Generative AI: ADEME publishes an opinion on quantifying environmental impacts
Published on 22 July 2026, the opinion points out that digital technology accounted for 4.4% of France's carbon footprint in 2022.
On 22 July 2026, ADEME published an opinion entitled "Generative artificial intelligence: significant environmental impacts".
The development of artificial intelligence has given rise to a highly competitive technological race, marked by massive financial investment and very strong growth in new uses. Like the rest of the digital sector, it requires infrastructure and equipment that are costly in resources and energy.
In 2022, digital technology accounted for 4.4% of France's carbon footprint. According to the foresight analysis published by ADEME in 2026, data centre energy consumption linked to French usage is expected to increase sharply, driven in particular by AI services.
The opinion provides an overview of the direct and indirect effects, negative and positive, of generative and agentic AI, and puts forward recommendations for limiting their impacts.
The methodological difficulty is real: quantifying the footprint of a given use requires allocating impacts between the model training phase, which is largely shared, and the inference phase, which multiplies with usage.
For grid operators, this trend translates very concretely into high-capacity connection requests concentrated in particular locations.