#68 A dive into every GenAI rabbit hole with Wilco Burggraaf and Mark Butcher
Green IO
00:00
Scaling small per-prompt footprints into large impacts
Wilco and Mark discuss how low per-prompt emissions accumulate at scale and why totals and location-based metrics matter.
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Transcript
Transcript
Episode notes
Over the last 3 months, several studies were published about GenAI and its environmental footprint. The most famous are Mistral AI’s life cycle analysis and Google’s study on Gemini. The opportunity and the conclusions of the Gemini prompt study were heavily debated in the Green IT field, including by two of the most respected thought leaders: Mark Butcher and Wilco Burggraaf.
This Green IO episode is thus a first: the first ever debate. A polite, constructive and yet incredibly insightful debate where Mark, Wilco and their host Gaël Duez discussed many topics such as:
- Which metrics teams actually care about? (hint: not the financial ones)
- Why the Google report remains useful for Wilco? (hint: for the baseline approach)
- Why the Google report on Gemini is a PR exercise for Mark (hint: it’s the data not the methodology)
- How to avoid waste during GenAI operations? (hint: apply our learnings from the past 60 years in IT)
- Why carbon offsets might trap teams in inaction for Wilco? (hint: everything looks solved while it’s not)
- Why pushing the carbon targets to 2025 is actually a good sign for Mark? (hint: because greenwashing is over)
- Why investors should also double check sustainability numbers? (hint: because numbers don’t match with financial perspectives)
- Are public cloud services so efficient both from financial and environmental perspectives? (hint: it depends the need for scalability)
And much more!
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📧 Each month our readers get carefully curated news on digital sustainability, packed with exclusive Green IO content. Subscribe to the Green IO newsletter: https://newsletter.greenio.tech
📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 9 - 11. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support! 🎁 Reclaim your ticket here: https://greenio.tech/conference/17/paris-2025-december
Connect with Wilco and Mark
Connect with Gaël and Green IO
- https://greenio.tech
- https://greenio-podcast.slack.com
- https://www.youtube.com/@greenio877
- https://www.gaelduez.com
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Referenced in this episode
- Green IO episode with Max Schulze (2024): https://podcast.greenio.tech/e/1n20w4wn-european-regulations-in-tech-some-insider-perspectives-with-kim-van-sparrentak-and-max-schulze
- Green IO episode with Shaolei Ren and Mohammad Islam (2025): https://podcast.greenio.tech/e/183m79v8-66-66-data-centers-and-water-in-the-us-a-complex-story-with-mohammad-islam-and-shaolei-ren
- Google’s study: Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference (2025): https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-environmental-impact-of-ai-inference
- Mistral AI LCA study (2025): https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environmental-standard-for-ai
- Sophia Falk and al. “More than Carbon: Cradle-to-Grave environmental impacts of GenAI training on the Nvidia A100 GPU” (2025): https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00093
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