🌱 Sustainable AI: Building Smart Without Breaking the Planet
Sustainable AI means creating intelligent systems that help people and protect our planet instead of draining energy, creating mountains of electronic waste, or making inequality worse.
Key Facts
- ⚡ Energy Reality: Training one advanced AI model in 2025 uses as much electricity as a small neighborhood needs for an entire year. Crazy right?
- 🌬️ Clean Power Shift: About 70 percent of new data centers now connect directly to wind or solar farms for their power.
- But the important thing: It’s still a mere fraction of the bigger problem & already on the right course to get better over time.
Think about your favorite sports car, of if you aren’t into cars, think about your friend who does.
It’s fast, beautiful, and turns heads everywhere.
Now imagine if that car constantly guzzled premium gas while pumping thick smoke into the air.
That was artificial intelligence five years ago.
And yeah, it’s brought up some pretty big sustainability concerns.
But today, the industry is completely rewriting how we power these digital engines so they run on clean energy and leave the world better than they found it.
📰 What’s Happening Right Now in 2025:
Google DeepMind figured out something brilliant.
They let an AI system control their data center cooling, making tiny adjustments every five minutes.
The result?
They cut cooling costs by 40%.
That’s millions of dollars saved and countless tons of carbon that never entered our atmosphere.
NVIDIA completely redesigned its chips.
Their newest processors deliver twice the performance while using the same amount of power as models from just three years ago.
It’s like getting a car that goes twice as fast on the same tank of gas.
Smart startups are timing their work differently.
Companies like Anthropic now intelligently schedule their biggest training jobs for off-times when wind farms generate excess clean power.
Instead of pulling from coal plants during peak afternoon hours, they surf the renewable energy waves.
And what’s the common thread in all these and more?
Companies have realized AI is part of the fix.
🌁 Zooming Out: Let’s look at the rest
I asked Perplexity to draw me a chart of what the end-user usage looks like in terms of carbon output for average consumer tasks.
And this doesn’t even start to cover Electricity for Heating/Cooling, Manufacturing, Shipping & Freight, or Air Travel to name a few that we don’t even want to look at on a chart.
While all US data centers annual emissions (~106 million metric tons of CO₂ in 2022) is close to commercial aviation at scale (~131 million metric tons CO₂), these are still only 1-2% of emissions in the global sector which is why we need to BE INFORMED on the facts.
📆 How This Changes Your Daily Life
Here’s the best part. You’re in control on what you use and what you care about.
I like to find ways to have AI support being part of the change, not the other way around.
Example?
Your voice assistant isn’t just answering questions, it’s learning your habits to save energy. It might turn down the heat when you’re out, or lower the lights before bed, all powered by a chip that uses less energy than a night light.
My kids use AI for homework.
I use it to meal plan with Val.
If you’re running projects, juggling deadlines, or managing a team, AI can help you do more with less, fewer meetings, faster research, cleaner output.
And when those tools are optimized to use less energy, you’re not just saving time, you’re lowering your footprint without lifting a finger once it runs on auto-pilot.
👉 3 Things You Can Do This Week
- Time Your Compute (and cycle off when done)
- Reuse Old Gear
- Track Your Emissions
🔮 What’s Next?
Now, new AI models are 50%+ more efficient than those from 2022. And, open-source tools are shrinking model sizes to run on laptops, a serious change and opportunity for schools, nonprofits, and small businesses.
These and others are just the start, but the good news is while usage is up and to the right, we’re not suffering at the same rate with waste for the privilege.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Your real-world experiences often shape what I cover in future newsletters.
Like next week, we’re going to cover all things AI & Bias and how it applies to everyone!
Speaking of your experience…
🚀 What Our Community Is Building
I launched this newsletter after realizing that most AI chatter was just noise, tweets with no proof, gurus with no shipping record.
What I craved (and couldn’t find) was a signal-rich space where entrepreneurs and leaders could see how real people are turning the latest AI trends into live products.
Where they can share the exact tools that moved the needle, and push each other to go further.
Join me and you’ll step into monthly live office hours where I stay until every roadblock is solved, daily micro-demos that surface the only tools worth testing, and an open brain trust of founders, devs, marketers, and nonprofit leaders who trade templates, shortcuts, and collaboration invites in real time.
Start building with CTRL + ALT + BUILD 🔗
See you inside.
