but is pointing out that greenpace isn't very rigorous with their pleas. They're seemingly picking whatever is the most topical. We should be against this, because latching on to the latest thing basically guarantees that the next thing rolls around, all the momentum will be lost. Remember when everyone was up in arms about crypto mining? How it's barely brought up because everyone's focused on AI.

namuol2• 1 year ago

Show your math.

elpocko11• 1 year ago

Besides common sense, I can tell you about my kW h counter going brrr when playing games (400 W continuously, sometimes for hours on end) vs. running Stable Diffusion or Llama-whatever (400 W for 15 seconds every 3 minutes for an hour or two). Extrapolate from that.

Night_Thastus• 1 year ago

The GPUs in PCs, consoles and phones aren't running full tilt 24/7. They run very bursty workloads for a couple hours a day at most.

Those in AI data centers never stop running and completely utilize their capacity. The difference in power usage is astronomical.

whiplash4514• 1 year ago

Can you please at least do the back-of-the-envelope math behind the “astronomical”?

I don’t claim to know, but we ought to be able to have a rational debate on this.

pavlov• 1 year ago

It’s not the same class of device.

A typical NVIDIA server GPU consumes 700W, and a server might have eight of them, so 5.6kW.

A PlayStation 5 consumes 200W total.

gruez4• 1 year ago

A PS5 serves a single person, maybe two. A datacenter GPU might be shared by dozens or hundreds of people, depending on how you count occupancy.

jonas21• 1 year ago

A typical server is serving hundreds or thousands of user sessions, while a PlayStation 5 is serving only one.

nemo2• 1 year ago

There are a lot of folks who vastly underestimate the carbon output of current AI training and work, and you're among them. The number of data centers being raised right now with increased power planning around data centers around the globe points to a reality of energy consumption that's probably an order of magnitude higher than you imagine. At a time when the costs of carbon poisoning the oceans is getting really ugly and driving extinctions, melting polar ice, and driving global warming, writing off a major new generator of atmospheric carbon is dangerously irresponsible.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

elpocko11• 1 year ago

writing off a major new generator of atmospheric carbon is dangerously irresponsible.

I agree: ignoring the carbon footprint of the gaming industry is irresponsible.

js8• 1 year ago

However, each consumer is paying for his own gaming console power. With AI (but also other "free" Internet services), there is a tragedy of commons (a coordination) problem, where you don't know the direct cost to you and so you (and others) will not make rational choices.

toshinoriyagi• 1 year ago

The most common GPU per the steam survey is the RTX 3060 at 170W TDP. A huge % of users have cards near or below this TDP. The SXM H100 has a 700W TDP, and will spend far more of its life at or near that value.

Given an average ~8 hours of work/school and ~8 hours of sleep, gaming GPUs likely don't use anywhere near as much power. Plus, even when they are on, they will probably idle near 30W-60W for a lot of time spent browsing the web or watching videos.

There are more gaming GPUs in existence right now, but the number of AI chips is likely closing that gap rapidly.

And of course, what is that energy being used for? People playing games are typically having fun, bonding with friends, or engaging in social behavior. A huge amount of AI is illegally trained on copyrighted works without license to use them, causing significant harm to various fields. Plus the deluge of AI slop bogging down the internet, social media, forums, image/art-hosting sites, search, and more.

I think it will be a while before modern generative AI is even close to providing value in aggregate.

narrator2• 1 year ago

Wait till the mining gets automated, the transportation gets automated, the manufacturing and construction gets automated. There won't be that much labor and we will run into our ecological limits to growth at meteoric speed since that will be the limiting factor on the AI/robot genie. The only job at the government will be who gets to use the AI/robot genie and frantically running about trying to play whack-a-mole with paperclip maximizers that will appear everywhere. The whole economy will collapse to that. Basically, central planning all over again. This is why we need Free Market Ecology. I'll post a link if anyone's interested.

astariul• 1 year ago

Please share

narrator2• 1 year ago

https://botsfordism.substack.com/p/the-economic-math-behind-...

yomismoaqui• 1 year ago

Is Greenpeace still a thing? I thought that Greta Thunberg and Just Stop Oil stole their thunder.

sien• 1 year ago

100 M Euro budget , 3.4 K staff, 34 K volunteers.

They are a big thing. Old people still donate to them.

They are a big reason Africans don't grow GMOs that can help children avoid blindness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace

MoonGhost• 1 year ago

Realistic calculations should include both sides. New way vs old. In this case AI assisted vs manual. Here intentionally only one side considered. Because comparison does not produce desirable result. Which makes in attention attracting BS.

platevoltage• 1 year ago

It is kind of weird to see the same people who have been saying "Our grid can't support electric cars" also not seeing any issue with the injection of AI into everything we see and do.

klysm• 1 year ago

I don’t think this argument applies because AI workloads can be centralized

grej• 1 year ago

Linking energy use to the environment is a political choice, and Greenpeace are some of the worst offenders for making the situation worse by opposing nuclear power at every turn.

dydghks2033• 1 year ago

Interesting point about energy cost. If GPT inference keeps scaling, latency + watt efficiency might become central to AGI deployment.

option• 1 year ago

What is the environmental impacts of Greenpeace lobbying against nuclear power?

Zaylan• 1 year ago

We talk a lot about AI’s potential, but its energy footprint is often underestimated. As model sizes grow, the environmental impact of both training and inference may show up faster than expected. It's an issue worth more attention.

whiplash4514• 1 year ago

Let's try to ground the discussion into data.

Headcounts:

- Gaming GPUs: Installed base 700-900M GPUs + active gaming rigs (100-200M). Assumption of 250M active gamers worldwide.

- AI GPUs: ~3 million high-performance AI GPUs currently in active use globally

Average power usage:

Gaming: 3 hours gaming at 300W → 37.5W average over 24h

AI: 16h×600W+8h×100Widle=10400Wh→ 433W average over 24h

Total Global GPU Power Consumption:

Gaming: 250M GPUs × 37.5W avg = ~9.4 GW -> 9.4GW×24h×365=82.4 TWh/year

AI: 3M GPUs × 433W avg = ~1.3 GW -> 1.3GW×24h×365=11.4 TWh/year

Even taking into account that data centers also require power for cooling, which doubles AI GPU energy impact, gaming >> AI by a wide margin.

Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

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