The Path to Sustainable AI -- Core Principles and Best Practices
Large-scale AI models are considerable consumers of computing resources and energy, leading to a significant carbon footprint on our planet. Researchers estimate that training a single natural language processing model can generate as much CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) as the annual emissions of 120 homes. AI workloads in data centers accounted for 15% of Google’s total electricity consumption -- 18.3 terawatt hours in 2021, which is comparable to the annual energy usage of the entire City of Atlanta. And this was well before the boom of generative AI technologies we have been witnessing over the last couple of years. Driven by the growing demands of large-scale data analytics and AI workloads, data centers are projected to consume 3–13% of global electricity by 2030 -- a significant increase from just 1% in 2010. The computational demands of cutting-edge AI models are increasing 1,000-fold every three years, and AI could account for 14% of the world’s total carbon emissions by