The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has been accelerating across all parts of society, boosting productivity and addressing pressing global challenges such as climate change. Nonetheless, the technological advancement of AI relies on computationally intensive calculations and thus has led to a surge in resource usage and energy consumption. Even putting aside the environmental toll of server manufacturing and supply chains, AI systems can create a huge environmental cost to communities and regions where they are deployed, including air/thermal pollution due to fossil fuel-based electricity generation and further stressed water resources due to AI's staggering water footprint.12,25 To make AI more environmentally friendly and ensure that its overall impacts on climate change are positive, recent studies have pursued multifaceted approaches, including efficient training and inference,5 energy-efficient GPU and accelerator designs,19 carbon forecasting,14 carbon-aware task scheduling,1,21 green cloud infrastructures,2 sustainable AI policies,10,18 and more. Additionally, datacenter operators have also increasingly adopted carbon-free energy (such as solar and wind power) and climate-conscious cooling systems, lowering carbon footprint and direct water consumption.8

Nonetheless, the technological advancement of AI relies on computationally intensive calculations and thus has led to a surge in resource usage and energy consumption. Even putting aside the environmental toll of server manufacturing and supply chains, AI systems can create a huge environmental cost to communities and regions where they are deployed, including air/thermal pollution due to fossil fuel-based electricity generation and further stressed water resources due to AI's staggering water footprint [12, 25]. To make AI more environmentally friendly and ensure that its overall impacts on climate change are positive, recent studies have pursued multi-faceted approaches, including efficient training and inference [5], energy-efficient GPU and accelerator designs [19], carbon forecasting[14], carbon-aware task scheduling[1, 21], green cloud infrastructures[2], sustainable AI policies [10, 18], and more. Additionally, data center operators have also increasingly adopted carbon-free energy(such as solar and wind power) and climate-conscious cooling systems, lowering carbon footprint and direct water consumption [8]. Although these initiatives are encouraging, unfortunately, a worrisome outcome-- environmental inequity -- has emerged [3]. That is, minimizing the total environmental cost of a globally deployed AI system across multiple regions does not necessarily mean that each region is treated equitably. In fact, the environmental cost of AI is often disproportionately higher in certain disadvantaged regions than in others. Even worse, AI's environmental inequity can be amplified by existing environmental equity agnostic resource allocation, load balancing, and scheduling algorithms and compounded by enduring socioeconomic disparities between regions.

The sharply increasing sizes of artificial intelligence (AI) models come with significant energy consumption and environmental footprints, which can disproportionately impact certain (often marginalized) regions and hence create environmental inequity concerns. Moreover, concerns with social inequity have also emerged, as AI computing resources may not be equitably distributed across the globe and users from certain disadvantaged regions with severe resource constraints can consistently experience inferior model performance. Importantly, the inequity concerns that encompass both social and environmental dimensions still remain unexplored and have increasingly hindered responsible AI. In this paper, we leverage the spatial flexibility of AI inference workloads and propose equitable geographical load balancing (GLB) to fairly balance AI's regional social and environmental costs. Concretely, to penalize the disproportionately high social and environmental costs for equity, we introduce $L_q$ norms as novel regularization terms into the optimization objective for GLB decisions. Our empirical results based on real-world AI inference traces demonstrate that while the existing GLB algorithms result in disproportionately large social and environmental costs in certain regions, our proposed equitable GLB can fairly balance AI's negative social and environmental costs across all the regions.

Fueled by the soaring popularity of large language and foundation models, the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence (AI) models' enormous environmental footprint has come under increased scrutiny. While many approaches have been proposed to make AI more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly, environmental inequity -- the fact that AI's environmental footprint can be disproportionately higher in certain regions than in others -- has emerged, raising social-ecological justice concerns. This paper takes a first step toward addressing AI's environmental inequity by balancing its regional negative environmental impact. Concretely, we focus on the carbon and water footprints of AI model inference and propose equity-aware geographical load balancing (GLB) to explicitly address AI's environmental impacts on the most disadvantaged regions. We run trace-based simulations by considering a set of 10 geographically-distributed data centers that serve inference requests for a large language AI model. The results demonstrate that existing GLB approaches may amplify environmental inequity while our proposed equity-aware GLB can significantly reduce the regional disparity in terms of carbon and water footprints.