The True Cost of Every Prompt: The Sustainability of AI and Data Centers

Everyone in San Francisco hears about AI's environmental impact daily, and the answers range from "it's basically nothing" to "it's catastrophic." The truth, as usual, is more complicated and more interesting than either extreme.

Carlos Diaz-Marin, an Assistant Professor at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability who leads the DELTA Group studying materials for energy and water applications, will walk through the mathematical models researchers use to predict AI's energy, water, and emissions impacts. Before Stanford, Carlos helped fund high risk, high reward energy technologies as an ARPA-E fellow at the US Department of Energy.

Carlos will first explain how data centers work and how AI is supercharging their growth, then dig into how scientists forecast the energy, water, and emissions footprint of this buildout, and what it means nationally and locally. Finally, he'll explore how this massive infrastructure push is accelerating clean energy deployment and new technologies with real potential for AI sustainability and beyond.