MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Tackling AI's Climate Change Problem

In an era defined by both the promise of technological innovation and the threat of climate change, artificial intelligence has emerged as both a valuable tool and a difficult challenge. As we use AI to tackle tough problems, we must also grapple with its hidden environmental costs and consider solutions that will allow us to harness its potential while mitigating its climate impact.

The success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model, which is backed by Microsoft, has sparked a technology arms race, with tech giants making enormous investments in building their own natural language processing systems. But the quest for more intelligent machines is quickly running into a web of sustainability challenges. AI has a fast-growing carbon footprint, stemming from its voracious appetite for energy and the carbon costs of manufacturing the hardware it uses. Since 2012, the most extensive AI training runs have been using exponentially more computing power, doubling every 3.4 months, on average.

About the Author

Niklas Sundberg is the author of Sustainable IT Playbook for Technology Leaders (Packt Publishing, 2022) and a board member of SustainableIT.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing global sustainability through technology leadership. He is chief digital officer at Kuehne+Nagel, a global transport and logistics company, and was previously CIO and global head of enterprise architecture at Assa Abloy.

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