Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been identified as a strategic tool to combat climate change, thanks to its ability to deliver energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. AI can significantly contribute to energy efficiency across various sectors, including agriculture, utilities, logistics, manufacturing, and data centers. By leveraging AI, farmers can minimize their use of fertilizers and water, utilities can enhance the efficiency of the electric grid, logistics operations can optimize delivery routes, and factories can decrease waste and increase energy efficiency.
Data centers play a critical role in maximizing energy efficiency with AI and accelerated computing. For instance, NVIDIA’s AI-based weather prediction model, FourCastNet, is approximately 45,000 times faster and consumes 12,000 times less energy compared to traditional techniques. If all AI, high performance computing, and networking offloads were run on GPU and DPU accelerators instead of CPUs, data centers could save a staggering 19 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, equivalent to the energy consumption of nearly 3 million cars driven for a year. Moreover, using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, energy efficiency improved 5 times on average across four key scientific applications, with gains of almost 10x in weather forecasting tests conducted at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.