Costs and trajectories

This dissertation looks at the environmental footprint of OpenAI. It separates two things that are often confused: what this footprint costs today, and where it is heading if the current trend continues. The starting point is a gap. Artificial intelligence is almost always presented as an immaterial technology, when in fact it rests on a very real physical infrastructure that consumes large and growing amounts of energy, water and raw materials.

I rely on papers from academic conferences and on institutional reports to document these costs, grouped under three axes: the direct consumption of energy and water tied to large language models, the mining and critical-material supply chains behind the infrastructure, and the long-term growth of these impacts, set against planetary boundaries.

It is also a research-creation project. Alongside the text, I built Heritage, a virtual reality game. Drawing on artists like Joana Moll, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, I defend one simple idea: artistic form can make us feel what academic research, on its own, does not always manage to convey.