AI, Compute & Climate Change

Coherent AI-related policymaking will require an understanding of AI computing capacities and their environmental impact, particularly for supercomputing technologies.

Overview

Assessing AI compute capacity and its environmental impact, particularly supercomputing technologies, is crucial to policymaking. High demand for AI has created reliance on high-performance computational infrastructures making it urgent to gauge their environmental impact. Policymakers are uniquely positioned to leverage this knowledge to guide legislative agendas and international collaborations.

The OECD.AI Expert Group on AI Compute and Climate contributes to the OECD’s initiative to create a basic framework for understanding, measuring and benchmarking domestic AI computing capacity by country and region. While mindful of the ever-evolving state of the computing landscape, the expert group is working with key AI computing players in a data-gathering exercise to understand “ai compute” energy consumption.
photo of Compute Climate Overview