Recently there’s been a lot of attention given to the carbon footprint of just about everything, but especially data centers that are already operating or being built. This foot print is especially scary when you consider that companies themselves generally under-report what they believe it is.
A recent Guardian analysis found that real emissions between 2020 and 2022 from data centers owned by the four big tech companies, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, were likely to be 662% higher than officially reported.
AI is making the problem even worse. According to the Guardian, “The best information we have is from informed third-party estimates: training GPT-3, a precursor to the current model, used an estimated 5.4m litres of water, according to one academic study, and produced as much CO2 as would be generated by flying between New York and San Francisco 550 times.”
We know this to be a problem on a large scale, but how much data does each of us consume in a day?
Again, according to the Guardian:
- Listening to a podcast: 20-100MB an hour
- Watching Netflix: 3GB an hour at HD quality
- Online shopping: Consider the data size of any images you browse, which can be big, before even thinking of the environmental impact of your delivery
- WhatsApp text message: 1-5KB a message, on average
- WhatsApp voice call: 400KB-1MB a minute
- WhatsApp video call: 2.5-15MB a minute
- Average pre-AI Google search: 500KB for a text-based search
- Average post-AI Google search: No one knows …
- Sending an email: Depends on the size of the message, but about 75KB on average
- Sending an email with photo attachment: As above, plus the size of the attachment
- Downloading an album on Spotify: Depends on your audio quality, but around 72MB for an hour-long album
- Playing a game of Fortnite: Between 45 and 100MB an hour
All of this data is pulled from a data center somewhere, contributing to the problem.
So how can each of us contribute to lowering the carbon footprint of the planet. Again according to the Guardian, “[Sasha] Luccioni, [AI and climate lead at AI company Hugging Face] advocates for “digital sobriety”: being mindful about how we use AI. “You don’t need to be using these new AI tools for everything,” she says. “There are applications that are useful, but there’s a lot of cases where you really don’t need them.” The same approach holds true for everything digital: think twice, text once.”
That doesn’t seem that difficult, but can we actually do it?
