Environmental effects of information and communications technologies
Abstract
The digital revolution affects the environment on several levels. Most directly, information and communications technology (ICT) has environmental impacts through the manufacturing, operation and disposal of devices and network equipment, but it also provides ways to mitigate energy use, for example through smart buildings and teleworking. At a broader system level, ICTs influence economic growth and bring about technological and societal change. Managing the direct impacts of ICTs is more complex than just producing efficient devices, owing to the energetically expensive manufacturing process, and the increasing proliferation of devices needs to be taken into account.
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TSMC does not provide granular data for their suppliers nor their internal processes.
“TSMC), the company that manufactures the GPUs designed by NVIDIA (among other companies), citing the complexity of their supply chains and proprietary information of its customers, also does not provide granular data for their suppliers nor their internal processes (such as chemical purification) [136]”
From From Efficiency Gains to Rebound Effects: The Problem of Jevons' Paradox in AI's Polarized Environmental Debate (2025) · cites this paper as [136]
It is impossible to carry out a full life cycle analysis of the hundreds of thousands of GPUs that are designed and manufactured each year and used to train and deploy AI models.
“meaning that it is impossible to carry out a full life cycle analysis of the hundreds of thousands of GPUs that are designed and manufactured each year and used to train and deploy AI models.”
From From Efficiency Gains to Rebound Effects: The Problem of Jevons' Paradox in AI's Polarized Environmental Debate (2025) · cites this paper as [136]
The rare earth minerals needed to produce computing hardware are mined in unsustainable and opaque ways.
“The rare earth minerals needed to produce computing hardware are mined in unsustainable and opaque ways.”
From From Efficiency Gains to Rebound Effects: The Problem of Jevons' Paradox in AI's Polarized Environmental Debate (2025) · cites this paper as [136]
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- Authors
- Williams, E.
- Affiliations
- Rochester Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Williams, Eric
- ORCID
- Williams, Eric
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2011-11
- Volume
- 479
- Issue
- 7373
- Pages
- 354-358
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W2065348025
- Cited by
- 304
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 30 · 2025: 43 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 20 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 15 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 19 · 2013: 14 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 8.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- 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 › Environmental Science › Environmental Engineering › Environmental Impact and Sustainability
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Energy Efficiency in Computing
- Keywords
- information and communication technologies, environmental impact, digital revolution, ICT manufacturing, energy consumption, smart buildings, remote work, network equipment, economic growth, technological change, social change
- MeSH terms
- Conservation of Energy Resources, Efficiency, Environment, Humans, Technology, Hazardous Substances, Recycling
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 ›
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