The News
Nvidia’s head of sustainability pushed back against the groundswell of anti-AI sentiment that’s unfurled over the last few weeks, attributing the backlash partly to a “fear of the unknown.”
“A lot of us feel that around AI,” Josh Parker said at Semafor’s The Next 3 Billion event. “How is it going to impact our lives in general?”
Nvidia is listening to communities’ concerns “to understand and provide transparency and data about the sustainability results that we see — the actual impacts of data centers,” including water and energy efficiency, Parker said.
“We’ve kind of solved the water consumption issue at the data center level, and a lot of people don’t know that yet,” he said. “Because the pace of innovation is so rapid, it’s hard to know that modern AI infrastructure is so efficient.”
Know More
Chip giant Nvidia has been one of the main beneficiaries of the data center boom, as demand for AI requires more high-powered chips to run increasingly complex models.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been an outspoken critic of calls from the frontier labs to slow the pace of AI over safety concerns.
Parker said the conversation around prioritizing both safety and sustainability wasn’t “inconsistent at all actually, because responsible deployment of AI is the common thread … at different times, different themes get more press and more attention than others.”