The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret
Open accessOverview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“AI, particularly generative models, can be extraordinarily energy- and water-intensive, thereby incurring significant environmental costs41.”
From Systematic review of cost effectiveness and budget impact of artificial intelligence in healthcare (2025) · cites this paper as [41]
In the citing paper
“Recent studies warn that GenAI's growth could one day rival the energy consumption of entire nations [28]”
From Understanding the Practices, Perceptions, and (Dis)Trust of Generative AI among Instructors: A Mixed-methods Study in the U.S. Higher Education (2025) · cites this paper as [28]
Citations
Cites
Aligning artificial intelligence with climate change mitigation
Kaack, L. H., Donti, P. L., Strubell, E., Kamiya, G., Creutzig, F., & Rolnick, D. (2022) · Nature Climate Change · doi:10.1038/s41558-022-01377-7 · Cited by 570
Research works printed but not linked: 3
Cited by
Sorted by citations
ChatGPT Needs SPADE (Sustainability, PrivAcy, Digital divide, and Ethics) Evaluation: A Review
Khowaja, S. A., Khuwaja, P., Dev, K., Wang, W., Nkenyereye, L., & Fortino, G. (2024) · Cognitive Computation · doi:10.1007/s12559-024-10285-1 · Cited by 235
The growing memristor industry
Lanza, M., Pazos, S. M., Aguirre, F. L., Sebastian, A., Gallo, M. L., Alam, S. M., Ikegawa, S., Yang, J. J., Vianello, E., Chang, M., et al. (2025) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08733-5 · Cited by 189
Toward an AI Era: Advances in Electronic Skins
Fu, X., Cheng, W., Wan, G., Yang, Z., & Tee, B. C. K. (2024) · Chemical Reviews · doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.4c00049 · Cited by 172
Systematic review of cost effectiveness and budget impact of artificial intelligence in healthcare
El Arab, R. A., & Al Moosa, O. A. (2025) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-025-01722-y · Cited by 149
“RecentevidencesuggeststhatAI,particularlygenerative models,canbeextraordinarilyenergy-andwater-intensive,thereby incurringsigni fi cant environmental costs 41 .”
E-waste challenges of generative artificial intelligence
Wang, P., Zhang, L., Tzachor, A., Masanet, E. R., & Chen, W. (2024) · Nature Computational Science · doi:10.1038/s43588-024-00712-6 · Cited by 139
Metadata
- Authors
- Crawford, K.
- Affiliations
- University of Southern California (US)
- Corresponding author
- Crawford, Kate
- ORCID
- Crawford, Kate
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2024-02-20
- Volume
- 626
- Issue
- 8000
- Pages
- 693-693
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W4391965576
- Cited by
- 175
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 56 · 2025: 83 · 2024: 36
- FWCI
- 18.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Electrical and Electronic Engineering › Green IT and Sustainability
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Energy Efficiency in Computing
- Physical Sciences › Energy › Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment › Photovoltaic Systems and Sustainability
- Keywords
- generative AI, environmental costs, CO2 emissions, energy consumption, environmental regulation, United States legislation
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
