Artificial Intelligence Is Booming—So Is Its Carbon Footprint
Artificial intelligence has become the tech industry's shiny new toy, with expectations it'll revolutionize trillion-dollar industries from retail to medicine. But the creation of every new chatbot and image generator requires a lot of electricity, which means the technology may be responsible for a massive and growing amount of planet-warming carbon emissions. Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and ChatGPT maker OpenAI use cloud computing that relies on thousands of chips inside servers in massive data centers…