Reads, takes and links. Posted here, before I forget them.
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Even with proprietary GenAI models, you can influence the environmental impact of use through supplier choice
I came across an interesting paper, How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference via a post on social media by a friend of mine, Asim Hussein, and one of the details surprised me enough to want to capture it here. What was worth writing down then? It’s on page…
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Google’s expenditure on AI is eye watering
Before I saw this chart, I knew that the hyperscalers had been spending huge amounts on datacentre infrastructure, but I had some vague idea that Amazon was spending the most, followed by Microsoft, then and Google. Boy was I wrong. Google has been outspending the other huge hyperscalers since 2018 This chart is from an…
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AI the tool vs AI the project
It’s the weekend, I’m trying to close down a bunch of tabs, and one tab I hadn’t realised I had open was this piece by Andy Masley about AI-generated images he’s been creating with Midjourney. Before it disappears into the either, I figured it was worth jotting a few thoughts down. Here’s the quote(s) that…
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What’s the single thing you would do to make a web service more sustainable these days?
From between 2018 and April 2025, I was an organiser of an online community called climateAction.tech. I’ve written about it a few times before on this blog. In the community slack, someone who I respect asked a valid question: For context, they work in a business selling what I consider domain names at the higher…
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A few notes on the quest for £1/kg H2, and relating it to fossil free datacentres
This post from Rivan, a hydrogen startup, makes a few key points that I think are really interesting in the context of the research into fossil-free molecules you might need for aviation, shipping, all year round power generation, and a fossil free internet. I’ve mainly written for my future self as much as anyone else,…
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Things you forget to ask when doing a podcast about AI power spikes and hardware standards
I’m sharing this here to come back to later, as I host a podcast called Environment Variables and I recently did an interview with some folks who are working on getting a standards group off the ground focussed on how datacentre hardware and software work together. There was one claim that during the interview I didn’t…
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Is the problem just GenAI?
I’m trying to make sense of some of the figures shared when we talk about the environmental impact of AI, and what the specific drivers of it are, in terms of the specific kinds of AI being deployed around the world. Here are some notes, and a request for help to point somekind of useful…
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Is the GHG Protocol including “enabled emissions” in Scope 3 in future?
I found this when I sitting down to read Killian Daly’s recent update on the Energy Tag blog about how the GHG Protocol is changing how organisations report the greenness of electricity and it seemed interesting enough to jot some notes here for others, as I hadn’t seen it coming at all. The next version…
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Getting my head around power factor when we talk about power usage of the internet
I was recently a technical reviewer of a paper by the Greening of Streaming folks, called “Overview of Power Factor in Streaming“, and the there’s a few takeaways that surprised me enough to want to make a note to come back to it in future (here’s the linkedIn post announcing the paper). Power factor was…
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On conflating different kinds of AI in the climate context
I’ve found myself looking for this quote 3 times this month, and LinkedIn is a real pain to use to find it, so I’m posting it here. This quote from David Rolnick, one of the founders of the non-profit Climate Change AI is a useful one to have handy, because its coming from someone with…
Got any book recommendations?