What do we really know about the environmental costs of the infrastructures behind the AI models we use daily? To answer this simple question, there is first what we currently know, from energy consumption and related carbon emissions, water usage for cooling systems in data centres, or material needs to produce GPUs. There are then a lot of blind spots, like the so-called “enabled emissions” that occur when AI is used to accelerate polluting activities, or the “rebound effect” where efficiency gains lead to an increase in a technology usage, which eventually increases overall emissions. In this landscape, the ecological footprint of data centres remains however largely concealed behind high-level corporate pledges and selective transparency. Every year, the publication by tech companies of their annual environmental reports offers a unique opportunity to get environmental information on the development of AI and its related infrastructures. In this opinion piece, I review the most recent environmental sustainability reports published by Microsoft and Google, offering a glimpse into the ecological realities of two of the world’s most influential tech giants. In their communications campaigns, they emphasise carbon removals, water replenishment, and renewable energy purchases, but are these all their environmental reports have to…
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