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Is AI a climate change villain whose insatiable hunger for electricity will roast the planet? Or will it help predict where the next climate disaster will strike and what to do about it?

To weigh these questions, a good starting point is AI's energy consumption.

The 2015 Paris Agreement was a deal among almost 200 countries to keep "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels" and pursue efforts "to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels."

Training and deploying AI models take place in large data centers that use a lot of power. A typical AI-focused data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households. That's why energy use is at the heart of this question about how AI will affect climate change.

But AI's energy consumption is increasing fast. According to the International Energy Agency, the power used to train large language models (LLMs) and to run them has risen roughly tenfold since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. And AI data centers of the future will consume far more electricity than they do today, perhaps 20 times more.

Use of AI has grown very fast and is still growing. 2 quadrillion tokens (the units of data AI models read and process) since last year.

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