Salesforce, a US-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, states that the artificial intelligence industry must adopt sustainability measures to address the strain the technology places on energy, water, and mineral resources.
In its latest AI Sustainability Outlook report, the company warns that the compute power used to train AI models has increased almost fivefold each year since 2010, driving a surge in data centre energy demand.
The International Energy Agency forecasts that such facilities could consume nearly 3% of global electricity by 2030 – a figure that may rise if 40% of AI data-centre projects face power shortages by 2027, as Gartner predicts.
With fossil fuels currently supplying 56% of data centre electricity, Salesforce says that without a shift to clean energy, AI cloud becomes “one of the fastest-growing sources of global emissions.”
The report also highlights that by 2027, AI operations could require up to six times Denmark’s annual freshwater withdrawals, with a significant portion coming from water-stressed regions.
Material supply chains for AI hardware, such as lithium and cobalt for batteries, as well as rare earth elements and copper, carry further environmental and social risks, including intensive energy use, pollution, and fuelling geopolitical tensions in mining regions, according to the report.
At the same time, Salesforce argues that AI could be a “precision instrument” for tackling climate change.
The report points to applications such as optimising energy grids, reducing methane leaks in oil and gas production, improving building efficiency, monitoring water quality, and supporting regenerative agriculture.
An example it gave is Good360, which uses Salesforce’s Agentforce platform to match disaster-relief donations three times faster while cutting fuel consumption by up to 20%.
The company’s own sustainability team is using Agentforce with its Net Zero Cloud to automatically surface emissions data, climate targets and energy-consumption metrics, reducing the time spent on reporting.
Salesforce’s senior vice president of Impact, Sunya Norman, said: “We simply cannot afford to build our digital future on the infrastructure of the past.”
“Every company, especially technology companies, must be intentional about the choices we make now to shape our future.”
