#68 A dive into every GenAI rabbit hole with Wilco Burggraaf and Mark Butcher

Update: 2025-11-04

Description

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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Connect with Wilco and Mark

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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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