OPINION Alexandra Luccioni Alexandre Lacoste dvances in Artificial Intelligence - and Machine Learning (ML) in particular - h ave result ed in amazing progress in the last years and decades, democratizing technology and making many aspects of our lives simpler, faster, and less complicated. While many of us hear about the latest and greatest breakthrough in AI technology, A Estimating Carbon Emissions of Artificial Intelligence what we hear less about is its environmental impact. In fact, much of AI's recent progress has required ever-increasing amounts of data and computing power. And this all comes at a cost - while currently cloud computing represents roughly 0.5% of the world's energy LUCCIONI Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2020.2991496 Date of current version: 18 June 2020 Victor Schmidt 48 IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE ∕ JUNE 2020