How to shrink AI's ballooning carbon footprint

The carbon footprints of data centres, which provide cloud-computing services, can range widely.Credit: Feature China/Future Publishing/Getty As machine-learning experiments get more sophisticated, their carbon footprints are ballooning. Now, researchers have calculated the carbon cost of training a range of models at cloud-computing data centres in various locations1. Their findings could help researchers to reduce the emissions created by work that relies on artificial intelligence (AI). The team found marked differences in emissions between geographical locations. For the same AI experiment, "the most efficient regions produced about a third of the emissions of the least efficient", says Jesse Dodge, a researcher in machine learning at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, Washington, who co-led the study.