COP29: AI’s double-edged climate sword will be high on the agenda

This year’s UN climate change conference will for the first time rally the technology industry to take on the climate emergency.

COP29, which kicks off on Monday in Baku, will hold its first-ever Digitalisation Day and other roundtables with artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on the climate high on the agenda.

AI models rely on data centres as they use servers that AI programs run day and night, which consume a lot of electricity. They also rely on energy to cool the data centres. 

The World Economic Forum estimated in April that the computer power dedicated to AI is doubling every 100 days. 

Leading cloud providers, who have significant involvement with AI, have reported a 62 per cent rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 2020 and a 78 per cent increase in electricity usage since 2023, according to the UN’s Greening Digital Companies 2024 report.

This follows the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, which saw the exponential rise of generative AI and technology companies racing to build and get out their latest models. 

“I think at the political level or the kind of communication level, they [tech companies] are very accommodating in they all agree that [making AI sustainable] is imperative,” said Tomas Lamanauskas, the deputy secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

“Now, on a day-to-day practical level, sometimes commercial, let's say market kind of imperatives, overtake, and that's a bit of a problem,” he told Euronews Next. 

“So the question is how we bring back the kind of longer-term thinking into this, while people are racing to build the best AI”. 

The answer to that question will probably not be answered by the summit but Lamanauskas said that the industry and policymakers