Will AI help or harm the climate?

The race to build better AI systems is having an ever-bigger impact on the environment. Data centres, which store and process the information required to train and operate AI models, currently account for around 2% of global electricity consumption. That figure will rise, as new facilities are built to accommodate ever more energy-hungry machine learning. But AI could also help reduce emissions, for example, by optimising electricity grids, detecting methane leaks or developing better battery materials. So, will AI be bad for the environment…or will it turn out to be good?

Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor, with AI writer Alex Hern. Contributors: Sasha Luccioni of Hugging Face; Boris Gamazaychikov of Salesforce; and Ronnie Chatterji of OpenAI.