Communications of the ACM
The Carbon Footprint of Artificial Intelligence
Credit: Olivier Le Moal
The growing utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) is apparent across all facets of society, from the models used to enable semi-autonomous cars, to models that serve up recommendations on streaming or e-commerce sites, and in the language models used to create more natural, intuitive human-machine interaction. However, these technological achievements come with costs, namely the massive amounts of electrical power required to train AI algorithms, build and operate the hardware on which these algorithms are run, and to run and maintain that hardware throughout its life cycle.
The cost of the electricity is not the only impact; traditional power plants that use fossil fuels (as well as some geothermal processes) to create power emit relatively high amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) as they generate electricity, compared with renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, or nuclear plants, which do not. That emitted CO2 has a direct impact on the environment. (See Andrew Chien's column on p. 5.)
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