The general idea is that the digital economy is environmentally friendly. This preconception, however, has more to do with a mixture of false perception and lack of information than with reality. Inria, the French digital science research institute, refers to forecasts indicating that by 2030, half of the world's electricity consumption will be accounted for by computing facilities.

Within this trend, the development of artificial intelligence—a technology that is otherwise essential for the deployment of renewable energies—is an important factor. Inria cites studies indicating that the design and training of state-of-the-art machine learning models produce the same amount of CO2 as six medium-sized vehicles over their lifetime.

In this context, and with the participation of Inria, six institutions from five countries—including Chile—have begun working on two projects: one aimed at developing ecologically viable machine learning technology (GreenAI), coordinated by Inria Chile, and another aimed at developing Sustainable Artificial Intelligence (SusAIN). The projects involve researchers from Inria in France and Chile, the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile, the University of Asunción-Paraguay, the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing in Brazil, and the University of the Republic-Uruguay.