How badly does AI harm the environment? We now have some answers to that question, as both Google and Mistral have published their own self-assessments of the environmental impact of an AI query.

In July, Mistral, which publishes its own AI models, published a self-evaluation of the environmental impact of training and querying its model in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced, the amount of water consumed, and the amount of material consumed. Google took a slightly different approach, publishing the amount of power and water a Gemini query consumes, as well as how much CO2 it produces.

Of course, there are caveats: Each report was self-generated, and not performed by an outside auditor. Also, training a model consumes vastly more resources than inferencing, or the day-to

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