Title page 1

Contents 5

Acknowledgment 2

Abbreviations 7

Key Points in Brief 8

Executive Summary 11

1. AI Across the Globe 14

1.1. A Technological Explosion 17

1.2. The Expanding Reach of AI Across Sectors 18

1.3. The Global Market for AI 18

1.4. Impacts on the Global Labor Market 19

1.5. Growing Concerns About AI 20

1.6. Environmental Dimensions of AI 22

1.7. A Just and Sustainable AI Future 24

2. AI's Growing Global Energy Demand 25

2.1. Energy Intensity of AI Training 26

2.2. AI's Energy Demand and its Environmental Footprints 26

2.3. AI's Training Footprints 26

2.4. Data Centers and AI's Expanding Energy Demand 30

2.5. AI's Contributions to Data Centers' Energy Use 33

2.6. World's Top Data Center Hosts and Their Electricity Mixes 34

2.7. Local Costs, Distant Benefits 36

3. AI in Use: Tools & Tasks 38

3.1. Two Forces Shaping AI's Operational Footprint 39

3.2. AI Tasks and Their Footprints 40

3.3. AI use at scale 41

3.4. Conventional Search Versus AI-Enhanced Search 42

3.5. Efficiency Improvement and Rebound Effects 43

3.6. Behavioral Energy Costs: Model Choice and User Prompts Matter 43

3.7. Towards sustainable use and scale 45

4. The Way Forward 46

4.1. Guiding Principles for a Responsible AI Ecosystem 47

4.2. From Measurement to Action 48

4.3. Roles and Responsibilities 49

4.4. Putting Principles into Practice 52

4.5. Conclusion 52

References 53

Figure 1. The evolution of artificial intelligence 16

Figure 2. Industrial revolutions from mechanization to intelligent systems 17

Figure 3. Key breakthroughs in deep learning 23

Figure 4. Global electricity supply by source 27

Figure 5. Electricity supply mixes in major data center host locations 28

Figure 6. Global electricity footprints 29

Figure 7. Footprints of electricity in the world's top 20 data center hubs 31

Figure 8. Global distribution of data center locations 32

Figure 9. Global electricity footprint intensities across the world's top 20 data center hubs relative to the global average 37

Figure 10. Energy demand in AI arises from two distinct phases 39

Figure 11. Energy per query for representative text and image generation tasks 41

Figure 12. How video generation settings shape energy demand 44

Figure 13. Six guiding principles for operationalizing responsible AI 48