Measuring the Carbon Intensity of AI in Cloud Instances
Jesse Dodge, Taylor Prewitt, Rémi Tachet des Combes, Erika Odmark, Roy Schwartz, Emma Strubell, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, Noah A. Smith, Nicole DeCario, Will Buchanan
Abstract
The advent of cloud computing has provided people around the world with unprecedented access to computational power and enabled rapid growth in technologies such as machine learning, the computational demands of which incur a high energy cost and a commensurate carbon footprint. As a result, recent scholarship has called for better estimates of the greenhouse gas impact of AI: data scientists today do not have easy or reliable access to measurements of this information, which precludes development of actionable tactics. We argue that cloud providers presenting information about software carbon intensity to users is a fundamental stepping stone towards minimizing emissions.