Women in Data Science Puget Sound 2026 · May 2026

Every LLM Call Counts: The Environmental Cost of AI, and How Data Scientists Can Reduce It

AI comes with a significant environmental cost — training and serving models consumes vast amounts of electricity, water, and raw materials, with AI already accounting for around 15% of data center energy usage. Covers the latest data on AI's environmental impact from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, what providers aren't disclosing, and practical techniques including prompt optimization, model selection, and caching to reduce both environmental footprint and costs.