The AI Action Summit, an international summit on AI development held in Paris last week, will be remembered not only for the announcement of the EU InvestAI Initiative project with a budget of €200 billion, designed to reduce the gap between Europe and the US and China in AI development, but also for the creation of the Coalition for Sustainable AI, which will include leading AI companies, including data center operators, suppliers and chip developers.
According to Data Center Dynamics, the coalition announced that it will seek to align AI development (both hardware and software) with environmental considerations. The new coalition is part of the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES), which was created in 2021. The Coalition for Sustainable AI was founded by France, the UN, and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
The new coalition was joined by data center operators Data4, Verne, EcoDataCenter, Equinix, Sepia Infrastructure and Telehouse, as well as cloud service providers OVHcloud and IBM. NVIDIA with AMD and Schneider Electric, Philips, Eviden, Orange, Mistral also became members. It is noteworthy that there is not a single hyperscaler among the participants, as well as American AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic. But there are numerous NGOs and higher education institutions, as well as the governments of France, Great Britain, Chile, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Italy, Kenya, South Korea, Morocco and Norway.
Image source: Verne Global
The rapid development of AI infrastructure has dramatically increased the energy consumption of the data center sector, and the industry is forced to use even coal to power the significantly increased computing power used to train ever larger AI models, highlighting the urgency of environmental protection issues as the AI market continues to grow.
Ahead of the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a French response to the American AI megaproject Stargate with €109 billion in private investment. France also expressed its readiness to allocate 1 GW of nuclear energy for the creation of a giant AI cluster.