Beyond Energy: Why AI’s Material Backbone Matters — and Why Africa Must Be Central to Any Sustainable AI Strategy
Source: enb.iisd.org At this week’s United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA7) in Nairobi, leaders will explore how to balance the benefits from Artificial Intelligence (AI) with its planetary footprint. This aside, there are already ongoing debates about how the sustainability of artificial intelligence tends to focus on energy use — the enormous electricity demands of training large models and the water needed for cooling. Energy tells only part of the story. Beneath every AI system sits a vast, mostly invisible network of minerals and materials: cobalt, copper, nickel, manganese, rare earths, silicon, and the semiconductors that bind them together. These resources shape ecological outcomes and global power dynamics just as profoundly as AI’s hunger for electricity (IEA, 2023). What makes materials so crucial today is the geopolitical context. Supply chains for critical minerals are heavily concentrated. A few actors dominate semiconductor fabrication; China controls key stages ...