Berget AI shows the same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO₂ in Texas than in Sweden
The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden
Swedish AI provider Berget AI, working with the Stockholm Environment Institute, WattTime, and Klimatkollen, has released an open-source method that calculates carbon emissions for each individual AI request. A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden versus 3.2 grams in Texas, driven largely by regional grid intensity. Customers can track their own emissions in Berget AI's console, and the MIT-licensed calculator works for any model and region.
Most of the alarming figures about AI's footprint come from multiplying an average by a guess at the volume, and nobody can check them. The only fair comparison is to calculate each request and add them up.
- blaze33
For 2025 the grid carbon intensity in Texas was 363gCO2eq/kWh, while it was 22gCO2eq/kWh in Sweden, so 16,5x more in Texas. Right now it's 427 in Texas vs. 50 in Finland ie. 8,54x more, like in the article (yes I looked the wrong country at first).
The reason is half of Texas electricity production is still fossil fuels (gas & coal) while mostly hydro, nuclear and wind in Sweden. So it's not really about ai, the models or the hardware. Fossil fuels make CO2, that's it.
- mepiethree
This is true of ~everything that uses electricity, not just AI https://app.electricitymaps.com
- armcat
Great writeup! I've done some work on Codecarbon [1] in the past, it's a pretty standard tool for measuring ML/AI workload emissions, it would be awesome to have your findings contributed to that project as well.
- bob1029
The reasoning effort knob is becoming a really important variable regarding how much impact AI models will have on energy consumption. Medium and max can differ by as much as two orders of magnitude in their token consumption. We also have to consider the amplification of compute demand that occurs by way of the tool calls themselves. Tokens are mostly a constant cost thing, but how they are interpreted can mean the difference between a 5 minute cpu bound operation and a 50uS cached database lookup. At some point, the CPU is going to become the bottleneck again.
- maelito
That's why Mistral is even more important than just being the only competitive european LLM builder : it's on the French grid.
- blfr
The comments section reminds me of The Dead Great-Grandfather Test
[Science fiction writer Bruce] Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.
Sterling's rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it's something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it's a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.
But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there's a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.
https://ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-and...
- alpineman
And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.
Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
- cm2187
Fair comparison. Texas just needs to flood the valleys of its famous mountain chain and collect the melted snow with dams to match Sweden's 40% hydro electricity production.