The Energy and Environmental Footprint of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to create major economic and social benefits but also to rapidly escalate electricity demand and its associated environmental impacts. Information has been a cornerstone of environmental law for half a century, and this Article argues that providing information to individual, corporate, and other users about the electricity demand and environmental impacts of AI can reduce those impacts without delaying development of the technology. Little is known about how AI large language models (LLMs) compare on these issues, though, and to address this shortcoming the Article provides the first comparison of the outputs of four AI environmental footprint calculators. The Article finds that running the same AI query through all four calculators produces substantial differences in outputs, with one calculator producing an estimate more than 50 times higher than another for the same type of query. These differences suggest that substantial improvements are needed in the disclosure of information, whether through international, national, state, or private standards, to provide reliable estimates of energy use and environmental impacts to users. In turn, more accurate, easily available information can create incentives for reducing the costs, energy demand, and environmental impacts of AI even in a deregulatory era.