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Week 3

Environmental Implications of AI

Energy, water, hardware lifecycle, and the rebound problem

8 arXiv papers covering AI energy and water consumption, embodied carbon, the Jevons rebound, and sustainable AI practice. The OECD policy report is link-only.

All PDFs link to raw.githubusercontent.com; clicking will download the file directly. Source links go to the canonical version on arXiv, the journal, or the publisher.

3.1 · What Does AI Actually Consume?

Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models
Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M. A., & Ren, S. (2023)
Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?
Luccioni, S., Jernite, Y., & Strubell, E. (2024) — FAccT ’24

3.2 · Infrastructure, Scale and the Rebound Problem

Chasing Carbon: The Elusive Environmental Footprint of Computing
Gupta, U., et al. (2021) — IEEE HPCA 2021
Efficiency is Not Enough: A Critical Perspective of Environmentally Sustainable AI
Wright, D., Igel, C., Samuel, G., & Selvan, R. (2023)
The Carbon Footprint of Machine Learning Training Will Plateau, Then Shrink
Patterson, D., et al. (2022)

3.3 · Critical Minerals and AI

Sub-lesson uses news reporting and policy documents (CHIPS Act, EU CRMA, US Geological Survey) which aren’t redistributable PDFs.

3.4 · Sustainable AI: What Can Be Done?

Green AI
Schwartz, R., Dodge, J., Smith, N. A., & Etzioni, O. (2019)
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
Rolnick, D., et al. (2019)
Measuring the Carbon Intensity of AI in Cloud Instances
Dodge, J., et al. (2022) — FAccT ’22

Linked but not redistributed

OECD (2022). Measuring the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence compute and applications. DOI:10.1787/7babf571-en 3.4
Open-access on the OECD library — included as a link rather than a downloaded copy because the OECD URL changes occasionally.