AI Compute and the Environment
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. These data can be explored in depth on the data tab of this page. The methodology counts cloud regions operated by major providers that hold a significant share of the global public cloud market. Cloud regions – physical hubs hosting specialised hardware designed to efficiently run AI workloads – are identified through publicly available data, and their AI compute capabilities are aggregated by geographic location. The resulting indicators categorise economies based on their availability of public cloud AI compute.
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.
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. These data can be explored in depth on the data tab of this page. The methodology counts cloud regions operated by major providers that hold a significant share of the global public cloud market. Cloud regions – physical hubs hosting specialised hardware designed to efficiently run AI workloads – are identified through publicly available data, and their AI compute capabilities are aggregated by geographic location. The resulting indicators categorise economies based on their availability of public cloud AI compute.
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.
Experts
The Expert Group on AI Compute and the Environment is comprised of multidisciplinary and cross-sector AI and foresight experts from around the world.
