The invisible weight of artificial intelligence
Energy, water, raw materials: even what seems immaterial leaves a footprint. Measuring it is the first step to making it lighter.
Updated October 2026
My point of view
Artificial intelligence has weight, gives off heat and consumes energy. Yet the bill never reaches the people who use it.
The cloud has an address
When we ask an assistant a question, it feels as if the answer comes from an immaterial cloud. It actually comes from a specific building, full of processors that use electricity, heat up and have to be cooled, often with water. Before that, those processors were made with metals mined from the ground and with large amounts of ultrapure water. At the end of their life they will become electronic waste.
According to the International Energy Agency, data centres used about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, 1.5% of the world's electricity: more than Italy uses in a year. By 2030 demand is set to more than double, to around 945 TWh, and artificial intelligence is the main driver of that growth.
A book born from a question
“AI: L'Impronta Fantasma” began with a simple question: how much does a conversation with an assistant weigh? To answer it I had to follow the whole supply chain, from cobalt mines to data centres, from cooling towers to electronic-waste dumps. The book has its own footprint too, and I declared it on the first page: about 28 kilograms of CO₂, like a 200-kilometre car journey.
The aim is to make visible a cost nobody sees today, without blaming the people who use these tools: an informed choice needs information.
A price that does not appear on the user's bill, but is paid by the atmosphere, by rivers, by soils, by the most exposed communities.
From AI: L'Impronta Fantasma (translated)
Measuring to make it lighter
The levers exist and they are concrete: smaller models for simple tasks, data centres powered by renewables, closed-loop cooling, hardware that lasts longer, computing shifted to sunny and windy hours. People who use AI can do their part as well: pick the right tool for the task, skip unnecessary requests, settle for a short answer when it is enough.
It all starts with measurement. That is why I built AI Impact Meter, a Chrome extension that estimates the footprint of conversations with assistants, and a calculator anyone can try here on the site.