From Carnegie Mellon University

March 24, 2025
Alexander Johnson
[email protected]

Artificial intelligence, a field known for its expanding uses across society, is also increasingly notorious for the massive amount of energy it needs to function. In a 2024 paper, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and machine learning development corporation Hugging Face found that generative AI systems could use as much as 33 times more energy to complete a task than task-specific software would.

“The climate and sustainability challenge can be overwhelming in the amount of new clean technology that we have to deploy and develop, and the ways that the energy system has to evolve,” said Costa Samaras, head of the university-wide Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. “The scale of the challenge alone can be overwhelming to folks.”

However, Carnegie Mellon University’s standing commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and its position as a nationally recognized leader in technologies like artificial intelligence mean that it is uniquely positioned to address growing concerns around energy demand, climate resilience and social good.

The research in sustainability and climate solutions that happens across the university’s seven schools and colleges — as exemplified by the countless and ongoing contributions of researchers like Harry Kresja, Destenie Nock, Azadeh Sawyer, Emma Strubell, and many others — reflects the expertise and innovative spirit that makes Carnegie Mellon uniquely suited to address modern energy and sustainability challenges.

On March 25, Carnegie Mellon University kicked off its Energy Week event, a gathering which brings together national leaders from industry, government and research to Carnegie Mellon’s campus to learn about and share advancements being made around the country. The Scott Institute proudly champions efforts at the intersection of energy, climate, technology and public policy, and the conference serves as its flagship annual event.

But Energy Week is also a chance for the university to spotlight the growing need — and ability — of institutions and individuals to solve problems at the intersection of AI and energy.

Samaras, director of the Scott Institute, has brought a wealth of experience in engineering and climate action to CMU. Having left the university to serve in the Biden-Harris Administration from 2021-24, he has seen the landscape of energy innovation from one of the highest offices in the land.

Before returning to Carnegie Mellon, Samaras helped to craft an executive order on artificial intelligence, penning a section that defined how the technology intersects with America’s energy system and the climate.

Now leading the Scott Institute, Samaras said Energy Week serves as a chance for individuals and institutions who interface with energy systems to take a similar approach to the problem. Among them are several from Carnegie Mellon’s own campus, such as The Block Center for Technology and Society.

“We hold Energy Week every year, and it was clear to us even last summer that the intersection of AI and energy was going to have broad interest to the community as this year’s topic, but also serve as a way to showcase all the different work that’s been happening at this intersection at Carnegie Mellon.”

”What I’ve seen at Carnegie Mellon is that people here understand the scale, and they welcome the challenge,” Samaras said.

One of the ways the university has sought to take on the task is through the expertise of The Block Center, which seeks to address the question of how technologies like AI can be harnessed for social good and quality of life improvements.

In 2024, the center published a transition memorandum in order to help guide incoming policymakers, industry leaders and society as a whole on issues of technological change and its demands.

Among the energy-based challenges the memorandum seeks to address are the difficulty in coordination of industry resources, a lack of transparency in energy and emissions reporting, and the inadequacy of existing metrics for knowing AI’s environmental impact.

The relationship between sustainability and artificial intelligence isn’t one that simply stops at making AI more energy efficient, Samaras said.

“I think a lot of people look at this challenge of, ‘How do we get to net-zero climate pollution? How do we ensure that we increase energy resilience? How do we ensure that we increase energy affordability?’ And they look at these challenges as individual silos that need to be tackled by individual disciplines.” Samaras said. “Carnegie Mellon doesn’t think like that. Carnegie Mellon says, ‘Let’s get together and solve this problem and we’ll bring together all the different skills and perspectives that we have in the research in the university and beyond.’”

It also requires looking at how AI tools can be used to bolster existing infrastructure and amplify ongoing efforts to solve problems holistically.

The work of individuals like Rayid Ghani, Distinguished Career Professor in the Machine Learning Department and the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, is one example of how this cross-disciplinary approach can look.

Ghani often looks at the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence not exclusively in a climate context, but concerning a wide range of social and economic potential. His research primarily focuses on how to use the technology to promote social good in areas such as public health, economic development and urban infrastructure.

But Ghani said the impact of AI on energy efficiency and sustainability has implications for many of the other areas of research and application that happen at CMU — and taking an approach that centers socioeconomically disadvantaged and impacted people is one of the most important ways the university works to make AI sustainable.

“Working on these problems throughout my career, I realized that they are all connected. A lot of the work I initially did required being opportunistic and seeing where I could make a difference,” he said. “For instance, why do we care about something like clean air? It’s not for the sake of the air — it’s about the people who are breathing the air. It’s not about just any single thing, and so you can’t focus on energy, or the environment and not worry about all the other things that impact people’s health.”

Many experts at Carnegie Mellon approach their chosen subject matter with a similar mindset, and leveraging interdisciplinary expertise is one of the main ways that the Scott Institute has been able carry out its mission.

“The Scott Institute, leading this effort on AI and energy, benefits from continued partnerships with institutes like The Block Center to understand the workforce and social dimensions, CyLab to understand the cybersecurity challenges, the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology to understand the political dimensions, and the College of Engineering’s Critical Technologies Initiative to understand supply chain and materials challenges,” Samaras said.

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Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The institution was originally established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, it became the current-day Carnegie Mellon University through its merger with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh.

The university consists of seven colleges, including the College of Engineering, the School of Computer Science, and the Tepper School of Business. The university has its main campus located 5 miles (8 km) from Downtown Pittsburgh. It also has over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Kigali, Rwanda (Carnegie Mellon University Africa) and partnerships with universities nationally and globally. Carnegie Mellon enrolls over 16,000 students across its multiple campuses from 117 countries and employs more than 1,400 faculty members.

Carnegie Mellon is known for its advances in research and new fields of study, notably being home to many firsts in computer science (including the first computer science, machine learning, and robotics departments), pioneering the field of management science, and being home to the first drama program in the United States. Carnegie Mellon is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”.

Carnegie Mellon competes in NCAA Division III athletics as a founding member of the University Athletic Association. Carnegie Mellon fields eight men’s teams and nine women’s teams as the Tartans.

The university’s faculty and alumni include Nobel Prize laureates and Turing Award winners and have received Emmy Awards, Tony Awards, and Academy Awards.

In the 1990s and into the 2000s, Carnegie Mellon solidified its status among American universities, consistently ranking very highly in the national U.S. News & World Report rankings, and amongst universities worldwide. Carnegie Mellon is distinct in its interdisciplinary approach to research and education. Through the establishment of programs and centers that are outside the limitations of departments or colleges, the university has established leadership in fields such as computational finance, information systems, cognitive sciences, management, arts management, product design, behavioral economics, energy science and economics, human–computer interaction, entertainment technology, and decision science. Within the past two decades, the university has built a new university center (Cohon University Center), theater and drama building (Purnell Center for the Arts), business school building (Tepper School of Business), and several dormitories. Baker Hall was renovated in the early 2000s, and new chemistry labs were established in Doherty Hall soon after. Several computer science buildings, such as Newell-Simon Hall, also were established, renovated or renamed in the early 2000s.

In 2006, Carnegie Mellon Trustee Jill Gansman Kraus donated the 80-foot (24 m)-tall sculpture Walking to the Sky, which was placed on the lawn facing Forbes Avenue between the Cohon University Center and Warner Hall. The sculpture was controversial for its placement, the general lack of input that the campus community had, and its (lack of) aesthetic appeal.

U.S. News & World Report places Carnegie Mellon very highly among American research universities. Many of its graduate programs have been ranked in national and international surveys. U.S. News ranks Carnegie Mellon as having 23 graduate programs in the Top 10 nationwide and 16 in the Top 5 nationwide.

Globally, Carnegie Mellon is ranked very highly by Times Higher Education, QS World University Rankings, ARWU, and U.S. News.

Carnegie Mellon was named one of the “New Ivies” by Newsweek. The Wall Street Journal ranks Carnegie Mellon very high in computer science, finance, and engineering according to job recruiters. Carnegie Mellon ranks very highly among “Best Colleges By Salary Potential (Bachelor’s Only)” in the United States according to PayScale’s. Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business has placed very highly in the annual ranking of U.S. business schools by Bloomberg Businessweek.

The Hollywood Reporter ranks the School of Drama very high in the world among undergraduate drama schools. The same publication ranked the MFA program at the School of Drama very highly in the world.

Carnegie Mellon’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences ranks very highly in social sciences and the humanities in the world by Times Higher Education. Dietrich College also ranks very highly for social sciences among Shanghai Jiao Tong University [海交通大学](CN) world’s top 100 universities.

Carnegie Mellon is one of 71 elected members of the Association of American Universities and one of 29 members (one of 13 American members) of the World Economic Forum Global University Leaders Forum.

CMU is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”. The university annually spends over $40 million on research. The primary recipients of this funding were the School of Computer Science, the Software Engineering Institute, the College of Engineering, and the Mellon College of Science. The research money comes largely from federal sources. The federal agencies that invest the most money are the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense.

The recognition of Carnegie Mellon as one of the best research facilities in the nation has a long history. As early as the 1987 federal budget, CMU was ranked as third in the amount of federal research funds received with $41.5 million, with only The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Johns Hopkins University receiving more research funds from the Department of Defense.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort between Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh, and Westinghouse Electric Company. PSC was founded in 1986 by its two scientific directors, Ralph Roskies of the University of Pittsburgh and Michael Levine of Carnegie Mellon. PSC is a leading partner in the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation’s cyberinfrastructure program.

In addition to its Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon has a branch campus in the Middle East, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, which offers a full undergraduate curriculum with degree programs in computer science, business administration, biology, computational biology, and information systems. The campus is located in Doha’s Education City which is home to multiple other U.S. universities all of which are funded by the Qatar Foundation. The Qatari campus has been the subject of controversy, as Islamic cultural values and laws in Qatar differ greatly from the core values of Carnegie Mellon. Additionally, Carnegie Mellon and other U.S. Universities in Education City have been criticized for being essentially complicit in Qatar’s funding of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas and their questionable human rights record by continuing to operate there despite these issues.

It also has graduate-level extension campuses in Mountain View, California in the heart of Silicon Valley (offering masters programs in Software Engineering and Software Management). The Tepper School of Business maintains a satellite center in downtown Manhattan and the Heinz College maintains one in Adelaide, Australia. The Heinz College, the Institute for Politics and Strategy, and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy host centers in Washington, D.C. as part of degree programs, research, and government affairs initiatives as well as being a part of the University of California, Washington Center. Carnegie Mellon also established the Integrative Media Program at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, New York. Carnegie Mellon also maintains the Carnegie Mellon Los Angeles Center in North Hollywood, California where students in the Master of Entertainment Industry Management program are required to relocate to Los Angeles in their second year and attend classes at this facility.

Carnegie Mellon’s Information Networking Institute offers graduate programs in Athens, Greece and Kobe, Japan, in collaboration with Athens Information Technology and the Hyogo Institute of Information Education Foundation, respectively. In the fall of 2007, the cities of Aveiro and Lisbon, Portugal were added to the Information Networking Institute’s remote locations. The Institute for Software Research International (ISRI) offers graduate programs in Coimbra, Portugal. The Entertainment Technology Center offers graduate programs in Portugal, Japan, and Singapore. The Human–Computer Interaction Institute offers a master’s degree in conjunction with the University of Madeira, in Portugal at the jointly founded Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute. The College of Engineering has an international location in Kigali, Rwanda offering the Master of Science in Information Technology and the Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Carnegie Mellon neighbors the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, and in some cases, buildings of the two universities are intermingled. This helps to facilitate myriad academic and research collaborations between the two schools, including such projects as the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, the Immune Modeling Center, the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, as well as the National Science Foundation-supported Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center. Further, the universities also offer multiple dual and joint degree programs such as the Medical Scientist Training Program, the Molecular Biophysics and Structural Biology Graduate Program, the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology, the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, and the Law and Business Administration program. Some professors hold joint professorships between the two schools, and students at each university may take classes at the other (with appropriate approvals). CMU students and faculty also have access to the University of Pittsburgh library system, as well as the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. The two universities also co-host academic conferences, such as the 2012 Second Language Research Forum. In 2015, in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, Carnegie Mellon became a partner of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance to leverage data analysis in health care.

The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship acts as Carnegie Mellon’s startup accelerator. Jim Swartz, co-founder of Accel Partners, pledged $31 Million to establish a hub for university wide entrepreneurial activities. His gift is the fifth largest Carnegie Mellon has received. In 2016, the center opened providing a business incubator and makerspace. The center employs Entrepreneurs-in-Residence who mentor founders of early stage companies consisting of students, faculty, and alumni. Startups work on their ideas throughout the year culminating at an annual Demo Day where they showcase their company to the public.

Carnegie Mellon’s alumni, faculty, and staff have founded many notable companies, some of which are shown below.

Activision Blizzard, 1979 (as Activision), founding CEO Jim Levy (B.S., M.S.).
Adobe Systems, 1982, co-founder Charles Geschke (Ph.D.).
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.S.) and Andy Bechtolsheim (M.S.).
Accel Partners, 1983, co-founder Jim Swartz (M.S.).
NeXT, 1985, co-founding VP Engineering Avie Tevanian (M.S., Ph.D.).
Transarc, 1989, co-founders Alfred Spector (Professor), Jeffrey Eppinger (B.S., M.S., Ph.D.), Mike Kazar (Ph.D.), Dean Thompson (B.S.).
FORE Systems, 1990, co-founders Francois Bitz (B.S., M.S.), Onat Menzilcioglu (M.S., Ph.D.), Robert Sansum (Ph.D.) and Eric C. Cooper (Professor).
Microsoft Research, 1991, founder Richard Rashid (Professor)
IDEO, 1991, founder David M. Kelley (B.S.).
Appaloosa Management, 1993, founder David Tepper (M.B.A).
Red Hat, 1993, co-founder Marc Ewing (B.S.).
Cognizant, 1994, co-founder Francisco D’Souza (M.B.A).
Juniper Networks, 1996, founder Pradeep Sindhu (Ph.D.).
Symphony Technology Group, 2002, founder Romesh Wadhwani (Ph.D.).
Astrobotic Technology, 2007, founder Red Whittaker (M.S., Ph.D., Professor).
Google X, 2010, co-founders Sebastian Thrun (Professor), Yoky Matsuoka (Professor), and Astro Teller (Ph.D.).
Nest, 2010, co-founder Matt Rogers (B.S., M.S.).
Duolingo, 2011, founders Luis von Ahn (Ph.D., Professor) & Severin Hacker (Ph.D.).
Coursera, 2012, founder Andrew Ng (B.S.).
Defense Innovation Unit, 2015, founder Maynard Holliday (B.S.)
Argo AI, 2016, co-founder Peter Rander (M.S., Ph.D.).
Nuro, 2016, co-founder Dave Ferguson (M.S., Ph.D.).
Aurora Innovation, 2017, co-founder Chris Urmson (Ph.D.

There are more than 117,000 Carnegie Mellon alumni worldwide. Alumni and current/former faculty include Nobel laureates, members of the National Academy of Medicine, members of the National Academy of Sciences, members of the National Academy of Engineering, Packard fellows, Emmy Award recipients, Academy Award recipients, Tony Award recipients, winners of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, and Turing Award recipients.

Alumni in the fine arts include artists Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, John Currin, Shalom Neuman, Jonathan Borofsky and Burton Morris; authors John-Michael Tebelak and Kurt Vonnegut; Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg; television series creator, Steven Bochco; actors René Auberjonois, Katy Mixon, Holly Hunter, Matt Bomer, and Zachary Quinto; children’s author E.L. Konigsberg; David Edward Byrd, Broadway actress Amanda Jane Cooper; Rock and Broadway Theater Poster Artist and graphic designer; Indian film actor Sushma Seth; Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart; mountaineer and author Aron Ralston and architect Mao Yisheng.

Alumni in the sciences include Charles Geschke, co-founder and chairman of Adobe Systems; Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar; James Gosling, creator of the Java programming language; Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO; George Pake, founder of Xerox PARC; Marc Ewing, co-founder of Red Hat; Jim Levy, founding CEO of Activision; billionaire hedge fund investor David Tepper; Scott Fahlman, creator of the emoticon; Chris Messina, creator of the hashtag; tech executive and entrepreneur Kai-Fu Lee; and astronauts Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14) and Judith Resnik, who perished in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. John Forbes Nash, a 1948 graduate and winner of the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, was the subject of the book and subsequent film A Beautiful Mind. Alan Perlis, a 1943 graduate, was a pioneer in programming languages and recipient of the first Turing Award.Alan Perlis, a 1943 graduate, was a pioneer in programming languages and recipient of the first Turing Award.